Mississippi State football’s start has Starkville buzzing.
The Bulldogs are 4-0, have a quarterback garnering Heisman hype and have shot up the national rankings to No. 16. MSU’s successes on the gridiron are already translating into triumphs for Starkville’s economy.
Starkville’s hotels are sold out for MSU’s game against Alabama on Saturday, the second straight weekend of hotel sell outs in the city, said Paige Hunt, director of tourism with The Greater Starkville Development Partnership.
     Paige Hunt   “It just goes to the reason that, the better you are (at football), the more people want to come see you,” Hunt said. “There’s just a lot of excitement in this Mississippi State fan base.”
The excitement follows two seasons of losing records for the program. The Bulldogs went 2-10 without an SEC win in 2024. MSU started 4-0 last year but tallied just one more win the rest of the way for a 5-8 finish.
Hunt said it’s not unusual for hotels to sell out during a game weekend, even when the Bulldogs are bad, but the 2026 hotel numbers are already in a better spot than the last two seasons.
Hotel occupancy was up 3.3% this past weekend when MSU hosted its SEC home opener against Missouri, compared to last year’s first conference home game against Tennessee.
The number shoots up to 8% when comparing last weekend to MSU’s SEC home opener in 2024 against Florida, when the Bulldogs were 1-3.
“We are much more likely to sell out when we are good at football,” Hunt said.
Hunt said MSU’s success extends beyond filling up hotel rooms.
“When you come for a football game, you’re likely going to eat at a restaurant. You’re going to stay at a hotel or a short-term rental. You’re going to potentially need to run to the local Walmart to get tailgate supplies,” Hunt said. “So there’s a lot going on, and that just means that just about every corner of the community is impacted by a home football game, and that happens regardless. But when Mississippi State is doing well … it just makes the excitement ratchet up just that much more.”
The impact isn’t contained to just Starkville.
While she didn’t have any concrete numbers for the 2026 season so far, Frances Glenn, tourism director for Columbus-Lowndes Convention and Visitors Bureau, said Columbus generally also sees an influx of visitors during a successful MSU season. Football season is something “we all benefit from,” she said.
     Frances Glenn   “We always have overflow from Mississippi State, both in the hotels and the restaurants,” Glenn told The Dispatch. “… I think there’s a direct correlation historically, and of course, the better Mississippi State does, people want to come back and watch.”
By the numbers
Starkville receives sales tax numbers on a three month cycle, so Ward 2 Alderwoman Sandra Sistrunk said it won’t be until November when the city knows its sales tax numbers for this football season. Other successful athletic seasons, however, have made a big improvement to Starkville’s numbers.
MSU’s 2014 season is widely regarded as one of the best in program history. The Bulldogs went 10-3, and shot up to No. 1 in the country after a 9-0 start. Sales tax revenue for September, October and November was up 12-15%, $50-$70,000 a month, from 2013, Sistrunk said.
She said there could have been other events in that three-month span but said most of those numbers would have been driven by football.
     Sandra Sistrunk   “I’d like to think that, if we have continued success, that maybe the numbers will be a little higher now than they were back then,” Sistrunk said.
Nancy Carpenter, who headed the Columbus-Lowndes CVB during the 2014 season, remembers Columbus seeing “almost as much” of an impact as Starkville did.
     Nancy Carpenter   “I remember during that time, we were thrilled at Visit Columbus just because of the impact that it was having (and) because of the people that wanted to come,” she said. “I remember the hotels were so full, and I was even helping, during that time, get people rooms.”
Carpenter believes those staying in Columbus at the time likely preferred getting away from the “busyness” of the gameday environment, particularly long lines. Visits from those fans also benefited Columbus attractions, she said.
“I was over, at the same time, the Tennessee Williams Welcome Center, and that was something else that I remember vividly, is having hundreds of people on the weekends,” she said. In 2021, when MSU’s baseball team won the national championship, Starkville’s numbers increased by 30%.
Sistrunk said those numbers are skewed because they include the city’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, but she estimated if that was taken out, it would have been another 15% increase.
“Having a successful football season, basketball season, baseball season, having interest in the community of any sort that brings people to the city has that immediate impact of increased sales, increased local investment in purchasing during the events,” Sistrunk said. “But the bigger piece of it is, if it’s sustainable, you see more interest in people actually investing in the community in terms of infrastructure, starting a business, buying a house, buying a second house, that sort of thing.”
Prep for this weekend
Ryan Handran was the general manager of Rick’s Cafe in 2014.
     Ryan Handran   “It was wild,” Handran said of the environment in the bar. “It’s hard not to be in a good mood when your team’s doing great. … It’s easy to go out and celebrate, and people were definitely feeling how easy it was.”
Handran is now a co-owner of Rick’s, and is feeling the hype around this year’s squad.
HARDY, a country music artist with more than 7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, is playing a concert on Friday at Humphrey Coliseum. Handran wasn’t planning on opening up the main bar, avoiding competition with the concert, but because of the football hype, he opened up the bar, and held a DJ night.
Rick’s has a capacity of 850, and Handran said he expects to be pretty close to that on Saturday. He said the bar is “stocking up basically to our fullest,” and is hosting the Jason Miller Band, who have over 13,000 followers on Instagram.
“The more of those stadium chairs we have filled, the more that trickles down across our little city,” Handran said.
He said the bar plans its entire fall schedule around the football season and relies more on making money throughout the football season, more than anything else throughout the year.
“These are some of the most important weekends for every business in this town,” Handran said. “If you can’t make your money on home game weekends in the fall, you are really going to struggle when it comes to the summer.”
News Editor Emma McRae contributed to this reporting. Jake is the Mississippi State athletics reporter for The Dispatch.