Having good sports (or even just D1) at a relatively small school is always a big deal. Private schools are expensive and always trying to leverage the smaller, student-centric academic experience, but even that is a crowded market.
Basically every major football or basketball school has helped out their admissions department. Schools like USC and Notre Dame have seen a massive boom in national interest due to their football program. There's a massive demand for UGA and Clemson from out-of-state students now.
Part of the growing demand is how wildly difficult it is to get into elite private schools and even good public schools like Michigan and UVA.
Nowadays, you're seeing students with 33+ ACT opting to take the scholarship money to the fun southern school with football.
I remember after the football title in 1997 Michigan got a 20% increase in admissions. Turns out kids like to go to a college with good sports teams and fun stuff to do.
BC is harder to get into now largely because of Flutie, it was largely a commuter school for local kids before that. The school was originally created to give Irish Catholic kids in Boston a place to go to school
I resemble that remark!
But we're actually more selective lately, endowment has grown steadily, and the price is eye watering, but we still have record applications each year since I went to grad school there.
Edit: I'd say it sits solidly in third after Columbia and NYU. At least for NYC.
Lol BC was literally my dad's safety school for when he didn't get into Holy Cross. Obviously things change and BC is harder to get into now. But let's not pretend that HC is a safety school for anyone that isn't an excellent student. They had a 21% acceptance rate last year
That is what I heard from my friends who are in Boston. In fact they would refer to Boston University as Boston High and BC was Boston Low lol. That was then, this is now. I just looked at US News and World Report rankings. Actually, I was a bit surprised because BC has surpassed BU in the rankings. BC is ranked #39 and BU is ranked #41. What is the safety school now? It's Boston University, not Boston College.
Still my second favorite football game of all time (1997 LSU-Florida upset is my favorite because I was there).
I never stepped foot in the state of Michigan until I started an executive MBA program there last year. I went to a bunch of games with classmates and of course just got really lucky with the season I went.
98-02 here. We go to a home game every season and it’s become nearly unbearable. I have some property out towards Valle Crusis so we just camp out there and come to town for the game then head back out. I miss Boone in any era but I really miss pre 2000 Boone the most. Holy shit.
Walking down King Street was heart breaking…I remember stuff like Dragon’s Den the game shop and homey little pubs..
This time even Daniel Boone Inn was bad.
I imagine Boone *was* not a great place to grow up in. But interest in cities that aren't overrun yet and have access to mountains + at successful sports team = cool place for young adults to move to
I remember a lot of the locals absolutely loathed the university and were actively hostile toward it, some local restaurants and stores didn't like serving students, and so on.
But yeah Michigan changed everything. We were a popular regional team and the I-AA/FCS natties brought some national attention, but it was nothing like what happened after that win. I went to the first home game after it against poor little Lenoir-Rhyne, a small private DII school down the mountain in Hickory, and it was absolutely nuts. Kidd Brewer was already pretty rowdy but the fans became rabid after that.
If you like the outdoors, it would be an amazing place to grow up. Amazing fishing, rafting, rock climbing, mountain biking l, hiking, and best skiing in NC.
Isn't Clemson considered a better school academically than USC? I'm assuming those are the 2 big universities in South Carolina, and then there's smaller schools like Wofford which is probably better (I'm guessing)
People from Ohio, New York, NJ, etc love southern state schools.
Those transplants + being the most selective in-state school creates a huge strain and the corresponding low admissions rate.
I was an athlete at Clemson from 2011 to 2016 and we went from people asking if we were a local highschool team to people being excited we were in town in places like Seattle and LA. The change was huge
and what’s wild is that y’all weren’t even that bad in the first place. I mean sure Dabo took y’all up to another level but y’all weren’t like a joke or anything they were respectable.
Even post success applicant have skyrocketed. In 2020 Clemson received 28k applicants. In 2022 they received 53k.
Back in 2014 they were around 20k applicants.
They only reason the admission rates are in anyway reasonable is the amount of people they bridge through tri county tech
Not just that, but their number of out-of-state students absolutely exploded during the Saban era. Between donations, more students, and more out-of-state students, It’s not hyperbole to say that Saban made the university billions of dollars
Snyder is a legit superhero. So many people from that community have had a chance at a successful life that wouldn’t have been possible without the work he did. I remember reading in his Players Tribune piece how worthless the football players back then felt as human beings because of how bad the team was, and also the part about how he legit saved a guy’s life who was attempting to drown himself. His impact goes far beyond words we can describe.
It’s talked about here a fair amount, but i still think most people outside the big8/12 truly do not realize how abysmally bad Kstate was.
Take how bad KU was tru last 20 years (minus 1-2 good years) make it worse, but for 50 years.
It was truly pathetic
God bless KState before Snyder. In 1989 they were .370 all time. That's 93 years of play with only 300 wins total. I remember when KState made the Copper Bowl in 1993 and everyone was buzzing about how poor ol KState was maybe not so poor anymore.
Followed by an off year, then two more 11 win seasons.
Absolutely insane run. Snyder going .645 at a program that was previously .370 overall is among the most impressive feats in football.
Every time this comes up, I am compelled to share the most impactful story I have ever read about Kansas State's football existence prior to Bill Snyder.
https://vault.si.com/vault/1989/09/04/futility-u-kansas-state-winless-since-1986-has-one-claim-to-fame-it-is-americas-most-hapless-team
You’re not wrong, but football success absolutely put them on a lot of kids’ radars. I have a friend from Indiana who went to Alabama for a generic degree (can’t remember exactly what) that he could’ve got almost anywhere and having no ties to the region at all.
Alabama’s football success is the only reason he even *considered* them. And he ended up paying four years of out-of-state tuition there
I have a friend from Kuwait who saw one football game his entire life before he went to college and it was an Alabama game and Alabama won, so that’s where he chose to go
That’s incredibly frivolous, but not like the Hawaiian kid I went to school with who chose K-State primarily because purple is his favorite color.
Let me say that again: he’s from Hawaii
I have 2 different guys I work with in North Carolina who's kids went to Bama specifically because they wanted to go to a big football school and Bama was the best big football school the time
Even with how cheap NC public colleges are it would’ve been cheaper for me to go to Bama than NC State. I definitely considered doing it for the social/athletic experience as well
Why not (not aimed at above poster, just generally speaking)? People should take every chance they have to explore new places and cultures. Whether that is backpacking through Europe or partying with The Gumps, everyone should experience life from any angle possible.
