Absolutely. Right now Seaton is the biggest portal prospect in the country. And every time he is mentioned Mississippi State is mentioned too.
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Don?t downplay the perception angle. When it won?t matter is if we never take the next step and start signing some of the better players. The next step is to win some games next season and then sign a couple top players.
Give olemiss credit; they play every angle and are doing well. When they first brought lane in, they signed all offense and neglected the defense but they knew if you were going to lose it was better to lose 42-35 than 10-7. It created excitement among the fans about having an exciting offense. Offense is flashy and gets a lot more attention than a great defense. We have an exciting offense if we can just get a competent OL.
The perception and hype element is the difference in Olemiss and MSU. Most of what Olemiss does and MSU won't touch it. It is fake but that is why OM stays ahead of us.
Winning perception is half the battle which I think is stupid. I see it in my work/career all the time. The narrative wins not the truth.
It's more than just fan and media hype. It's also about recruiting players. If you build the perception that other elite players are interested in you every now and then you'll land a few.
These players don't want to go somewhere that it is lunch pail and hard work. They want clicks and likes. Now some of our fans may say "I don't want to be like that" or "I don't want MSU to be like that" or "if it doesn't work we're going to be embarrassed" but the reality is this is what we need to do to win and get to where we want to go.
It's like that guy who pulls up to the club in a Lambo and gets out with top tier clothes and high dollar watch on their wrist. You wanna know what that guy does for a living and tell all your friends around you "check out that guy."
Little do you know the Lambo is rented and the watch is a fake. But he got everyone's attention.
We all talk about how OM wins the PR/perception game and how we should be doing more and how we suck at it. Blah blah blah. But now we try to participate and it gets dumped on. Go figure.
Edit: apologies for singling you out because it’s your opinion. I just think we need to do everything under the sun in recruiting to attract players, whether its reality or perception.
Exactly! Drone and light and laser shows only go so far. Winning sells like nothing else.
MSU has sold everything except for the players on the field most of the time. If we can sell that we are adding really good players and have the ability to add them and win it takes care of everything else.
OM branded themselves as a respectable program long before they became one.
Perception is 100% important, and it's something we've historically been pretty bad at.
I don't think old has anything to do with it. Many would say I'm old and while the perception thing is not real, it matters a lot. OM always been better than us, we need to start leveraging everything we can.
We let the 40/41 NC get away from us; OM would have never let that happen - rest is history.
Honestly because we all know there will be a vocal segment of our fans that complain about it and how they are embarrassed about it.
See the Erick Dampier and Jeff Malone announcement that some MSU are complaining about because it wasn't "big enough" of an announcement. Which to me the only thing that is weird is that they are officially doing it in 2027 but that's fine.
Those same fans will celebrate the Snow Bowl though.
Well actually they are. They spend $20MM more on football than we do and that doesnt include NIL which they spend more there also. They make alot more in football than we do. We are close 20 years ago but they have left us behind the last decade for sure
2024- they spent 57MM on football- we spent around 37MM
Got to stop comparing ourselves to them. They have left us behind for now