Mississippi State should absolutely face off against New Mexico on a Thursday night

If we’re going to get the Mike Leach era started properly, it should be with a weird game scheduled at an unconventional time. So, let’s go ahead and get the first Mississippi State football game of the Mike Leach era moved to a Thursday night slot.

Earlier today, SixPackSpeak tweeted this out:

Hearing that first game of Leach era vs New Mexico will be Thursday night as rumored

— SixPackSpeak (@sixpackspeak) February 18, 2020

This is honestly a great idea for multiple reasons.

First, let’s get some national exposure for Leach and the Bulldogs. There’s a reason why many schools are moving their games to “week zero.” This isn’t a move totally in that direction, but it does get an earlier start time for Mississippi State.

That puts MSU in front of an audience craving college football content coming off of the offseason. And with the Bulldogs making a splashy hire in Mike Leach, plenty of fans around the country will want to see how that hire is working out.

It wasn’t even that long ago that Stanford played a dang American college football game on the island-country-continent of Australia in an attempt to play the game earlier than when the season began and in hopes of getting more attention.

There will be an audience for this game.

The second big reason why Mississippi State fans should support this is simply due to the climate of the area. Early September in Mississippi isn’t exactly known for being cool. The current scheduled date for the Bulldogs to play New Mexico in Starkville, Mississippi is Saturday Sept. 5.

Given that New Mexico isn’t exactly a notable team, this game will almost certainly be shuffled to an early kickoff.

How many people truly want to pack into a concrete stadium surrounded by tens of thousands of other sweaty people and bake in the sun for three or four hours?

That won’t be as enjoyable as a Thursday evening kickoff, when the sun is closer to setting and the heat of the day is beginning to cool off a bit. Sure, it’ll always be humid and people will always be sweaty, but this is an opportunity to get this game out of the hottest parts of the day.

I don’t know who we need to speak to about this, but this needs to happen.