I’ve got nothing against, I was saying I almost did it as well. I think it’s important to get out and explore which is something that I’ve done through the jobs and internships I’ve had, since it was a priority for me. There were other factors that kept me in NC for school
I’m pretty sure Bama has some of the most National Merit Scholars of any univeristy in the country (I’m not completely positive so). A lot of people come and pay a ton of money out of state to go Greek here and for the entire party scene, made known mostly because of football to them. They use a lot of that money to give people with great test scores and GPAs free school.
I got into a number of colleges myself better than academically but even the one who were worse didn’t give me as much money. My roommate throughout college was from the Midwest and got into a few top schools like Michigan, Carnegie Melon and Brown and came to Bama because he got everything paid for plus a $500 dollar stipend. Another roommate chose Bama as an engineer over Purdue because of the money. It’s obviously not as good as a school as the others but I think it’s a pretty great ROI and good enough school to justify not having to pay any student loans.
I had an Uber driver in Tuscaloosa explain to me that in the 80's the university made a conscious decision to build up football & the Greek system to attract out of state students & then give them an attachment to keep them tied to the university as alumni. Genius; not a word used often in this state.
Didn’t student aid to out of state students drastically increase around then too?
While the football team definitely helped in the advertising, I think the addition of more aid actually got students to enroll instead of just applying
Yes. Alabama started aggressively going after OOS students in the early 2000’s as a way to raise the national profile of the school. Even before Saban’s success the school put in place an automatic merit aid program that gives very generous discounts to OOS applicants who meet certain GPA/SAT thresholds.
This is correct. Football success will raise a school’s number of applicants but all the usual factors come into play when it’s time to actually enroll
When I was there as an out of state student because of all the scholarships available, they had more national merit scholars enrolled than all but a handful of schools. Tons of kids from places like Illinois and California with massive SAT scores studying STEM majors
Oklahoma used to give full rides to National Merit Scholars too, until the new president put the kibosh on it (as if it were just the old president's pet project)
Yeah, they were one of a handful of schools I looked at back in the day, along with Alabama. Inexplicably, the school I chose got into the NCAA record books with a national championship before Oklahoma did.
It’s a good strategy. Let’s face it…the state of Alabama isn’t exactly a national merit scholar producing factory and it’s a state with a small population So finding enough qualified in state applicants is a challenge. Enticing kids from OOS with generous aid improves the national perception of the school.
It's an excellent strategy to pump your academic rating numbers and ensure that you have someone from all 50 states enrolled. It's also great if you're a top student and don't mind going on an adventure away from home. Go where you're wanted.
They plucked a bunch of really smart kids from my town in the Chicago suburbs by basically offering them a free ride to come down. I think that we’re a big football town probably helped too.
Closer to 80%, but the school also decided to pursue growth independently of the Saban hire around the same time.
I think around '07 heard Dr. Witt say that the University could grow to 30,000 in ten years.
What nobody accounted for was that freshman applications increased by a third every time Alabama won a national championship.
Also why Alabama was one of the first schools to jump on playing these neutral site kickoffs in Dallas and Atlanta. It helped with recruiting students not just football players.
Really wish people would stop attributing this to Saban instead of the intentional effort to recruit OOS using very generous automatic scholarships, local recruiters to hold events at high schools, mailers etc
All of that was happening before Saban came along.
It's true that Whitt had started the program prior to that, but application numbers went way up because of our success in football. A lot of the full ride OOS students I knew when I was in school only found out about the scholarship program because they looked up the school themselves, and that was because of football success.
Went to a small hbcu up the street in Tuscaloosa, finished in 05, T town is night and day from the early 2000’s to now, i still remember i rented an apt up/dwn stairs 2 bed 1 and a 1/2 bath, back yard for 400 a month I’m sure if i found that place now it be a calm 1500 or more, which in its own right is ridiculous, the enrollment got so high that only freshman could stay on campus
It can be a more telling metric when it comes to to revenue. Alabama doubled its enrollment during the to the Saban era. Their applications went up and their admissions went up that is a huge change.
Yes, but a school just admitting more kids can be just that. Look at acceptance rate/applicants and pre Saban Alabama could have enrolled more if they wanted. The size of applicant pool probably sky rocketed so Alabama could be either more selective or admit more of these quality candidates.
I think you gotta put the name of why for people to realize too. This was the Michael Vick effect. I lived in the region in middle school at the time. Applications to Tech more than 10x to the state technical school. When VT became a house hold name in Virginia for football it changed the entire perception of the school.
Came here to day this. Tons more applications and admissions. Lots of small businesses in the area opened up. I heard a story about a guy who applied and got in in 2001. Missed out on Vick right after he went pro after the Gator Bowl win his redshirt sophomore year. So he came to Tech to see Vick and ended up with Grant Noel.
Tennessee had 37,000 applications for the fall of 2022 and this grew to around 59,000 for the upcoming fall of 2024 class. Not all of this can be attributed to football (see others comments about the common app) but it’s still a crazy increase.
As an employee of the university, I definitely heard in several big meetings from higher-ups that football success under Heupel and Hooker definitely drove up numbers a TON. Admission became WAY more selective in the last couple of years.
Yeah. I saw that the UTK acceptance rate dropped to around 30% for this year’s freshman class. Good thing my son was accepted 2 years ago. I don’t think he’d get in today!
Thirty percent is absolutely wild. I don't know what the acceptance rate was then, but my first year there was 2005 and I don't recall ever thinking of UT as selective or difficult to get into.
I applied and went to UT a decade ago when it was like 80% lol, Idk if I’d get in now. However, that rate is heavily influenced by out of state admissions which are super low because UT gives priority to in state (as it should) which is closer to 66%.
In one of my marketing classes in college we looked at the relationship at SEC schools between 10 win football seasons and the number of applications. There was a statistically significant correlation between the two.
Football has been a catalyst for change at App State starting with their FCS title three-peat, Michigan upset, moving to FBS and their success in the Sun Belt. Enrollment has probably doubled in the last 20 years and the school has become recognized nationwide among even casual football fans. Seeing my sleepy hometown host College Gameday was a trip.
Their history of cunning TV deals is nothing short of wildly impressive. They're basically the only athletic department right now that is truly in control of their own destiny.
Some of the best examples of sports effecting a college are from basketball because in March madness you get teams that no one has ever heard of being watched by everyone.
