The close distance between most schools in each division will undoubtedly supercharge old rivalries and spark up new versions, so a passionate and extremely dedicated core base that will challenge for top attendance marks in football every year provides USM with its most apparent and immediate enhancement to the conference. While the Sun Belt experienced its highest attendance growth since 2013 last season, the defenestrated version of Conference USA hit an all-time low. Southern Miss will add top tier attendance numbers to one of only two conferences that saw its attendance increase from 2019 to 2021. This new monetary development will enhance the product for a Golden Eagle fan base that is already one of the Sun Belt’s biggest. The school’s $27M in total operating expenses becomes a much more manageable figure in a league with similar finances, especially without chasing schools like North Texas and Charlotte whose budgets have ballooned to impossible-to-match heights. Roots remain within driving distance for athletes and fans alike. This doesn’t even consider the estimated $500,000-$1 million dollars per year the university believes it will save in travel costs within a geographically coherent conference whose 4 overall when including Marshall, per Sportico’s available data. In the Sun Belt, however, that number places the Golden Eagles firmly at the top half of the conference-No. Southern Miss generated $8,772,779 of revenue across all sports in 2020-21-good for No. Southern Miss will be able to get more bang for its buck in this conference than at virtually any time in school history, which buoys the abounding optimism within Eagle Nation that money (or lack thereof) doesn’t always have to equate with on-field success. Reshaping the financial situation to better suit the Golden Eagles’ goals is perhaps the most underrealized development of the university’s newest move. The reality of the situation, however, belies this dark pessimism.
To some people, USM is just too broke and too behind the football times to ever rise back to its prior goals of annually contending for conference titles and gruffly nudging its way into Top 25 consideration every now and again.
There’s the perception among a certain subsect of media members and fan enclaves that Southern Miss is destined to become the Group of Five’s version of Nebraska-a woebegone anomaly whose storied past can be chalked up to a perfect concoction of positives that blended together at just the right moment in history. But a move to the Sun Belt, along with the continued program building of second-year head coach Will Hall, has lifted the spirits of a community desperate for a sliver of success. That period was perhaps the nadir for Southern Miss from a football perspective, when colleagues like Memphis and East Carolina got called up to the American Athletic Conference while USM experienced a first-to-worst drop on the gridiron that was arguably the most catastrophic in recent football memory. Joining the Sun Belt and playing teams that fans have actually heard of has resulted in a building excitement thought unimaginable during the doldrums of conference realignment circa 2012-14, the time Southern Miss was ostensibly left behind for good.
SOUTHERN MISS CONFERENCE REALIGNMENT FREE
This type of realistic hope was set when Southern Miss broke free from the shackles of a deformed Conference USA that looks nothing like its original iteration. This excitement has been grounded in the reality of the sport’s current landscape, where we seem to be morphing at hyperspeed into dual conference behemoths ruling over the rest of the schools that fight for scraps of relevancy amid an ever-shrinking pile of carcasses. There’s been a certain type of optimism permeating within the Southern Miss community in the leadup to this football season, one that hasn’t yet foolishly allowed itself to become too mesmerized by daydreams of a college football fantasy that will never be again. (Photo: Southern Miss Athletics, 247Sports)
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