EVICTION NOTICE: The state just evicted your school from it from its current location. What new city in Mississippi would you move your school to?
- Thread starter dawgstudent
- Start date
It has to be Jackson area. No other city, other than maybe the coast, would be an improvement over Starkville. I’d put it in Jackson too. Probably right downtown. Beef up campus security. Capital police is already there. Would be a legit D1 school in an urban setting that MS does not have.
I thought about this a lot over the years and I wish in 1878 They had put the school in Raymond. Plenty of land for the agriculture aspect of the school and very close to the largest city in the state.
It's interesting that a number of Mississippi Community colleges have built nice new buildings, away from their campuses in more populated areas.
EMCC - GTR
NWCC - Southaven
Holmes - Ridgeland
Hinds - Pearl
ICC - Tupelo
I'm sure there is more
EMCC - GTR
NWCC - Southaven
Holmes - Ridgeland
Hinds - Pearl
ICC - Tupelo
I'm sure there is more
Similar parallels to our state’s racial history. We hurt ourselves the most by believing we were better than others. Not unusual throughout human history but hurts nonetheless.
Never heard that. If so, incredibly stupid by Vicksburg leaders. But the Pearl location is much better. Just need better leadership. Which hopefully the new Board will provide.
Move it to Jackson.
Merge JSU and MSU to become the biggest university in the state.
Gentrify the 17 out of Jackson.
Merge JSU and MSU to become the biggest university in the state.
Gentrify the 17 out of Jackson.
That stadium was always had a lot of fans in it when State or Ole Miss played. 6oK plus watched MSU vs USM in 1981. Would have been more if it had more seats. Hell in 1981 Bryant–Denny only had 60K seats. There are way more Miss State Alumni and supporters in Madison and Rankin County today than there was in 1981. If Ole Miss or Miss State was located in the Jackson Metro area there would be an 80K seat football stadium. Way easier to drive 10 miles than 141 miles. There would be no hotel issue. It would be so easy for alumni to get to the game. They would go. Miss State also has a large alumni base south all the way to the coast. Going to game in Madison or Rankin would be way more attractive than driving to Starkville and they would have a hotel at a reasonable price.
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This would seal it:
I heard that also but not surprising Vicksburg politics has a bad habit of being incredibly short sighted. When I lived there my short stint, people that grew up there and still lived there wondered why anyone would want to live anywhere else or commute from Jackson suburbs over.
Vicksburg would be interesting. Interstate, neat and active downtown, ERDC relationship (which MSU has multiple faculty and staff in Vicksburg around ERDC currently), but also would help attract students from Texas which is a good and growing market.
not to mention the Grant Library and MSU’s focus on Civil War in History Dept. Could be the Mecca of Civil War sites
not to mention the Grant Library and MSU’s focus on Civil War in History Dept. Could be the Mecca of Civil War sites
I would not call Tupelo Ole Miss country. There's a **** ton of state fans there.
Yeah….probably 35k MSU and 25k USM. That’s an intrastate rivalry with both teams being 2 hours from the stadium. You don’t play 7/8 of those games per year.
And Scott Field only had 32,000. What’s your point? BD also expanded to 72,000 in 1988.
In Madison and Rankin? Sure….because a ton of those people moved there from Jackson in the past 42 years. But that doesn’t move the needle for the area as a whole. The overall metro area has grown at a minuscule 0.7% on average over that period, and is presently in decline (not just Jackson). Compare that to the areas in and around Starkville and within easy driving distance….including Tupelo, DeSoto County, Birmingham metro, and Huntsville. It ain’t much different population wise in the Jackson MSA than it was in 1981, relatively speaking. But its a lot different for those other areas.
If either WAS located there, as in past tense, when the universities were founded, yes maybe so. But that wasn’t the question of the thread. The question was, if we were “evicted” from Starkville, today, in 2023, where do you start over? I would put Jackson and that entire area as far on the bottom of the heap as possible when picking a new location. It’s a cancer of a city at this point that is only going to continue dragging everything else down with it. Including its suburbs….and that’s already started happening.
