His tailgating tour focused on the visuals that accompany tailgating and capturing the uniqueness of tailgating on film. Whereas most fans like Steiniger and Goldstein were drawn to tour for the game, Mathis’ whole focus was tailgating. The game was secondary. Mathis’ goal was to encompass the essence of what it is like to be on campus for a college football Saturday. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. What Taylor Mathis captured with his camera is worth a trillion.
We had a chance to catch up with Taylor Mathis and ask him about his tailgating tour, why did he do it, what cool stuff did he find and if there will be another tailgating tour in the future.
Tailgating Ideas: To give us some background on you and to better understand how you came up with this idea to travel the country tailgating along the way, where did you grow up, where did you go to school and how did you come up with this idea?
Taylor Mathis: I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina and went to high school there. I actually swam in college at Wisconsin. I got recruited out of high school and ended up going there to swim. I swam there for about three years but my last year I didn’t swim. I just enjoyed college life my last year there at Wisconsin. At that time I got really into photography and ended up going to photography school in Santa Barbara after college for about a year and a half. I then moved back to Charlotte last September. So it was about a year ago in 2009. I graduated high school in 2004 and graduated college in 2008 just to give you a timetable on me. I photograph food and travel for a living for a few magazines and some commercial stuff and I blog as well.
The whole idea of the college football tailgating tour that I took this fall was…. Well, I wanted to visit other college towns and to see what kinds of foods they had. Going to school in Madison [Wisconsin], I am kind of biased in thinking that Madison is the best college town in the country. I just wanted to see what other people’s experiences were like. I have been to Austin [Texas], I’ve been to Athens [Georgia], Chapel Hill [North Carolina]. I’ve been to about 20 college towns.
I got the idea because I really like college football. I know game days in Madison are completely different than in other places from what I have heard. I have friends who went to Georgia or went to Tennessee and they are telling me how different their game days are. I’ve seen pictures on Facebook and seen girls wearing dresses and heels. That’s very different from what I had seen at Wisconsin.
I kind of wanted to combine my love of traveling, food and football all into one. I was looking around to see if there is anyone out there that has done something that I was thinking of and I couldn’t really find it. I made the decision that I was just going to go and do it. I was actually driving across the country with one of my roommates who goes to grad school in Pasadena, [Calif.]. I drove with him from Wisconsin to Pasadena and during that trip I decided I was going to do it. As we were in the car, I would sit there and look at my phone and look at all the different college’s football schedules and write them down. I was getting an idea of where I wanted to go and picking out dates. When we were actually in Las Vegas, I bought four tickets to Seattle, Dallas, Madison and Baton Rouge. I decided it was going to happen once I bought those airline tickets.
Tailgating Ideas: I am not going to ask you to disclose the finances behind all of this but did you have some money saved up in order to afford all of this? Did you just max out your credit cards or did you have someone sponsoring this trip? After all, 13 trips to college football towns in about four months is not cheap.
Taylor Mathis: I had some savings already saved up from other stuff I had done throughout college and other freelance work. Basically, I had some funds to do this but I knew that no one was going to pay me to do it. I might as well just do it. Also I looked at it as being a photographer, this body of work will help set me apart from other people. Because going to 13 locations, having no idea of what I am going to encounter and still trying to come out with a specific product all the way through… It was a challenge I definitely wanted to do and see if I could take it. It was just something I really wanted to do. My thought was the worst case scenario is I just have the most amazing experience one can have going to all of these schools and pretty much living college football for about three months. Now what I am trying to do is I am working on a book proposal. I have an agent and we are working on taking the entire tour and turning it into a book that will hopefully be out by next August.
Tailgating Ideas: You mentioned that when you were in Las Vegas you bought four tickets to four different places, thus putting the wheels in motion for this tailgating tour. But once it was all said and done, you ended up going to 13 different college football stadiums. How did you determine which schools you were going to visit and what criteria did you use to decide which schools made the cut? Did you map it out based on distance between the first school you visited and then the second school was a shorter distance than the others that made the list?
Taylor Mathis: Actually I came back to Charlotte after every game. I wanted to include all of the major BCS conferences so I did make sure I spread it out. I went to six SEC schools, three Big 10 games, going to OU/Texas was my Big 12 game. I went to Pitt which is a Big East school and I also went to Virginia Tech which was my ACC game. I picked Wisconsin because I went to school there and I wanted to go back there for a game day. I picked Penn State because it is the second largest stadium in college football. I wanted to do Ohio State and Michigan but I had to choose just one of them based on logistics and driving considerations. Since the Ohio State vs. Michigan game was in Columbus this year, I decided to do Ohio State. Being in the Big 10 and it is always such an important game being a rivalry game, I mean, they have been playing each other since 1897. It’s such a huge game. I am so glad I went to see that. I started the tour at Ole Miss around Labor Day and it ended in Ohio after Thanksgiving. The tour went from sun dresses to hats and gloves. At Ohio State I got there about 6:30 in the morning and it was 22 degrees with the wind chill. It was pretty cold so everyone had hats and gloves and all that.