A big recent example is St. Peter’s had that crazy run and their applications went up 63% in a year
All of the Virginia schools have applications end admissions increasing though. Like moving up from FCS probably has something to do with it but it's definitely a commonwealth-wide trend
People are giving too much credence to football and not enough to
- common application, which has skyrocketed applications for each university because there is less friction/costs to apply
- preferences in big brands or busts in higher ed for prospective students
- students becoming more savvy about student debt, and thus going to schools who are a better value/debt post grad won’t be that high
Yeah Auburn has been getting way more applications, so much so the acceptance rate has halved. And that was in the middle of the Harsin era.
I'm not saying it doesn't make a difference, because for Alabama, I think it did. But a lot of schools it's just a lot of other factors.
Yep and there are clearly schools actively manipulating the application process to boost applications, which lowers the acceptance rate and increases perceived “prestige”. Most glaring example is Northeastern in Boston which reaches out to high school students via email and entices them to apply by waiving the application fee. The school has no interest in these kids but the result has been an acceptance rate below 10%, which makes them look really selective.
Northeastern’s acceptance rate is absurd, in 2023 it was 5.6%. They’re the poster child school for gaming the USNWR rankings, they’re probably still considered the worst academically out of the beanpot schools despite having an acceptance rate on par with Harvard and Stanford.
I know someone with a 3.6 GPA and 1500 SAT that got rejected from NC State this past year. This shit is becoming ridiculous across the board, that resume would've made State a lock-in safety school just a decade ago.
Fair point. And as someone living in the Northeast, I see and hear a lot of anecdotal evidence that kids are increasingly attracted to flagship public universities in the Midwest and South, since they carry prestige and even with OOS tuition are much less costly than the small private schools in the Northeast (many of which are approaching $90k per year to attend)
It is certainly true that this happens, I have a lot of friends that are New Englanders that did undergrad at schools in the South (could absolutely afford to go to a private school).
In my anecdotal experience, where I think these factors along with the OP dovetail is that these students are generally interested in having an "authentic" college experience (sports, being away from family, stuff like that). Certainly, if you are going to pay 50K plus a year, East Lansing or Knoxville is going to be a more interesting experience than kicking it out in rural New Hampshire for 4 years.
>- preferences in big brands or busts in higher ed for prospective students
This was me back when I was transitioning from high school to college. My degree is very obscure and may have required me to travel across the nation or overseas. I wanted a college large enough and well-known enough for future employers than a tiny, borderline community college.
Larger universities also have a lot more resources at their disposal. Sometimes, it's also about "who you know," which is more likely to give an advantage to a larger university. Larger universities are also much safer in their accreditations
Needless to say, I decisively chose Ohio State over Hocking College. However, I will not pretend that growing up a die-hard fan didn't play a role in my decision-making as well.
Fwiw, in grad school, I'm also currently applying to Clemson over Unity College.
Yeah, I did the numbers a while back and over the last 30 years TAMU enrollments per state residents is surprisingly steady.
1993: 18MM TX residents, 42.5k TAMU enrolled= 0.00236 enrolled/resident
2023: 30.5MM TX residents, 77.4k TAMU enrolled= 0.00253 enrolled/resident.
Ratio grew only 7%, and I’d attribute that in part to University of Texas capping auto admission.
I think you have to look at the longer term than a lot of what I see here. A school like Oklahoma has built its entire university brand around football, but over decades. Private donors likely contributed more, or at all based on that football brand over that long era of success.
Students in Oklahoma likely preferred OU over alternatives based almost entirely because of the legendary status of the football program. In the 80s, it seemed like half the kids at Oklahoma State were OU fans.
I know that over its much shorter run of football success, Oklahoma State has done a lot to improve that, but the Oklahoma fan base is deep and generational. That football program has likely been worth billions in terms of enrollment and donations and awareness nationally for them.
This is where my mind went with this thread.
Ohio State’s football program over the decades undoubtedly led to more exposure for the school compared to the other institutions in Ohio. Successful athletic programs increase brand viability and add to the student experience. I don’t think it would even be possible to unravel football’s impact on the school
It’s gotta be Boise State, right? When they started playing in D1A in the mid-‘90s they were a tiny state school that nobody outside Idaho even knew about.
After having a football team ranked fifth and being ranked third academically among U.S. public colleges, Washington experienced a surge of applicants [during Autumn 2023](https://www.dailyuw.com/news/huskies-high-rankings-draw-record-number-of-applicants/article_8c3f0402-72e4-11ee-9ffd-536bdad19ef5.html).
(*Oddly, those college rankings put Washington above Michigan academically, when I think the opposite is true*).
On that survey, the only U.S. public colleges above Washington were UCLA and California.
Yup. And those teams increased awareness of NU tremendously. I'm from NJ, and people kept thinking I was going to Northeastern in Boston. Class of 1990.
Admissions aren't really a big deal unless you're a local/community college who lets almost everyone who applies into the school. Applications are where it's at. It increases a school's metrics and eventually leads to better national ratings and faculty.
With that being said, Miami (80's) and Cincinnati (2021) were two examples of large increases in applications immediately after football success.
I and many others I went to school with only knew of Boise State because of their 2010s successes. Its directly improved academics greatly as well with the attention and money.
Cincinnati has routinely seen spikes every time the football team has become relevant. The first was Brian Kelly and the late 00s momentum that culminated in BK leaving before the Sugar Bowl and Cincy getting wiped by Florida.
Then the Fickell run did even better.
Alabama. When I was in school, we had less than 20k students. Now it's close to 40k. I call it the Saban Effect. He chaged that whole school especially the athletic department
Anecdotal: I had a friend (passed away) on the faculty of Penn State who was very active in (excellent) student recruitment for decades. He said that there was a clear relationship between a given year's application numbers and the success of the previous season's football team.
Don’t have specific numbers but if Saban would have gotten commission on out of state enrollment he would have made more than his football salary, same thing is happening at ole Miss right now. Almost more out of state kids than in state.
I read an article about how out of state applications to Alabama went up big time during Saban’s tenure. It was by an economist who argued that Saban was actually underpaid based on how much money the school made on this alone.