You’d also certainly have tremendous political bickering around how to allocate between $750 million and probably $1 billion (minimum) in construction costs for building an 80,000 seat stadium in Rankin or Madison counties, realizing of course that 50% of the residents there are still going to be Ole Miss fans and alumni.
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Back in the 70’s and 80’s I saw SEC games in Jackson that literally had less than 25,000 butts in seats. I remember reports of tickets that were actually sold at Jackson locations that only totaled a few hundred combined. It was a parade down 25 or the Trace on Saturdays from Starkville and elsewhere. No, Jackson already had their chance and they blew it. Anywhere but there.
The state blew it when they built the schools where they did. This is not 1970's or 80's. College football is on a whole different level today. State can get 60k in Starkville. They could get 80K in Jackson today. It opens the whole world of South Miss. Easier to drive to Rankin County from Gulfport than to Starkville. There is a reason why both Ole Miss and State played big SEC games in Jackson. Yes the campus stadiums were smaller but why were they smaller? Like I said there a lot more alumni in Central Miss than the 70's and 80's. A lot of them don't want to drive 140 miles to a game but would drive 10 miles.
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Here's my stump for DeSoto County/Memphis metro:
It would quickly become the biggest and best school in the Memphis metro. You would be in a safe area but close to the city. More profs would be willing to relocate to a metro area (lots of Targets for coaches wives.) You still are close to rural/ag land for research. Tons of working professionals would attend to get advanced degrees.
3 fortune 500 companies are HQ'd in Memphis... FedEx, IP, and AutoZone, all of which could easily partner with Mississippi State for massive hiring and training programs. There is a real airport in Memphis. Memphis is a top 50 metro in economic productivity and is 3x Jackson in terms of annual GDP.
Oxford is too far to really tap into the metro on a daily basis. Nobody is driving 80+ miles to get an advanced degree at night after work. University of Memphis will be your real competition and we win that battle real fast.
In less than a decade Mississippi State would own the Memphis metro. Worried about losing out to OM in the Jackson metro or coast? It's 15 minutes longer to drive to Southaven than to Oxford from Brandon or Gulfport.
The biggest thing for me is college graduates would have real opportunities in the city after graduating. Memphis isn't bougie like Nashville or Austin, but it's a solid metro with good career opportunities for nearly every field. We would build stronger alumni resources and raise more money.
You talk about “opening the whole world of South MS” like everything south of I-20 is some sort of demographic sleeping giant. South MS is the coast and Hattiesburg….and a whole lot of nothing beyond that. And Hattiesburg is mostly spoken for. And the coast is still almost 3 hrs from Jackson.
If the goal is to truly open up South MS and be the yin to OM’s yang in North MS, then forget Jackson and go all in on a campus in Ocean Springs or somewhere nice like that….where you could cultivate the small town college feel but still have a lot of great urban benefits, too.
Ultimately, a theoretical MSU v2.0 would have to think bigger than being in the most convenient location possible to the largest number of Mississippians. It would need to be an attractive destination to the highest number of potential high performing students possible….which, unfortunately according to some, means heavy catering towards out of state students. The real life v1.0 needs to be doing the same thing, but of course can’t change its location.
That gives you 3 options:
1) Tupelo - good midsized city with growth potential that also has interstate access and can be accessed in less than 2 hrs from Memphis, Birmingham, and Huntsville and can also be reached in 3ish hours from the Nashville area - fastest growing big city in the south - as well as Chattanooga and Jackson being the same distance.
2) The coast - plant the flag and become the SEC school of choice in South MS. Yeah, you have the LSU influence, but they aren’t going to get every kid from Pensacola all the way through Mobile and into MS. Go get those kids.
3) DeSoto County - distant 3rd in my opinion. You put a presence in a growing area, but who’s to say that growth continues? Memphis today has a lot of similarities to Jackson 25 years ago. It’s probably too big to fail, but even if it doesn’t you are just going all in on one specific metro area that already has a few other options for potential students and athletes nearby.