When it comes to schools, there are a lot of rankings out there by sports writers and bloggers trying to rank the best places as far as college tailgating. The exact order changes but consistently every year ranked in the top five are Penn State, LSU, Tennessee, Ole Miss and Washington. Given that I could drive to all of those SEC schools, I did that. Coincidentally, one of my roommates from college lives in Seattle. I had a place to stay with him and just walked to the game from his house. Seattle was one of the places that surprised me the most. Growing up in the south and going to school at Wisconsin, I really didn’t know much about Pac-10 football. [At Washington] They definitely can tailgate with the best of them out there. Washington and Tennessee are the only two schools that can tailgate on water so it was really cool to get to see that.
Texas vs. Oklahoma, just given the history of that game and how it is held at the Cotton Bowl inside the Texas State Fairgrounds, its just a different experience. The same goes for the Georgia/Florida game being the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. You can’t call it that anymore but the reputation behind the game I knew I had to hit that one. So as far as scheduling, Texas/Oklahoma and Florida/Georgia are always held on the same weekend so those were the first two that got locked in. I then just started looking at the match ups. When I saw LSU was hosting Alabama I knew I had to go there. Then I saw Tennessee and Alabama on the schedule and wanted to see Tennessee at its best. Alabama being the defending national champions I knew their fans would travel well and they would bring a big crowd. Washington just got thrown in because they had a night game and they were at home. Wisconsin got chosen as week two because it is also my birthday that weekend and the same weekend as the Wisconsin Ironman, which I had two of my friends doing.
I started the tour at Ole Miss because it is almost a 10 hour drive from Charlotte and I wanted to do that long of a drive at the beginning of the tour and not at the end. Coincidentally, I found out that Pitt was playing in a Thursday night game against Miami. I have a friend who goes to dental school at Pitt. So I went up there that Thursday for the Pitt game and then that Saturday went to the game in Happy Valley. Virginia Tech got slotted in there on the third weekend because I had an open weekend and they were at home in Blacksburg. I chose Auburn vs. Georgia because I had heard it is such a big rivalry. I am so glad I did because I had no idea Auburn was going to have the undefeated season like they did this year. The game that I went to, they clinched the SEC West at that game. My only regret is that I couldn’t have seen Alabama on a Saturday. I saw them on a Thursday when they played Georgia State a couple weeks before the Iron Bowl. It wasn’t at its height but I still had a good idea of what tailgating in Tuscaloosa is like. And then I ended the tour in Ohio State.
I did end up going to the ACC Championship game because it was here in Charlotte. I actually got to meet up with the same people from Virginia Tech that I met three months earlier. That experience I haven’t shared on my blog. That is going to be saved for the book. That’s more of post season tailgating. It felt like what it would feel like tailgating before a bowl game because you have to travel there. You don’t know until a couple of weeks ahead of time that you are actually going there.
I’m very happy with all the schools I chose to visit. All of them are definitely schools I would go back to again. I believe they are all at the top of the college tailgating scene. There are some that I didn’t make it to that I wished I could have gone to. I wished I could have gone to a game in Athens or a game in Gainesville or have gone to Ann Arbor or gone to Iowa.
Tailgating Ideas: Going to college at Wisconsin and being exposed to that type of Big 10 tailgating and football culture, you knew what you were in for when you started this thing. Being a professional photographer, did you choose tailgating and college football as your subject because you knew the colors and the textures of the foods and the excitement of the fans, etc., etc. would all make great photographs? Or did it come down to you enjoy tailgating and you would be able to take your passion for tailgating and it would translate to the photographs?
Taylor Mathis: It was a combination of both. Part of it was that I knew the level of excitement that was involved in Madison. I had heard and seen other people’s pictures from these other places that have that level [of passion for tailgating]. I was curious to see what it was like. The biggest thing for me was to see what SEC tailgating was like. Growing up in Charlotte I have a bunch of friends that went to SEC schools. They tell me, “yeah, we wear dresses to the games”. That’s unheard of in Madison. No one wears dresses up north to games. It’s so different to go to places like Tennessee or Ole Miss and it is a completely different world. So I was fascinated in seeing that. Also, I knew the whole piece together photographically would be really cool because of the different colors. Because every school you go to it is a different color scheme every time. It was all about what people would wear depending on what location they are in. It was also driven by what people eat while tailgating. At Wisconsin, most of our games are at 11 am. So there is not a ton of time for tailgating. So it’s either brats and a lot of beer basically. There is not a ton of time to do full-on menus. Where at LSU, their tradition is they normally have 7 pm kick-off games, unless TV moves the start time. Unfortunately the Alabama vs. LSU game I was at was supposed to be at seven but CBS decided to move it to the 2:30 slot. There were a lot of tailgaters that were not happy about that. When you are cooking a full pig, which is what I saw a lot of people doing, you need seven or eight hours. Some people got there at 4:15 in the morning to start tailgating.
Tailgating Ideas: People down in Baton Rouge take their tailgating almost as seriously as they do Tiger Football. From what I have seen, trying to differentiate the passion fans have for tailgating compared to the passion they have for watching their team play is like trying to tell identical twins apart.
Taylor Mathis: Oh definitely. They take it very seriously. It’s really cool to be a part of. Every game I went to I wore a shirt that had my website printed on it and on the back it had my whole sch