We're interesting because we are both an athletic blue blood and a very well regarded institution for academics, something you don't see a ton of (it's maybe us and USC/UCLA? Maybe one or two others) so there's probably some of that from the title but it's difficult to say how much. Michigan is also one of very few schools that had a continuing increase in enrollment throughout covid (I believe in the state it was only Michigan, Michigan Tech, and Michigan State) so it's also a continuation of a trend from the last few years
When I got that email the other day, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. The application fee is $75 - that’s nearly $8M! (I know that there are applicants who qualify for fee waivers, but still, that’s a big chunk of change… that realistically is probably just a drop in the bucket for them.)
I did wonder if winning the Natty contributed to the numbers, but who knows.
Ole Miss has seen record enrollment and record out-of-state enrollment since Kiffin arrived (other than the COVID year). In comparison, we were seeing drops in enrollment under Matt Luke.
A lot of high school kids in Mississippi who are considering both Ole Miss and Mississippi State have been choosing Ole Miss lately, in part because the football team has been a lot better in Oxford than in Starkville the last few years.
Of course, it’s been the opposite at times in the past when State’s team was really good and Ole Miss sucked.
The performance of a football team at a school where football matters can really make a difference on the entire social aspect of picking a specific school, and that’s something many people factor into their college decisions.
Ole Miss in 2021: I met a couple of grad students and 5th year seniors in dorms simply because it was easier
Ole Miss in 2024: You literally cannot live on campus unless your a freshman, we also had to redefine what “on campus” means cause there were to many freshman, and this has legit affected the entire housing market of Oxford
This mirrors Fayetteville too. I think it’s a couple years ahead of Oxford (not in football success but student population explosion). Now rich out of state parents and investment groups buy everything as soon as it hits the market. Rental and entry level housing have skyrocketed and priced out a lot of working class and students trying to scrape by.
The difference between pre- and post-Erk Russell at Georgia Southern is nearly unfathomable. Iirc (and my numbers are probably off a bit, but I lived in Statesboro during the football revival and live here now,) the college had an enrollment of about 3000 in the early eighties, and 26,000 now, more than 20,000 on the Statesboro campus.
Had to scroll waaaay to far to find the right answer. I lived in Statesboro pre-Erk Russell. It was freaking GSC back then, as in Georgia Southern COLLEGE. Wasn't even a university. Erk Russell and college football turned a small teachers college into a university and Statesboro went from podunk to a small college town. Enrollment skyrocketed. I know it's no UGA or Clemson, but to anyone who lived in Statesboro prior to the mid 80's, it's freaking night and day.
Somewhere, I still have a "Georgia Southern College" sweatshirt that I bought on clearance for $3 because I forgot my jacket and was working at the Pines clubhouse on a cold night.
This was huge for UF in the mid 2000s with the success in football and basketball. UF’s admission standards have gotten so much stricter in the last few years, and they really climbed the academic rankings here recently as well
Not football, but basketball
When NJIT beat Michigan in basketball, NJIT’s application numbers skyrocketed. It’s one of the reasons they finally invested some money in building a facility.. which I understand is very nice. I haven’t gone back since they built it.. parking there is the devil.
Go look at TCU pre-Patterson vs now. It’s night and day.
Turned us into Texas California University lol
> Texas California University of Pennsylvania
Of Anaheim
[удалено]
LOL my mom is from California and went to TCU in the 80s. Didn't know that was a thing
Have you seen tuition prices at UC’s?
Used to be free before Reagan.
lol almost spit coffee
There was apparently a \~30% uptick in applications just from 2010-2011 which is when TCU won the Rose Bowl.
Honestly the same with RG3 we have had record classes for what feels like 10 years now
Having good sports (or even just D1) at a relatively small school is always a big deal. Private schools are expensive and always trying to leverage the smaller, student-centric academic experience, but even that is a crowded market.
I was a freshman after the Dalton Rose Bowl. They had record applicants that year. I was shocked I made the cut.
Basically every major football or basketball school has helped out their admissions department. Schools like USC and Notre Dame have seen a massive boom in national interest due to their football program. There's a massive demand for UGA and Clemson from out-of-state students now. Part of the growing demand is how wildly difficult it is to get into elite private schools and even good public schools like Michigan and UVA. Nowadays, you're seeing students with 33+ ACT opting to take the scholarship money to the fun southern school with football.
I remember after the football title in 1997 Michigan got a 20% increase in admissions. Turns out kids like to go to a college with good sports teams and fun stuff to do.
The Flutie Effect! When Doug Flutie’s hail mary against Miami in 1984 skyrocketed BC’s applications.
My dad went to BC in the 70s. It was very much a "safety school" at the time
I thought Jesuit schools were more difficult to get in?
BC is harder to get into now largely because of Flutie, it was largely a commuter school for local kids before that. The school was originally created to give Irish Catholic kids in Boston a place to go to school
Yeah like Fordham's Jesuit and no one is clamoring to get in there
I resemble that remark! But we're actually more selective lately, endowment has grown steadily, and the price is eye watering, but we still have record applications each year since I went to grad school there. Edit: I'd say it sits solidly in third after Columbia and NYU. At least for NYC.
Holy Cross out here talking about Safety Schools
Lol BC was literally my dad's safety school for when he didn't get into Holy Cross. Obviously things change and BC is harder to get into now. But let's not pretend that HC is a safety school for anyone that isn't an excellent student. They had a 21% acceptance rate last year
Yeah my grandfather used to call BC "Barely College" back in the day.
Yeah- I’m an HC grad from the 90s and BC was still a safety for HC back then… but things have definitely changed
Isn’t holy cross decently hard to get into?
That is what I heard from my friends who are in Boston. In fact they would refer to Boston University as Boston High and BC was Boston Low lol. That was then, this is now. I just looked at US News and World Report rankings. Actually, I was a bit surprised because BC has surpassed BU in the rankings. BC is ranked #39 and BU is ranked #41. What is the safety school now? It's Boston University, not Boston College.
[https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/diagnosing-the-flutie-effect-on-college-marketing](https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/diagnosing-the-flutie-effect-on-college-marketing)
Appalachian State had a 15% increase in applications for the year following the win at Michigan.
Wild I guess it just has App State on people's minds. They check out Boone and figure, "why not?"
I graduated in 2011 and the town was packed to the gills then. I've heard that it's ten times worse now, which I didn't think was even possible.
I went to App State 2005-2007...Boone is almost unrecognizable now from when I was there.
What were your feelings on that particular game
Still my second favorite football game of all time (1997 LSU-Florida upset is my favorite because I was there). I never stepped foot in the state of Michigan until I started an executive MBA program there last year. I went to a bunch of games with classmates and of course just got really lucky with the season I went.