I get your logic, but we don't want to build Memphis......it has done that on its own. We want to build Mississippi. Jackson is much more important to that. And Ole Miss is more wrapped into Memphis than you think. They have daily shuttles running back and forth, friends of mine worked for the Yerby Center.
I really like the concept of Vicksburg. Cool town close to Jackson, but not right directly in the metro. South tip of the Delta. Meridian and Tupelo are the other solid, realistic choices in my opinion. But there are tons of employers in the Jackson metro too, and I'd much rather see that area thrive due to MSU, than Memphis.
This is exactly why Tupelo is such a strong pick. But of course, the Golden Triangle is in the same boat (damn I wish we could merge these two areas).
Yeah it's even closer to Oxford but we are close already. We could almost create a weird sort of 'rivalry area' that would be pretty unique. Or even a small research triangle area, like Raleigh-Durham. And let's face it, north MS seems like the only place that could see big growth eventually.
Oh well, none of this is happening
I vote for Yazoo City home to two of our greatest alumni, Fletcher Cox and Jerry Clower.
Close to Jackson and Vicksburg.
Plenty of farm land still available. Former Mississippi Chemical plant is still in operation along with a Federal prison so you could get an agricultural, industrial, governmental thing going.
Also Delta on one side of 49E, hills on the other so you could teach farming in both.
Close to Jackson and Vicksburg.
Plenty of farm land still available. Former Mississippi Chemical plant is still in operation along with a Federal prison so you could get an agricultural, industrial, governmental thing going.
Also Delta on one side of 49E, hills on the other so you could teach farming in both.
This is exactly why Tupelo is such a strong pick. But of course, the Golden Triangle is in the same boat (damn I wish we could merge these two areas).
Yeah it's even closer to Oxford but we are close already. We could almost create a weird sort of 'rivalry area' that would be pretty unique. Or even a small research triangle area, like Raleigh-Durham. And let's face it, north MS seems like the only place that could see big growth eventually.
Oh well, none of this is happening
The Tupelo thing is a head scratcher. For 30 years it's been ready to "boom"... And for 30 years it's been a dud. Still a nice small town, but it's about time to give up on the idea it's ever going to be anything else. I remember the argument being once the interstate was in its a perfect hub between Memphis and Birmingham... I guess when it was 55 mph with ridiculous roads in Alabama full of red lights that made sense... But 70 mph on the interstate means it's 3-3.5 hours from Memphis to Bham and the hub is really not needed.
Yep.
Most of the jucos started off as residential ag high schools which is why they were established in small towns.
But when farming became less labor intensive and towns and cities began to grow, the jucos had to create additional campuses in other parts of their districts.
All the significant travel is East or West. There are no accessible destinations North or South. They set the table in the late 80s to be the next big thing when they put good plans in for things like education and infrastructure. The health care and hospital improved. Towns nearby, like Saltillo, started improving. They got the automotive plant established, but then all the significant advances to bring in money and people seemed to stop. It's still my first consideration if I ever relocate to Mississippi.
It still ain’t bad, though. There is definitely growth in the area, at least it’s not going backwards. Tupelo/Pontotoc/New Albany is good living if you prefer the smaller town lifestyle but still a growth ‘heartbeat’. I wouldn’t call it a dud by any means. But in true MS fashion the economic machine is an hour south in the Golden Triangle. Such is life in the Sip I suppose. Guess we have to wait around for 50 years for it all to grow together.
I won’t be around for it. But there is a future there.
The growth rate of Tupelo by itself over the past 40 years has been double what both the entire Jackson MSA and the MS Coast MSA have been over the same period. And that excludes the bigger boom experienced by nearby areas like Saltillo, etc. That growth has been partially offset by loss of jobs in furniture manufacturing (mainly to China), but it has still happened. If Tupelo is a “dud”, I sure as hell don’t know what you’d call the rest of the state’s growth. A steaming turd, perhaps.
