“I started tailgating with my parents, and we used to tailgate right in front of the M Club,” Mississippi State alumnus and longtime fan/tailgater Chris Richards said. “We’d pull up the trucks and let down the tailbed, lay out our food and stuff.”
Richards has been attending games since the Rockey Felker coaching era in the late 1980s, and he followed his family’s tradition of attending the university and tailgating in The Junction – a grassy area just outside the south end zone of Davis Wade Stadium. That tradition was always first-come, first-served.
Tailgaters would wake up at the crack of dawn on Fridays to stake out their spots, which were not available to reserve otherwise in The Junction. The cost? Nothing.
That is, until this season.
On Aug. 21, MSU announced the area would be exclusive to customers of the university’s tailgating partner, Southern Tradition Tailgating, with a base price of $3,500 for a tailgating spot for the season.
The company has had a contract with MSU for reserved tailgating spots since 2016, occupying the area in and adjacent to the amphitheater bowl and Fan Zone on Stone Boulevard. Now, STT’s area has moved out of the amphitheater and into The Junction, while public tailgating is restricted to adjacent spaces on Stone, Lee Boulevard, Creelman Street and Old Bully Boulevard.
While some fans signed up to retain their spot or claim a new one, Richards was adamant that he would not be one.
“It really makes me sick. I think it’s disgusting what the university is doing,” Richards said. “I understand that they charge now, but it used to be first-come, first-served. Tailgating was the last thing, and I really don’t like paying big money to reserve it.”
Richards expressed a variety of concerns over the monetization of the gameday experience, concerns shared by other tailgaters as well.
With added fees to reserve season tickets, or a supplemental donation to the Bulldog Club, The Junction is just the latest additional cost.
“Tailgating and spending time with friends and family on a football Saturday was always the point. … Now it’s just too inaccessible,” another tailgater displaced from The Junction told The Dispatch on the condition of anonymity due to their employment with the university.
The former Junction regular expressed frustration with meeting the rising costs of the annual fall tradition.
In addition to the cost, tailgaters expressed concern over the loss of tradition that comes with vacating The Junction to paying customers, a decision justified by MSU as an effort to introduce uniformity and meet “a desire for fan and family safety” in a university press release.
“It’s very difficult for the university, when it’s on a first-come, first-served basis, to establish the identity of a person at a tailgate tent and for that to be anything consistent,” MSU Vice President for Strategic Communications Sid Salter said. “Having a consistent system where there are accountable persons for behavior at the tailgate tent, and the ability through those contracts to manage that, I think absolutely increases safety.”
While The Junction was once a collection of custom tents and maroon canopies, it’s now a sea of uniformly gray and black Southern Tradition tents.
“This move feels like an attempt to use that narrative as a means to continue capitalizing on college football at the expense of students, fans, and the community,” the tailgater continued. “It also occurs at the same time that ticket costs are increasing and wages/university/state support is waning.”
A 2023 incident in The Junction resulted in stricter rules about spacing and loudspeakers playing music, rules that still apply, but tailgaters were skeptical of the reasoning for this year’s change.
“They had that rule. They never enforced it,” Richards said. “I don’t think that’s the root of the problem. They were definitely trying to push people out, and I think they let some bad actors ruin tailgating for everyone who doesn’t want to pay a lot of money for the season.”
Changing times
The pre-season price to reserve a tailgating spot through Southern Tradition was $3,500 but that number grew to $4,650 after the start of the season.
Brad Vickers, a Starkville native, founded the enterprise in 2009. In 2016, his company became an official tailgating partner of the university.
“We didn’t want to take away anybody’s spots, especially ones who had been there forever,” Vickers said. “It’s just that with changes come growing pains, and a part of changing our location was we took over the whole Junction. People either had to be displaced or sign up for a package with us.”
Under Southern Tradition’s 2022 contract with the university, which The Dispatch obtained through an open records request filed in early September, the company would be responsible for tailgating in four areas of the campus, excluding The Junction. When approached by the university in the summer about moving into The Junction, Vickers knew there would be backlash.
“We’ve been doing this a while, and people get territorial (about their tailgating spots),” Vickers said. “Even our customers get territorial about their old spots. When people get a spot, they think of it as theirs, but in actuality, it is the university’s, and they can do with it as they will.”
Vickers says he has tried to address tailgaters’ concerns when they called him.
Richards noted going onto the company’s web page the day of the announcement and struggling to find availability in The Junction for new customers, and he considered not tailgating at all because of his anger with the university’s decision.
“I will never be a Southern Tradition customer,” he said. “I want to set up my own damn tent, and I don’t want to look out in The Junction and see a host of tents that all look the same.”
Not quite in writing
According to the contract obtained by The Dispatch, STT pays 26% of monthly event revenue to the university as part of its standard agreement. The contract was signed in 2022 and runs through the end of 2026.
However, there has not yet been an addendum to the contract specifying Southern Tradition’s move to The Junction. Salter told The Dispatch that the 2025 arrangement was not a trial period, but that the university wanted to see the plan play out before making a permanent change.
In short, the agreement with Southern Tradition is currently unaltered from the one signed in 2022.
“Putting it in a contract, we want to have the experience of a full season under our belt before we make that change,” Salter said. “For the first games, it’s been a success. I think people are satisfied with it by and large, so I don’t anticipate changes. As far as the contract, we will address it at the end of the season.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 34 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