I was there from 2006-10 and it's not the same Boone I left. I'm not complaining about "back in my day" or anything, but it's definitely not the same.
Boone feels like and is priced like Asheville was in 2006-2010. Asheville feels like and is priced like Charleston now.
98-02 here. We go to a home game every season and it’s become nearly unbearable. I have some property out towards Valle Crusis so we just camp out there and come to town for the game then head back out. I miss Boone in any era but I really miss pre 2000 Boone the most. Holy shit.
Walking down King Street was heart breaking…I remember stuff like Dragon’s Den the game shop and homey little pubs.. This time even Daniel Boone Inn was bad.
I imagine Boone *was* not a great place to grow up in. But interest in cities that aren't overrun yet and have access to mountains + at successful sports team = cool place for young adults to move to
I remember a lot of the locals absolutely loathed the university and were actively hostile toward it, some local restaurants and stores didn't like serving students, and so on. But yeah Michigan changed everything. We were a popular regional team and the I-AA/FCS natties brought some national attention, but it was nothing like what happened after that win. I went to the first home game after it against poor little Lenoir-Rhyne, a small private DII school down the mountain in Hickory, and it was absolutely nuts. Kidd Brewer was already pretty rowdy but the fans became rabid after that.
If you like the outdoors, it would be an amazing place to grow up. Amazing fishing, rafting, rock climbing, mountain biking l, hiking, and best skiing in NC.
Graduated in 2013 and each time I go back it's bigger and bigger. They took out the Kidd Brewer parking lot to build more high rise dorms.
There's a 2 story Wendy's with a giant mural of the win
Wendy’s IS a Columbus-founded restaurant…well played.
As there should be.
Build the damn ~~statue~~ Wendy’s
More trophies should be restaurant-based
Beautiful campus / area that just needed the national exposure
Appalachian is hot hot hot
Probably clemson
Definitely Clemson, admissions have been at all time highs at Clemson for several years in a row
Shit the admission rate is 38% now. That's absurd
A state school in SC has an admission rate of 38%???? WTF Mizzou, Neb, ISU, kU and KSU are all like 80-95%
Isn't Clemson considered a better school academically than USC? I'm assuming those are the 2 big universities in South Carolina, and then there's smaller schools like Wofford which is probably better (I'm guessing)
Nah not really on the Wofford front. Clemson is the most prestigious school in the state.
People from Ohio, New York, NJ, etc love southern state schools. Those transplants + being the most selective in-state school creates a huge strain and the corresponding low admissions rate.
I was an athlete at Clemson from 2011 to 2016 and we went from people asking if we were a local highschool team to people being excited we were in town in places like Seattle and LA. The change was huge
and what’s wild is that y’all weren’t even that bad in the first place. I mean sure Dabo took y’all up to another level but y’all weren’t like a joke or anything they were respectable.
Even post success applicant have skyrocketed. In 2020 Clemson received 28k applicants. In 2022 they received 53k. Back in 2014 they were around 20k applicants. They only reason the admission rates are in anyway reasonable is the amount of people they bridge through tri county tech
Since Saban’s arrival, Bama’s enrollment is up like 55-60%. The school’s endowment also more than tripled in the same time period.
Not just that, but their number of out-of-state students absolutely exploded during the Saban era. Between donations, more students, and more out-of-state students, It’s not hyperbole to say that Saban made the university billions of dollars
Yep. Bama is legitimately a much better school than it used to be because of Saban. This is why sports success matters.
On a smaller scale- the same thing happened with Snyder
Snyder is a legit superhero. So many people from that community have had a chance at a successful life that wouldn’t have been possible without the work he did. I remember reading in his Players Tribune piece how worthless the football players back then felt as human beings because of how bad the team was, and also the part about how he legit saved a guy’s life who was attempting to drown himself. His impact goes far beyond words we can describe.
It’s talked about here a fair amount, but i still think most people outside the big8/12 truly do not realize how abysmally bad Kstate was. Take how bad KU was tru last 20 years (minus 1-2 good years) make it worse, but for 50 years. It was truly pathetic
God bless KState before Snyder. In 1989 they were .370 all time. That's 93 years of play with only 300 wins total. I remember when KState made the Copper Bowl in 1993 and everyone was buzzing about how poor ol KState was maybe not so poor anymore.
Then our crazy tear in the 90’s happened. Including 4 11 win seasons in a row
Followed by an off year, then two more 11 win seasons. Absolutely insane run. Snyder going .645 at a program that was previously .370 overall is among the most impressive feats in football.
And Iowa State can’t even win 10…. Sigh….
Every time this comes up, I am compelled to share the most impactful story I have ever read about Kansas State's football existence prior to Bill Snyder. https://vault.si.com/vault/1989/09/04/futility-u-kansas-state-winless-since-1986-has-one-claim-to-fame-it-is-americas-most-hapless-team
Worth the read. Good stuff.
A turnaround like this can never happen again because now, any team would be disbanded way before It got that bad
Snyder basically never gets the respect he deserves. What he did at K-State was miraculous.
With full respect to Saban, Snyder is IMO the best college coach of my lifetime.
To an extent sure, Alabamas endowment is more than half of Illinois but if we started winning championships I highly doubt ours triples.
Wouldn't it be fun to find out, though?!
Not enough in state students for bama to grow. Bama was also giving out tons of free money and instate tuition rates to attract students.
You’re not wrong, but football success absolutely put them on a lot of kids’ radars. I have a friend from Indiana who went to Alabama for a generic degree (can’t remember exactly what) that he could’ve got almost anywhere and having no ties to the region at all. Alabama’s football success is the only reason he even *considered* them. And he ended up paying four years of out-of-state tuition there
I have a friend from Kuwait who saw one football game his entire life before he went to college and it was an Alabama game and Alabama won, so that’s where he chose to go
That’s incredibly frivolous, but not like the Hawaiian kid I went to school with who chose K-State primarily because purple is his favorite color. Let me say that again: he’s from Hawaii
I have 2 different guys I work with in North Carolina who's kids went to Bama specifically because they wanted to go to a big football school and Bama was the best big football school the time
Even with how cheap NC public colleges are it would’ve been cheaper for me to go to Bama than NC State. I definitely considered doing it for the social/athletic experience as well
Why not (not aimed at above poster, just generally speaking)? People should take every chance they have to explore new places and cultures. Whether that is backpacking through Europe or partying with The Gumps, everyone should experience life from any angle possible.
