COLUMBIA, Mo. — The countdown to the start of Missouri’s 2024 football season just became a little bit shorter.
Mizzou’s season opener against Murray State has been moved up two days to Aug. 29, the football program announced Tuesday. It will start at 7 p.m. and air on the SEC Network.
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That means the Tigers will start their season with a Thursday night home game, continuing a scheduling trend that has found success in attracting fans over the past couple of seasons.
The game against Murray State was originally slated for Aug. 31, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. The Racers agreed to the scheduling shift.
“Holding our season opener on the Thursday night of Labor Day weekend has been huge from an attendance standpoint the last two seasons and it has helped us create a big-time atmosphere from our fans and student section,†coach Eli Drinkwitz said in a statement. “This doesn’t happen for us without Murray State and the SEC, so we appreciate both accommodating the change. I’m excited to keep this new tradition going with Mizzou football on Thursday night leading into Labor Day weekend the Missouri way.â€
The 2024 opener will be MU’s third consecutive Thursday night start to a season.
In 2023, 50,434 fans watched Missouri take down South Dakota. In 2022, after a scheduling swap to bring in Louisiana Tech as the first opponent, the Tigers drew a crowd of 47,563 for the opener.
Both marks were higher than the 46,327 who were on hand for the 2021 season opener, Mizzou’s first home game of the Drinkwitz era to take place without pandemic-induced crowd restrictions.
In 2023, MU sold out the final five of its seven true home games, an attendance feat unheard of for the program since 1980. The season that ended with the Tigers winning the Cotton Bowl over Ohio State wound up as the fifth-best-attended home slate in school history.
The 35,006 season tickets issued in 2023 were the most since 2015, and Mizzou’s overall spike in attendance was the biggest of any Southeastern Conference program.