Not sure where you are getting that info or how skewed the years from 80-90 were... But Tupelo has barely grown since I moved there in the early 90's. Lee county, which includes Saltillo has grown a whopping 26% since 1990. That's not a boom... It's a meh..
If you add in Union, Pontotoc, and Itawamba counties the growth in the same time span, it bumps up to 27%. For comparison, the entire state is up 14.4% since 1990.
Now you want to see a boom... DeSoto County is at 175%.
And for the last 10 years... Lee county is losing people. Not knocking the town, but the boom never happened. It has barely out performed the state. It was the bottle rocket that never really took off, but that probably makes it better for a lot of folks.
Got to look 10-20 years out…..Joe Max is the GOAT (not me).
I actually hold real goats, contrary to what the nimrods on this site say as far as greatest of all time n ****….
I would do near Gulfport and the 10/49 intersection OR in the Brandon/Flowood area
I don’t buy Gulfport is on LSUs doorstep it is further from Gulfport to Baton Rouge than Starkville to Tuscaloosa.
I don’t buy Gulfport is on LSUs doorstep it is further from Gulfport to Baton Rouge than Starkville to Tuscaloosa.
I never called it a “boom”. I simply said their growth rate over the period was higher than the Jackson MSA and the Gulfport-Biloxi MSA was over the same period, which is true. It’s also higher than the Memphis MSA over that same period, including DeSoto County. It’s been slow, steady growth over many years, with a few short term setbacks here and there. But long term net growth nonetheless, in spite of its bread and butter industry bleeding jobs to the Chinese.
So, the 4-county area in and around Tupelo has a growth rate that is double what the rest of the state had been, and you don’t think that’s significant?
That’s certainly a boom for those counties, and for the whole state in a much smaller sense. But within the context of this discussion, that boom is a mirage….because its mostly just migration out of Memphis. If you were to locate a new MSU in DeSoto County for the reasons you mentioned, you are staking a claim on the entire MSA, not just the MS suburbs. In that sense, it doesn’t matter if you have 500,000 in DeSoto County vs. 1 million in Shelby County, 750,000 in DeSoto vs. 750,000 in Shelby County, or 100,000 in DeSoto vs. 1.4 million in Shelby County. You want the whole pie. But if you want to look at the entire MSA’s net growth rate over that same period since 1990, its only about 30%.
And don’t get me wrong…its not a bad strategy. The biggest thing the Memphis MSA has going for it is a larger baseline of population already there. But over that same period, the Jackson MSA (which has struggled mightily for well documented reasons) is up 45%. The Coast is up 31%, and it’s had its own struggles as well. So I’m not sure the Memphis MSA as a whole would be a desirable one to go all-in on. Furthermore, the university as a whole wouldn’t reap nearly the economic benefit as it would in a more Mississippi-centric location, because you throw out every proximity advantage you have to Memphis / Shelby County if you don’t waive out of state tuition for the entire Memphis MSA.
Tupelo is of course not ever going to be one of those huge MSA’s. The advantage they have is accessibility to where they can cast the net easily into Memphis, Huntsville, Nashville, Birmingham, Chattanooga, and even Jackson. And the Coast is only about 25 min further away from Tupelo than it is from Starkville, so you lose nothing there. The growth I cited for the city, while not a “boom”, is sustainable, healthy growth that is a product of mostly good policy (strong support of public schools, promoting and developing arguably the best health care hub in the state, tax incentives for industry in the area like the Toyota plant and its suppliers, Cooper Tire, the remaining furniture business, etc.). An SEC school would certainly put it in that Auburn / Tuscaloosa development structure, which wouldn’t be bad at all. It’s also more “Mississippi” than DeSoto County will ever be.
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No question about this. It's the biggest drawback there is for MS investing anything in Desoto County. #1, they don't have to, it's growing on its own. #2, it's simply good fortune that its located next to Memphis, but it's still pretty much Memphis. The economy will revolve around Memphis and the center of that will always be in Tennessee.
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