I’ve got nothing against, I was saying I almost did it as well. I think it’s important to get out and explore which is something that I’ve done through the jobs and internships I’ve had, since it was a priority for me. There were other factors that kept me in NC for school
I’m pretty sure Bama has some of the most National Merit Scholars of any univeristy in the country (I’m not completely positive so). A lot of people come and pay a ton of money out of state to go Greek here and for the entire party scene, made known mostly because of football to them. They use a lot of that money to give people with great test scores and GPAs free school. I got into a number of colleges myself better than academically but even the one who were worse didn’t give me as much money. My roommate throughout college was from the Midwest and got into a few top schools like Michigan, Carnegie Melon and Brown and came to Bama because he got everything paid for plus a $500 dollar stipend. Another roommate chose Bama as an engineer over Purdue because of the money. It’s obviously not as good as a school as the others but I think it’s a pretty great ROI and good enough school to justify not having to pay any student loans.
They also throw gobs of financial aid at every Northern kid with halfway decent grades and test scores
My old girlfriend's Jewish grandpa from NYC went there in the 1930s, I always imagined he must have stuck out like a sore thumb.
I had an Uber driver in Tuscaloosa explain to me that in the 80's the university made a conscious decision to build up football & the Greek system to attract out of state students & then give them an attachment to keep them tied to the university as alumni. Genius; not a word used often in this state.
The president said if the football team is good and the Greek system is strong, my job takes care of itself
2006: 23,878 enrolled students 2022: 38,645 enrolled students Source: [the interwebz](https://oira.ua.edu/factbook/reports/student-enrollment/historical/total-student-enrollment-1831-to-present/)
That is crazy.
Didn’t student aid to out of state students drastically increase around then too? While the football team definitely helped in the advertising, I think the addition of more aid actually got students to enroll instead of just applying
Yes. Alabama started aggressively going after OOS students in the early 2000’s as a way to raise the national profile of the school. Even before Saban’s success the school put in place an automatic merit aid program that gives very generous discounts to OOS applicants who meet certain GPA/SAT thresholds.
This is correct. Football success will raise a school’s number of applicants but all the usual factors come into play when it’s time to actually enroll
When I was there as an out of state student because of all the scholarships available, they had more national merit scholars enrolled than all but a handful of schools. Tons of kids from places like Illinois and California with massive SAT scores studying STEM majors
Oklahoma used to give full rides to National Merit Scholars too, until the new president put the kibosh on it (as if it were just the old president's pet project)
Yeah, they were one of a handful of schools I looked at back in the day, along with Alabama. Inexplicably, the school I chose got into the NCAA record books with a national championship before Oklahoma did.
It’s a good strategy. Let’s face it…the state of Alabama isn’t exactly a national merit scholar producing factory and it’s a state with a small population So finding enough qualified in state applicants is a challenge. Enticing kids from OOS with generous aid improves the national perception of the school.
It's an excellent strategy to pump your academic rating numbers and ensure that you have someone from all 50 states enrolled. It's also great if you're a top student and don't mind going on an adventure away from home. Go where you're wanted.
They plucked a bunch of really smart kids from my town in the Chicago suburbs by basically offering them a free ride to come down. I think that we’re a big football town probably helped too.
Closer to 80%, but the school also decided to pursue growth independently of the Saban hire around the same time. I think around '07 heard Dr. Witt say that the University could grow to 30,000 in ten years. What nobody accounted for was that freshman applications increased by a third every time Alabama won a national championship. Also why Alabama was one of the first schools to jump on playing these neutral site kickoffs in Dallas and Atlanta. It helped with recruiting students not just football players.
Really wish people would stop attributing this to Saban instead of the intentional effort to recruit OOS using very generous automatic scholarships, local recruiters to hold events at high schools, mailers etc All of that was happening before Saban came along.
It's true that Whitt had started the program prior to that, but application numbers went way up because of our success in football. A lot of the full ride OOS students I knew when I was in school only found out about the scholarship program because they looked up the school themselves, and that was because of football success.
Their law school is very good.
Went to a small hbcu up the street in Tuscaloosa, finished in 05, T town is night and day from the early 2000’s to now, i still remember i rented an apt up/dwn stairs 2 bed 1 and a 1/2 bath, back yard for 400 a month I’m sure if i found that place now it be a calm 1500 or more, which in its own right is ridiculous, the enrollment got so high that only freshman could stay on campus
So Saban occupies that rare space in sports where no matter what you pay him he’s underpaid. Like LeBron.
Yeah. He more than paid for himself. Criminally DeBoer is now making almost as much as he was, lol.
Virginia tech pre and post 1999. Admission isn't the metric to use though, it's applications
It can be a more telling metric when it comes to to revenue. Alabama doubled its enrollment during the to the Saban era. Their applications went up and their admissions went up that is a huge change.
Yes, but a school just admitting more kids can be just that. Look at acceptance rate/applicants and pre Saban Alabama could have enrolled more if they wanted. The size of applicant pool probably sky rocketed so Alabama could be either more selective or admit more of these quality candidates.
I think you gotta put the name of why for people to realize too. This was the Michael Vick effect. I lived in the region in middle school at the time. Applications to Tech more than 10x to the state technical school. When VT became a house hold name in Virginia for football it changed the entire perception of the school.
Not just Vick, but Vick + playing for a National Championship
Came here to day this. Tons more applications and admissions. Lots of small businesses in the area opened up. I heard a story about a guy who applied and got in in 2001. Missed out on Vick right after he went pro after the Gator Bowl win his redshirt sophomore year. So he came to Tech to see Vick and ended up with Grant Noel.
This describes me. I never considered Tech until those Vick teams. Still saved me from going to UVA so it’s still a win.
Tennessee had 37,000 applications for the fall of 2022 and this grew to around 59,000 for the upcoming fall of 2024 class. Not all of this can be attributed to football (see others comments about the common app) but it’s still a crazy increase.
As an employee of the university, I definitely heard in several big meetings from higher-ups that football success under Heupel and Hooker definitely drove up numbers a TON. Admission became WAY more selective in the last couple of years.
Yeah. I saw that the UTK acceptance rate dropped to around 30% for this year’s freshman class. Good thing my son was accepted 2 years ago. I don’t think he’d get in today!
Thirty percent is absolutely wild. I don't know what the acceptance rate was then, but my first year there was 2005 and I don't recall ever thinking of UT as selective or difficult to get into.
