The state of Alabama has just as many
Alabama, Auburn, UAB, Troy, USA, UNA, West Alabama, Jacksonville State, Birmingham Southern, Samford, UAH, Alabama State, Alabama A&M, Tuskegee. There are plenty more but those are the more well known.
It's all about funding and where your money goes. Both of those universities have 27K or more students on campus right now and they have way more donors willing to give back to the football program because of that. We've only recently gotten our enrollment over 20K. Now that has some to do with the fact that Alabama is a more populated state, but Bama and Auburn have been there for a long time. We are finally increasing enrollment and really driving home the fact that MSU is a comparable university.
But in order to compete, I think it has more to do with donors and money coming back into the university than it does with the number of universities. Auburn and Alabama have a lot more donors giving a lot more directly to football because they've made that commitment to student enrollment and to their football program. We need our donors, school, and athletic department to do the same. There may be a lot of universities in MS, but I think the resource sharing is not what's holding us back. We've got to make a bigger effort to get enrollment up and increase our alumni base and I don't think the other universities are taking away potential students that we could have. We have to promote ourselves better and commit to a bigger university and I believe we are finally doing that. We are definitely committed to growing MSU and I think THAT is going to be a major player in us being a power school in the future.