LSU season starts with Mike Serio closing in on 500 straight games attended

Mike Serio, the LSU football season is about to start.

What are you going to do next?

I’m going to Disneyworld.

Well, not exactly.

Serio is going to Orlando for the Tigers season opener against Florida State on Sunday night in Camping World Stadium.

And his wife and daughter will be going to Disneyworld, but Serio will skip the roughly 25-mile side trip to see Mickey and Minnie because he’ll be “on a work trip.”

Serio’s “work” – in addition to running Mike Serio’s Po-Boys on St. Charles Avenue – is attending LSU football games – in Tiger Stadium, inside the Caesars Superdome, at the home stadium of opponents and at neutral sites such as the one that will host the “Camping World Kickoff” between the No. 5 Tigers and the No. 8 Seminoles.

The game on Sunday will be the 490th consecutive game that the Tigers football team will play with Serio in attendance.

Neither hurricanes nor heat nor gloom of losing teams has stayed Serio from his appointed rounds. And recently neither did the COVID pandemic, though it could have caused an asterisk next to LSU’s 41-7 victory against Vanderbilt in Nashville in the second game of the 2020 season.

No tickets were sold to the game because of the pandemic, but Serio knew the lay of the land from previous trips to Vanderbilt, including one just 348 days earlier when the visiting Tigers rolled to a 66-38 victory.

Serio was looking over pictures of the stadium grounds that “I took the year before during my recon and they had a parking garage.”

“We went and watched the game from the highest row of the parking garage,” Serio said. “It was awesome.”

Perhaps demonstrating that an unseen presence is helping to guide Serio on his travels, the vantage point from the garage had an eerie familiarity to it.

“It was almost like my tickets at Tiger Stadium,” Serio said. “I’m on the goal line between the East sideline and the North end zone, right on the dividing line. It was weird because it was kind of similar in the same corner, but in the parking garage.”

If one were inclined to pick nits, they could question the validity of Serio watching from outside the stadium in terms of extending his game-attendance streak.

But Serio had that covered.

“Before the game ended I walked into the stadium,” he said, “so I’m counting it.”

Fair enough.

While awaiting the kickoff, Serio made fast friends with a guy named Chris, a native of Shreveport, LSU alumnus and current resident of Nashville who arrived in the garage on his motorcycle.

During the course of their visit Serio told Chris about his streak of games attended.

“I’ve seen LSU play on every SEC campus except Columbia (Missouri),” he said. “We play there in 2023.”

LSU was scheduled to play Missouri in Tiger Stadium one week after the game at Vanderbilt.

But Hurricane Delta had other ideas.

Her threat to Southern Louisiana caused the game to be moved to Columbia.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” Serio said. “The next week we were going to Columbia.”

Serio’s streak tracks the recent history of the Southeastern Conference. His trip to Columbia, which will be duplicated October 7, adds another notch on his belt necessitated by the expansion of the membership, just as trips to Columbia, South Carolina, College Station, Texas and Fayetteville, Arkansas did with other newcomers.

He also has seen LSU play the Razorbacks in Little Rock just as he has seen games against Ole Miss and Mississippi State not only in Oxford and Starkville but also in Jackson and games against Alabama in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham.

Next season Texas and Oklahoma will begin competition in the SEC. Serio already saw LSU play the Longhorns in Austin (2019).

The Sooners’ first game against the Tigers as conference rivals will come next season in Tiger Stadium. The first meeting in Norman, Oklahoma hasn’t been set, but whenever that is, Serio plans to be there.

In the meantime the Game No. 500 in a row milestone looms November 18 against Georgia State in Tiger Stadium.

That’s not the most exotic circumstance for a guy who has visited 19 states outside of Louisiana, including 42 different cities, during the streak.

Game No. 400 had a little more romance to it because it came when LSU played Wisconsin in historic Lambeau Stadium in Green Bay, home of the Packers, Serio’s favorite team when he was growing up.

“It was like going to Yankee Stadium to me,” Serio said.

For the record, this streak began on October 15, 1983 when the Tigers lost to Kentucky 21-13 in Tiger Stadium.

Speaking of Tiger Stadium, Serio hasn’t missed a game in Death Valley since Archie Manning’s final appearance, which was a 61-17 LSU victory on December 5, 1970.

And now it’s back to Orlando, which has been the site of a few notable LSU games. It’s where Charles McClendon coached his last game – a 34-10 victory over Wake Forest in the Tangerine Bowl at the end of the 1979 season – it’s where Nick Saban coached his final game with the Tigers – a 30-25 loss to Iowa in the Capital One Bowl at the end of the 2004 season – and it’s where the Tigers last took the field in a 63-7 thumping of Purdue in the Citrus Bowl on January 2.

It’s a small world after all.

Though football is Serio’s specialty, his LSU menu is varied like the Po-boy options at his restaurant.

In April, Serio was in Dallas to watch Kim Mulkey’s second Tigers team win the NCAA Women’s Final Four. Barely two months later, he made his 29th trip to the Men’s College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska to watch Jay Johnson’s second Tigers team prevail.

“I drove up to Omaha by myself,” Serio said. “I drove 15½ hours straight. I was cranked up. I could have driven to China.”

Serio has seen all seven of the Tigers’ MCWS titles just as he has seen all four of LSU’s national championships in football, including the 1958 victory over Clemson when he was seven years old.

Tiger fans have pointed out that football coach Brian Kelly – like Mulkey and Johnson – is in his second season in Baton Rouge.

“I’m not saying he’s got to win,” Serio said. “I’m a realist.”

He pointed out that Saban was in his fourth season when LSU won the 2003 title, Les Miles was in his third year when LSU won the 2007 title and Ed Orgeron was in his third full season when LSU won the 2019 title.

But he also noted a common thread among those three seasons as well as the 2001 SEC and Sugar Bowl championship season and the 2011 undefeated regular season and national runner-up finish.

“The odd numbered years are good,” Serio said.