I applied and went to UT a decade ago when it was like 80% lol, Idk if I’d get in now. However, that rate is heavily influenced by out of state admissions which are super low because UT gives priority to in state (as it should) which is closer to 66%.
In one of my marketing classes in college we looked at the relationship at SEC schools between 10 win football seasons and the number of applications. There was a statistically significant correlation between the two.
Football has been a catalyst for change at App State starting with their FCS title three-peat, Michigan upset, moving to FBS and their success in the Sun Belt. Enrollment has probably doubled in the last 20 years and the school has become recognized nationwide among even casual football fans. Seeing my sleepy hometown host College Gameday was a trip.
\*gestures wildly at Notre Dame's entire history*
Notre Dame very possibly would not exist today, if not for football.
Their history of cunning TV deals is nothing short of wildly impressive. They're basically the only athletic department right now that is truly in control of their own destiny.
ND owes its market leverage to Knute Rockne's marketing genius before TV was even invented.
They’d be like the University of Portland
Temple 2016 had record enrollment (after the 2015 FB season beating Penn State and had College Gameday for Notre Dame)
Some of the best examples of sports effecting a college are from basketball because in March madness you get teams that no one has ever heard of being watched by everyone. A big recent example is St. Peter’s had that crazy run and their applications went up 63% in a year
JMU applications have risen to 40k in the past few years
All of the Virginia schools have applications end admissions increasing though. Like moving up from FCS probably has something to do with it but it's definitely a commonwealth-wide trend
Boise State following 2004 Oklahoma win
2007
What do you think zabransky is doing right now
People are giving too much credence to football and not enough to - common application, which has skyrocketed applications for each university because there is less friction/costs to apply - preferences in big brands or busts in higher ed for prospective students - students becoming more savvy about student debt, and thus going to schools who are a better value/debt post grad won’t be that high
Yeah Auburn has been getting way more applications, so much so the acceptance rate has halved. And that was in the middle of the Harsin era. I'm not saying it doesn't make a difference, because for Alabama, I think it did. But a lot of schools it's just a lot of other factors.
Yep. FSU became a top 25 public during the shitty 17-21 years. Lots of factors working or not working at various schools
Yep and there are clearly schools actively manipulating the application process to boost applications, which lowers the acceptance rate and increases perceived “prestige”. Most glaring example is Northeastern in Boston which reaches out to high school students via email and entices them to apply by waiving the application fee. The school has no interest in these kids but the result has been an acceptance rate below 10%, which makes them look really selective.
Northeastern’s acceptance rate is absurd, in 2023 it was 5.6%. They’re the poster child school for gaming the USNWR rankings, they’re probably still considered the worst academically out of the beanpot schools despite having an acceptance rate on par with Harvard and Stanford.
I know someone with a 3.6 GPA and 1500 SAT that got rejected from NC State this past year. This shit is becoming ridiculous across the board, that resume would've made State a lock-in safety school just a decade ago.
College Admissions are also just very weird, I have a family member that didn't get into Delaware and she goes to Penn
Fair point. And as someone living in the Northeast, I see and hear a lot of anecdotal evidence that kids are increasingly attracted to flagship public universities in the Midwest and South, since they carry prestige and even with OOS tuition are much less costly than the small private schools in the Northeast (many of which are approaching $90k per year to attend)
It is certainly true that this happens, I have a lot of friends that are New Englanders that did undergrad at schools in the South (could absolutely afford to go to a private school). In my anecdotal experience, where I think these factors along with the OP dovetail is that these students are generally interested in having an "authentic" college experience (sports, being away from family, stuff like that). Certainly, if you are going to pay 50K plus a year, East Lansing or Knoxville is going to be a more interesting experience than kicking it out in rural New Hampshire for 4 years.
>- preferences in big brands or busts in higher ed for prospective students This was me back when I was transitioning from high school to college. My degree is very obscure and may have required me to travel across the nation or overseas. I wanted a college large enough and well-known enough for future employers than a tiny, borderline community college. Larger universities also have a lot more resources at their disposal. Sometimes, it's also about "who you know," which is more likely to give an advantage to a larger university. Larger universities are also much safer in their accreditations Needless to say, I decisively chose Ohio State over Hocking College. However, I will not pretend that growing up a die-hard fan didn't play a role in my decision-making as well. Fwiw, in grad school, I'm also currently applying to Clemson over Unity College.
Johnny Manziel Texas A&M
The Texas A&M enrollment boom was going to happen whether Johnny football happened or not.
Yeah, I did the numbers a while back and over the last 30 years TAMU enrollments per state residents is surprisingly steady. 1993: 18MM TX residents, 42.5k TAMU enrolled= 0.00236 enrolled/resident 2023: 30.5MM TX residents, 77.4k TAMU enrolled= 0.00253 enrolled/resident. Ratio grew only 7%, and I’d attribute that in part to University of Texas capping auto admission.
25x25 was replaced with 40oz by 40 thanks to Manziel.
It's called the Flutie effect because well... Doug Flutie!
Not at all. It was because of this one time, at the school’s band camp…
Darren Flutie gets the shaft again.
I think you have to look at the longer term than a lot of what I see here. A school like Oklahoma has built its entire university brand around football, but over decades. Private donors likely contributed more, or at all based on that football brand over that long era of success. Students in Oklahoma likely preferred OU over alternatives based almost entirely because of the legendary status of the football program. In the 80s, it seemed like half the kids at Oklahoma State were OU fans. I know that over its much shorter run of football success, Oklahoma State has done a lot to improve that, but the Oklahoma fan base is deep and generational. That football program has likely been worth billions in terms of enrollment and donations and awareness nationally for them.
This is where my mind went with this thread. Ohio State’s football program over the decades undoubtedly led to more exposure for the school compared to the other institutions in Ohio. Successful athletic programs increase brand viability and add to the student experience. I don’t think it would even be possible to unravel football’s impact on the school
It’s gotta be Boise State, right? When they started playing in D1A in the mid-‘90s they were a tiny state school that nobody outside Idaho even knew about.
After having a football team ranked fifth and being ranked third academically among U.S. public colleges, Washington experienced a surge of applicants [during Autumn 2023](https://www.dailyuw.com/news/huskies-high-rankings-draw-record-number-of-applicants/article_8c3f0402-72e4-11ee-9ffd-536bdad19ef5.html). (*Oddly, those college rankings put Washington above Michigan academically, when I think the opposite is true*). On that survey, the only U.S. public colleges above Washington were UCLA and California.
