We won't fire Lemonis, and we shouldn't, but I wish he would just leave

[StarkVegasSteve]

Starkville is a great place. It’s unique, it’s a good town, and it’s somewhere you can take your family to and feel safe and enjoy the weekend watching sports. It just doesn’t compare to some of the other schools. Our marketing team is also a$$. Instead of leaning into cool things about the university, like helping put men on the moon, we lean into the cow college. Meanwhile, scUM gets ranked as one of the biggest party schools around and just rolls with it. I don’t think our school admin wants MSU to be seen as a fun place to be, but if we’re being honest, we aren’t taken seriously as place to get your education either. I don’t even think Stark has a bowling alley. It’s going to be hard to get a kid from a major metro area to consider living there for 4 years. That’s more than 20% of the kid’s current life. Most of us at that age couldn’t see past the next test, forget 4 years.

Half the frats are full of good Ol’ country boys too. It’s a unique thing and I am not saying that should change. MSU is just a different type of place than probably any other college in the SEC. Even Vandy has Nashville. Starkville just needs something extra. The pieces are there, but it needs something more than cowbells to stand out.

It all comes down to branding and buy in. Ole Miss has branded themselves as a cool university and Oxford has branded itself as a cool town and their fans spout that info off ad nauseum . Oxford and Starkville have almost identical demographics, but because their fans drink the kool aid and spread the propaganda the rest of the country believes it. Starkville and Mississippi State have fought buying in to being a cool place to be for the better part of 30 years and are just now turning the tide in the other direction. Thanks in large part to Parker Wiseman, Lynn Spruill, and Mark Keenum.

The other big thing that Mississippi State needs to do is start recruiting out of state students at a much heavier clip. We need to get established in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Birmingham, and Nashville. Our academic recruiting focuses more on the MS Delta than big metropolitan cities in the South. That HAS to change. Our fans have bagged on OM for the longest time for having all these out of state students but guess where a lot of their money comes from....THOSE SAME OUT OF STATE STUDENTS. It's time to tap into that. Also, our alumni dept needs to get off their ass and start trying to get the young alumni involved. I know people that graduated between 2015-2019 who HAVE YET to come back to campus since they graduated. OM makes a big deal about getting their alumni back to campus at least once in the fall and once in the spring. Our alumni dept instead focuses on Bob from Bogue Chitto and Gary from Grenada.