Saturday's Ole Miss football game is a perfect storm for horrible attendance

OXFORD — When it comes to filling up Vaught-Hemingway Stadium with fans, there's nothing worse for Ole Miss than a marquee matchup between LSU and Alabama.

LSU and Alabama will play what's being billed as the game of the year this weekend. Alabama, ranked No. 1 in the Amway Coaches Poll, hosts No. 2 LSU at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday. In all likelihood, the winner of this game will be on the fast track toward a spot in the College Football Playoff.

Ole Miss, meanwhile, has a game with much lower stakes. At 3 p.m., Ole Miss (3-6) will kick off a home game against winless New Mexico State.

Given the timing and opponent, combined with other factors that have plagued Ole Miss, it's possible that Saturday will be one of the lowest attended games in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium history.

"I can count on one hand the number of home games in my life I've missed," Ole Miss alum Nicholas Carr said. "I've been to all of them this year. But I won't be attending this one. The weather is fine or whatever. But it's the middle of the day. You have to find a parking spot. You miss a lot of other football. And it's just a crappy opponent. So yeah, we're not going."

The LSU-Alabama effect

Ole Miss has played two home games with announced attendances of fewer than 40,000 fans since Vaught-Hemingway Stadium expanded to seat more than 60,000 fans in 2002. 

The first instance happened in 2007, when 23,283 fans showed up to watch Ole Miss beat Northwestern State. The other was in 2009, when 38,184 fans attended the Rebels' win over Northern Arizona. Conveniently, both of those games fell on the same Saturday as marquee matchups between LSU and Alabama.

In 2007, No. 3 LSU defeated No. 17 Alabama in the first ever "Saban Bowl," where the Tigers defeated their former head coach 41-34 just three years after he left Baton Rouge for the NFL.

In 2009, No. 3 Alabama kept its undefeated season alive with a primetime win over No. 9 LSU. In both cases, the winner went on to win the national championship.

It'd be wrong to say the presence of an LSU-Alabama showdown was the sole reason Ole Miss had trouble filling the stadium on those days. For starters, the matchups barely overlapped. In 2007, Ole Miss kicked off three hours before LSU and Alabama. And in 2009, Ole Miss played four hours after the Tigers and Tide.

But it's impossible not to make the comparisons between 2007, 2009 and this Saturday.

In all three cases, Ole Miss entered off a loss against Auburn. In all three cases, Ole Miss played a non-Power 5 opponent that didn't drive any local interest. And in all three cases, LSU and Alabama earned the nationally televised CBS game of the week, making it an impossible matchup to ignore.

A season-long decline

Ole Miss also has to deal with internal factors.

Throughout the 2019 season, attendance numbers at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium have been down significantly. Average attendance for Ole Miss home games in 2018 was 55,865 fans per game, which represented a 10-year low. Through five home games this year, average attendance is down to 47,572 fans per game, which is a 15% dropoff.

The best attended home game this season was against Texas A&M on Oct. 19 when 50,257 fans showed up. That number would've represented the least attended game at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in each of the last seven seasons.

Now factor in the November aspect of it all. Since 2002, Ole Miss has played 10 November home games against non-Power 5 opponents. The average attendance in those games is 47,547. That's roughly equivalent to the number of fans who attended this season's game against Vanderbilt. 

And of those 10 games, few have been as unappealing as this weekend's matchup.

New Mexico State (0-8) comes to Oxford with the second-worst scoring defense in the country and the 12th-worst scoring offense. The Aggies have lost by an average of 24.4 points per game this season and have turned the ball over 22 times, the third-most in the FBS.

When asked why, despite all this, fans should choose to attend this Saturday's game, Ole Miss coach Matt Luke offered the following answer.

"It's the same thing I tell our players: You only get so many opportunities," Luke said. "You work all year. You're guaranteed 12 opportunities and you want to make the best of them because they go fast. Here we are with 22 or so days left in the regular season. The opportunities go fast and you want to take advantage of each opportunity."

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The skippers

Luke's pitch makes sense for the players. But that message might not resonate widely with fans.

Interest for this Saturday's game is so low that multiple Ole Miss fans who have tickets have told the Clarion Ledger they won't be using them. Rather, many fans plan to camp out at their tailgate spots in The Grove where they'll primarily watch the LSU-Alabama game but keep up with Ole Miss and New Mexico State on commercials.

Others aren't going to bother making the drive.

Overall, Carr, the Ole Miss alum, said he has been encouraged by Ole Miss fan turnout this year. He thinks a lot of the attendance issues can be partially attributed to opposing fanbases not traveling to Oxford as well as they have in the past.

But Carr agreed that this Saturday will be a "perfect storm" of sorts for reasons why not to come to the game. He said the LSU-Alabama game is part of why he's skipping out. But the time commitment and expenses associated with attending just aren't worth coming to the stadium to watch a couple quarters of what Carr said he expects to be a blowout.

The fear, Carr says, is what kind of slippery slope might be created if attendance is as bad as people expect on Saturday. In Carr's mind, skipping one game makes it much easier to miss more in the future. The comfort of watching from home and the opportunity to save money is alluring, and that temptation increases with every Saturday away from the stadium.

If that's the case, this Saturday should generate a lot of temptation.

"I'm not sure that I've heard of anyone actually going to the game," Carr said. "And maybe the one person I did [hear is going] said he's going to leave by halftime. It's just a bad opponent. It's expensive. And the proliferation of televisions have made it so much easier to stay home where you can watch all the games."

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Contact Nick Suss at 601-408-2674 or nsuss@gannett.com. Follow @nicksuss on Twitter.