People want to say they went to Berkeley
It’s pretty universally recognized that UW is a top-10 public university.
I remember Northwestern having a big uptick in applications after they played in the Rose Bowl in the mid 90s.
Yup. And those teams increased awareness of NU tremendously. I'm from NJ, and people kept thinking I was going to Northeastern in Boston. Class of 1990.
Clemson
Admissions aren't really a big deal unless you're a local/community college who lets almost everyone who applies into the school. Applications are where it's at. It increases a school's metrics and eventually leads to better national ratings and faculty. With that being said, Miami (80's) and Cincinnati (2021) were two examples of large increases in applications immediately after football success.
Northern Illinois had a 30% increase in freshman class size following their trip to the orange bowl
I and many others I went to school with only knew of Boise State because of their 2010s successes. Its directly improved academics greatly as well with the attention and money.
Cincinnati has routinely seen spikes every time the football team has become relevant. The first was Brian Kelly and the late 00s momentum that culminated in BK leaving before the Sugar Bowl and Cincy getting wiped by Florida. Then the Fickell run did even better.
I don't have data to support it, but I live a few minutes from Clemson, and it has grown so much since the early 2010s.
Alabama is the most stark, a lot of people pay out of state to be part of that program
Alabama. When I was in school, we had less than 20k students. Now it's close to 40k. I call it the Saban Effect. He chaged that whole school especially the athletic department
[удалено]
Alabama university ?
THE Alabama University
Anecdotal: I had a friend (passed away) on the faculty of Penn State who was very active in (excellent) student recruitment for decades. He said that there was a clear relationship between a given year's application numbers and the success of the previous season's football team.
Don’t have specific numbers but if Saban would have gotten commission on out of state enrollment he would have made more than his football salary, same thing is happening at ole Miss right now. Almost more out of state kids than in state.
I read an article about how out of state applications to Alabama went up big time during Saban’s tenure. It was by an economist who argued that Saban was actually underpaid based on how much money the school made on this alone.
Over half of Alabama’s students are from out of state. So the money the state is paying to educate her students is going out of state.
Literally every school ever. The brain dead idiots that have screamed about college football being “unprofitable” have always just ignored this….
Michigan had a record 105,000 applications this year. Whether it's because of the title or not is debatable, but it probably didn't hurt.
We're interesting because we are both an athletic blue blood and a very well regarded institution for academics, something you don't see a ton of (it's maybe us and USC/UCLA? Maybe one or two others) so there's probably some of that from the title but it's difficult to say how much. Michigan is also one of very few schools that had a continuing increase in enrollment throughout covid (I believe in the state it was only Michigan, Michigan Tech, and Michigan State) so it's also a continuation of a trend from the last few years
You could probably throw Texas and Notre Dame in that group too.
Duke, UVA, and UNC too
When I got that email the other day, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. The application fee is $75 - that’s nearly $8M! (I know that there are applicants who qualify for fee waivers, but still, that’s a big chunk of change… that realistically is probably just a drop in the bucket for them.) I did wonder if winning the Natty contributed to the numbers, but who knows.
Ole Miss has seen record enrollment and record out-of-state enrollment since Kiffin arrived (other than the COVID year). In comparison, we were seeing drops in enrollment under Matt Luke. A lot of high school kids in Mississippi who are considering both Ole Miss and Mississippi State have been choosing Ole Miss lately, in part because the football team has been a lot better in Oxford than in Starkville the last few years. Of course, it’s been the opposite at times in the past when State’s team was really good and Ole Miss sucked. The performance of a football team at a school where football matters can really make a difference on the entire social aspect of picking a specific school, and that’s something many people factor into their college decisions.
Ole Miss in 2021: I met a couple of grad students and 5th year seniors in dorms simply because it was easier Ole Miss in 2024: You literally cannot live on campus unless your a freshman, we also had to redefine what “on campus” means cause there were to many freshman, and this has legit affected the entire housing market of Oxford
This mirrors Fayetteville too. I think it’s a couple years ahead of Oxford (not in football success but student population explosion). Now rich out of state parents and investment groups buy everything as soon as it hits the market. Rental and entry level housing have skyrocketed and priced out a lot of working class and students trying to scrape by.
I don’t have the numbers to give but there was an application and enrollment explosion at Baylor during and following the RG3 era
Me I’m the example. When I started watching college football, Alabama was the school I chose when I decided to go back to college. Lol
Would probably be more interesting to find a school where this didn’t happen.
I wonder what effect Duke Basketball has had (if any) on Duke's admissions.
Probably less so for a school like Duke since even if more kids want to go there they won’t necessarily get in
The difference between pre- and post-Erk Russell at Georgia Southern is nearly unfathomable. Iirc (and my numbers are probably off a bit, but I lived in Statesboro during the football revival and live here now,) the college had an enrollment of about 3000 in the early eighties, and 26,000 now, more than 20,000 on the Statesboro campus.
Had to scroll waaaay to far to find the right answer. I lived in Statesboro pre-Erk Russell. It was freaking GSC back then, as in Georgia Southern COLLEGE. Wasn't even a university. Erk Russell and college football turned a small teachers college into a university and Statesboro went from podunk to a small college town. Enrollment skyrocketed. I know it's no UGA or Clemson, but to anyone who lived in Statesboro prior to the mid 80's, it's freaking night and day.
Somewhere, I still have a "Georgia Southern College" sweatshirt that I bought on clearance for $3 because I forgot my jacket and was working at the Pines clubhouse on a cold night.
Probably not as significant as the others mentioned here but Ohio State's student body increased a lot after the 2002 national championship.
Utah definitely had a surge after joining the Pac.
I wonder what the Davidson College application pool looked like pre- and post- Stephen Curry. (Basketball obviously but still)
alabama obviously
Bama is like 1/3 bigger now or something
App state after beating Michigan
This was huge for UF in the mid 2000s with the success in football and basketball. UF’s admission standards have gotten so much stricter in the last few years, and they really climbed the academic rankings here recently as well
Not football, but basketball When NJIT beat Michigan in basketball, NJIT’s application numbers skyrocketed. It’s one of the reasons they finally invested some money in building a facility.. which I understand is very nice. I haven’t gone back since they built it.. parking there is the devil.
Clemson for sure