(Photo from Ole Miss Athletics)
- The university on the last day of January announced it was charging tent set-up vendors for space in one of America’s best-known tailgating areas.
For Stacey and Lynn Wall, the journey from “I” to “we” began in the Grove.
Lynn ran an errand. She left the family tent for only a few minutes. Friends and family knew what was coming.
Lynn returned, and there was a knee in the dirt, then a ring, and life was different, all amid the backdrop of familiar sights, sounds and academic buildings, of sun-blocking trees, of cherished people and places, and Ole Miss football just feet away.
It’s hard to put a price on that, but Ole Miss has, and it’s a big one.
The university on the last day of January announced it was charging tent set-up vendors for space in one of America’s best-known tailgating areas.
The fee will be $150 for single-game set-ups of 10-x-10 tents or $100 a game for the complete schedule of home games.
Rebels fans who want to set up their own tents may still do so for free.
Lynn, as most perceptive ladies do, knew a proposal was coming at some point. She didn’t know that Saturday was the day.
The Old Family Tent
“We were at the old family tent. There were tents all around is that we’d been tailgating with in the Grove for years. Everyone not only in our tent but in the tents around, knew I was doing it,” said Stacey Wall, a Jackson native who now lives in Oxford.
Now that experience will cost – should set-up companies choose to pass on the expense — $700 more for a full season.
College football fans paying attention could see this coming.
It’s no longer an amateur sport.
According to On3.com’s NIL tracker the number of players making at least $1 million in NIL money annually increased from 10 in October of 2023 to 34 in 2024.
Through the early stages of NIL, Ole Miss held off on Grove fees.
Mississippi State began charging tent vendors to set up in The Junction in 2014.
Some fans claim college football is being ruined, but it’s not by NIL alone. The combination of NIL and the Transfer Portal, with little regulation of either, gives players the ability to chase dollars and new experiences each season.
The new ways make college football a beast for coaches to plan beyond one season at a time. There’s no telling where your quarterback will be in a year.
It’s not like the NFL where player contracts are for more than one season.
Lane Kiffin doesn’t like the system, but his experience in and around the NFL has helped him work it to the Rebels’ advantage.
More change is coming. An NIL “contract” covers one player. Starting July 1, schools will begin revenue-sharing with all players, an estimated expense of $20-22 million.
The Southeastern Conference this week announced its 14 members, not including Texas and Oklahoma, would receive checks from the conference of roughly $52.5 million per school for full-year participation.
For years it’s been hard to think of SEC schools as “needy,” but player payments have changed that.
Their bottom lines are taking a hit. Now they’re trying to find new revenue streams to meet this demand and also the demands involved with a continued quality fan experience.
Ole Miss athletics director Keith Carter pleaded for understanding when breaking the news of tent-vendor charges to his fans.
“In the world that we’re living in with increases in so many different things in our own budget, we’ve got to find new revenue sources,” he told the Ole Miss 247Sports website.
Near the SEC Bottom in CFB Financials
In making the announcement Ole Miss also shared operating expense and revenue information for 2023 for 15 SEC schools. Information for Vanderbilt, a private school, was not provided. Ole Miss ranked No. 13 in both lists, ahead of only Missouri and Mississippi State each time.
Schools aren’t paying players right now. That’s done through the private collectives, and the fundraising success of The Grove Collective played a key part in helping Kiffin build a playoff-worthy roster. The Rebels, 9-3 in the regular season, finished just outside the 12-team field.
But the collectives allow fans to choose their level of participation in the pay-the-players process. For some that’s a lot, for some little or none, with many levels in between.
But Grove set-up fees are different. Individual vendors will decide how much of that expense is passed on to their clients. It’s hard to imagine that Ole Miss fans deeply connected to the Grove experience won’t feel the hit.
The question is whether they’ll be sympathetic to their AD or if they’ll walk away?
Wall would like more information about the set-up fees from the school.
“I’d love a little more transparency. I’d like to know what their projected revenues are. If it’s such a big number I think I’d probably say, ‘it’s bad, but I get it.’”
Some fans, yet again, will have to decide how much Ole Miss football success means to them and what their participation level will be.
“I think most fans, and I’m not just talking about Ole Miss, are pausing to reflect on that,” Wall said.
Wall has been around Ole Miss football a long time.
Former AD Ross Bjork once told him the greatest challenge at Ole Miss was getting fans to attend.
Carter may face a greater challenge than Bjork did.
For now, he’s hopeful the Ole Miss tailgate experience will not change.
“At the end of the day, when we show up to the first game next fall, everything should look and feel the exact same,” he told 247Sports.
Just Win Baby
Fans may go along at the beginning but take a wait-and-see approach before making long-range plans. What the Grove looks like will depend on wins and losses to some extent, Wall predicts.
“If Lane makes a deep run in the playoffs, a lot of this is going to be swept under the rug,” he said. “If we stumble like we did this season, it’s going to get more and more difficult.”
He’s hoping that from somewhere, leadership rises and rebalance occurs.
“There’s something magical about the Grove, and I hate the whole NIL thing has come to this. I’m all for athletes getting paid, but the pendulum has swung too far. I do think at some point it will swing back, but as a fan who loves college football, basketball, baseball and Ole Miss, it’s disheartening.”
