Sun Shines on USM's Brand Again
I’ve worked in enough communications departments to know that most people who use words like “branding” and “synergy” unironically should be sent to labor camps. College football, however, is one of the few worlds left where developing a “brand” still means something other than starting a Facebook page to hawk skin cream pyramid schemes. There are individual brands in college football, the ones we all know, those programs that have built entire financial ecosystems around the gridiron.
The others are codified by conference alignment.
College football fans, even casual ones, likely know what you mean when you say you’re watching some MACtion or inhaling Pac-12 After Dark. That’s why, putting aside the economic savings, improved on-field product, and regional rivalries sure to develop, the enhanced publicity that Southern Miss will receive as a member of the Sun Belt Conference may be the most undervalued part of the program’s move.
USM officially accepted its Sun Belt invite this week, leaving its perch as the remaining charter member of a C-USA that looks nothing like its original iteration. The excitement that peppered the leadup to the announcement has been unmatched within the fan base since at least 2011, and this decision is sure to be the most impactful in modern Southern Miss history.
But besides a new conference home, athletic director Jeremy McClain, president Rodney Bennett, and the other players in this unfolding reclamation project have, whether they realized it or not, begun the process of building Southern Miss a new identity—one that the school will finally be able to nurture to its full benefit.
The “Fun Belt” is a brand as beloved as anything in college football, and it’s exactly what USM needs to help formulate a new distinct personality in this new century. Nothing brings the Juul-sucking Barstool Sports dinguses and IPA-swilling Ringer dorks together like some Wednesday night Sun Belt action, and the league’s trademark as an entertaining product moonlighting as a weeknight gambling haven for degenerates has solidified its spot firmly amid the popular baseline of college football’s sacred “brands.”
I don’t think we’ve discussed enough just how vital this is for a program that has essentially played in purgatory since the last great realignment in 2013. C-USA’s only claim to fame is being a funny-sounding punchline in a sports column. That USM will be linked to the “Fun Belt” for the foreseeable future is an instant win.
It helps tremendously that the Sun Belt has the full backing of ESPN, the sport’s omnipotent God who wears the college football crown on its head like a Lee Corso Gameday pick. The TV deal the Sun Belt signed with ESPN this summer ends in 2030-31 and came with a 50% increase in the number of Sun Belt football games that appear on ESPN's linear channels. There are discussions that the deal will be renegotiated and increased even further once the realignment wheels stop spinning and the Sun Belt also officially adds Marshall and James Madison to go along with Southern Miss and ODU. No longer will fans have to Google how to find the channel the Golden Eagles are playing on, and long gone are the days when you’re live on NFL Network one afternoon and streaming exclusively on Xanga the next.
Oh yeah: Thursday night football in Hattiesburg is back, baby!
And that’s what the Golden Eagles have been missing since 2013—valuable opportunities to “build their brand” and play in front of a national audience on an ESPN channel that isn’t The Ocho. The fact that the Worldwide Leader truly wants the Sun Belt to grow—and challenge the new American Athletic Conference at that— is proof positive that the increased money AAC migrants will receive can’t be the only consideration when discussing which league is set up best for the foreseeable future. Southern Miss is now in a partnership with ESPN. That sentence alone should make you want to run butt naked through Spirit Park painted in gold.
The revolving door that has become Conference USA never developed anything close to a “brand name” post-2013 realignment. It barely had a functioning leadership department in which to screw things up, and generally took the approach of a senior three days before graduation when it came to proactivity. Southern Miss no longer being associated with a far-flung group of commuter schools is in itself a massive step in the right direction. USM being in a regionally coherent southern conference made up of mostly small towns with passionate fan bases is exactly what was needed to leave life support and slowly regenerate into an elite Group of Five team once again.
The university may need to change its mascot from the Golden Eagles to the Phoenixes for how its athletic program was just reborn from the ashes of a dying Conference USA.
The sun is shining on USM once again.