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I have a confession.
I’ve never lived the life of an SEC football fan. I’ve instead lived the life of an SEC journalist.
What that means is that I’ve never had to endure the insane cost of being a full-time SEC fan. I’ve never had to make the decision about which $600 hotel I should stay in or whether I should drop $300 on that flight up to Chicago so I could rent a car and drop a few hundred more dollars on some scalped tickets outside of Notre Dame Stadium.
The fine folks over at SEC Shorts actually did this perfect spoof on the high price of being a Georgia fan in 2017:
After seeing some of the numbers of those expenses, it’s hard to wonder how Georgia and other SEC fans don’t go broke on a yearly basis supporting their teams.
According to SunTrust-sponsored analysis from Wakefield Research, the average cost of being an SEC fan this year will be $1,212. Keep in mind that doesn’t include hotels. Add those in there and that price jumps up to an average cost of $4,232. The data shows the following prices per average SEC fan:
- $411 on ticketing
- $383 on parking
- $3,020 on lodging
The average fan isn’t shelling out thousands of dollars to see Georgia play at Notre Dame, but the average SEC fan does have other non-ticketing/parking/lodging costs. That racks up quite the bill. That’s not news.
What is news is how much each average SEC team’s fan will spend this season. Lucky for you (and me), Wakefield Research found the breakdown of how much each SEC fanbase should expect to spend on average in 2018, accounting for lodging, tickets, concessions, parking, merchandise and tailgating:
- Alabama — $6,212
- Ole Miss — $6,191
- Georgia — $5,288
- Auburn — $5,251
- Florida — $4,503
- South Carolina — $4,119
- Tennessee — $4,108
- Texas A&M — $4,098
- Mississippi State — $3,600
- Mizzou — $3,585
- Vanderbilt — $3,397
- Arkansas — $3,267
- Kentucky — $2,984
- LSU — $2,639
Daaaaaaaang, Bama. Y’all got some deep pockets.
The overwhelming majority of that $6,212 is the fact that an Alabama fan spends an average of $4,926 on hotels per year. That’s basically the price of a used car. If I wanted to stay overnight for this weekend’s game against Louisiana and get a room at a standard hotel like the SpringHill Suites by Marriott in Tuscaloosa, I’d shell out a cool $529 for ONE NIGHT.
And while LSU is dead last on that list, staying at a Holiday Inn in Baton Rouge for Alabama weekend is still $300 a night. That’s a whole lotta gumbo.
I realize that not everyone tries to stay at a hotel in town. There are hotels 30 minutes away or there’s the 1-day trip crowd.
If you’re the SEC fan who doesn’t stay in hotels and you still want the full game day experience, here’s how much on average one should expect to spend according to the SunTrust-sponsored research:
- Georgia — $1,431
- Florida — $1,359
- Auburn — $1,335
- Ole Miss — $1,298
- South Carolina — $1,288
- Alabama — $1,285
- Mizzou — $1,212
- LSU — $1,190
- Mississippi State — $1,181
- Kentucky — $1,147
- Vanderbilt — $1,094
- Arkansas — $1,079
- Tennessee — $1,038
- Texas A&M — $1,025
Is it surprising to see that the average fan of each team in the SEC spends $1,000? Probably not. We’re talking about 3 months of the best entertainment that money can buy.
SEC fans should just be thankful that road-tripping across the southeast region is at least more affordable than it is for the Pac-12 or even the Big Ten, where you’ve got teams that are thousands of miles apart.
The furthest Big Ten teams apart are Nebraska and Rutgers, which are separated by nearly 1,300 miles. That’s a 20-hour drive. That’s not quite as bad as the road trip from Arizona to Seattle, which is a solid 23.5-hour drive.
The research doesn’t calculate potential costs of flights with how much those vary. Diehards at places like Mizzou and Texas A&M, which are on the outskirts of the SEC’s geographical footprint, would rack up a thousands of dollars more if they were to fly to road games (A&M’s closest drive in the SEC is a 6-hour trip to Baton Rouge while Mizzou’s is 5 hours to Fayetteville).
That probably explains why A&M fans are dead last in the SEC in terms of average spending on the 5 non-hotel categories (tickets, concessions, parking, merchandise and tailgating). They’ve got to spend their money on traveling.
Personally, I can’t imagine trying to cut whatever costs possible to afford a season as an SEC fan. You know, for the people who aren’t rich with more money than they know what to do with.
Here’s one final note to consider. According to a survey conducted by Harris Poll, 72 percent of 916 claimed SEC fans were willing to give something up in order to pay for their season on fandom.
I’ll tell you what, though. If the average SEC fan is spending $1,212 in 2018, cutting back on a $30 monthly gym membership isn’t exactly going to cover that. It’ll take the average fan several sacrifices to afford the financial demands that come with being an SEC fan.
But that’s a choice that many are willing to make. I got a good reminder of that when I was in Oxford a couple weeks ago. I saw fans from all different walks of life. Some seemed like regular, hard-working blue collar people who love their college football. I met others who were roughly 6 tax brackets above me.
Isn’t that the beauty of college football? Even though some have more disposable income than others, fans are there for the same reason. Whether it just means more or it might mean too much, we can all agree on one thing.
It means a whole lot.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
