By Jim Hunt for the News and Journal
As the West Virginia University Mountaineers take to the field to open the 2025 season, the football fans aren’t the only ones with a smile on their faces. College football is big business, and businesses throughout Central West Virginia look forward to the infusion of dollars. Every hotel and restaurant fills on football weekends, and blue and gold gear flies off the shelves. On game day, the stadium is stocked with tons of food and enough beer and soft drinks to satisfy more than 60,000 screaming fans.
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In 1968, when I attended WVU, football was a Saturday afternoon event. The streets of Morgantown were busy, but there were no motorhomes staking out parking lots or tailgating stretching into three-day mini vacations. Today, football weekends have become community-wide festivals that ripple far beyond the stadium gates.
While WVU is a big deal here, it is small potatoes compared to the largest programs. My good friend Tom Fountaine, Borough Manager in State College, Pennsylvania, regularly helps host more than 100,000 fans at Beaver Stadium. He told me that after years of practice, his departments run game days almost like clockwork. Police, fire, public works, and sanitation each know their role, and can pivot quickly when television networks shift a kickoff time on short notice. Tom has shared those experiences through national groups like the International Town-Gown Association and the International City/County Management Association, where his lessons on managing “football cities” have been invaluable.
The upside is clear. Fans pour millions into local economies through hotels, restaurants, and retail, while national broadcasts put a spotlight on towns that otherwise might never trend outside their region. But not every resident cheers the arrival of football weekends. Traffic jams, noise, and late-night parties are the price of fame, and city leaders must balance the excitement with neighborhood concerns.
As someone who has watched WVU games since the 1960s, I marvel at how much has changed.
What once felt like a Saturday diversion is now a three-day festival, a tourism engine, and a civic identity all rolled into one. College football is more than just a game, it’s a city-building enterprise, testing the patience of local officials while filling the pockets of local businesses. So, when the Mountaineers take the field, it’s not just Morgantown that wins—it’s every city that learns how to turn the roar of the crowd into fuel for its future.
