Mercer Ready To Resurrect Football For The First Time In 72 Years This Fall.
GREENVILLE, S.C.–For a conference considered among the top football conferences in the Football Championship Subdivision, losing schools like Appalachian State and Georgia Southern could prove to be a knockout blow in maintaining such a status.
Just a few years ago, the SoCon was a formidable basketball conference that saw Stephen Curry and the Davidson Wildcats captivate the nation with a run to the Elite Eight. Appalachian State won its third straight national championship and scored the biggest upset in FCS history. Times were good for the Southern Conference.
In a calendar year, Appalachian State had shocked No. 5 Michigan and won a third straight title, while the Wildcats downed Gonzaga, Georgetown and Wisconsin en route to that Elite Eight appearance. The league finished No. 15 out of 31 Division I conferences in RPI on the hardwood.
It was a good run of success for the Southern Conference for its two major revenue sports, but now a little over five years later, the conference finds itself at a cross-roads with plenty of question marks coming up when the conference office, along with the league’s athletic directors meet in Hilton Head for the annual spring meetings.
As members leave for other conference, the biggest question mark will obviously be membership. But while the obvious question of Southern Conference realignment is who the league should add, maybe the one that few are asking is for what reasons. Will it be more important for the SoCon to maintain its status as a power football conference, or will it be the main priority be to improve its status as a basketball conference. After all, the SoCon has seen a distinct drop-off in talent the past couple of seasons in terms of RPI, as the SoCon finished ranked 27 out of 31 conferences.
The SoCon has several options to move towards solving both problems in theory, but the league obviously won’t be the SoCon football power it was with Appalachian State and Georgia Southern anytime soon. If the league should hope to even approach the level that Appalachian State and Georgia Southern as a football conference would be to add a school like Coastal Carolina, who made no secrets about wanting to be apart of the SoCon back as early as 2006, when it was passed over in favor of Samford, which joined and began play in the SoCon a couple of years later.
The Chanticleers have been one of the top programs in the Big South Conference since joining the conference as a start-up member a decade ago. Liberty, a program that was a rivalry atop the Big South for the Chanticleers, is also on the move to FBS, likely ending up in the Sun Belt along with Appalachian State and Georgia Southern, so it will be vital for the Big South to somehow try and maintain its relationship with Coastal Carolina. Losing Coastal Carolina, who was won five league crowns since starting a football program in 2003 and is more than any current member of the league.
Stony Brook Is An Up-And-Coming Football Program On The FCS Scene, With 19 Wins Over The Past Two Seasons.
Despite being passed over the first time around, Coastal Carolina would no doubt be a solid addition to the SoCon, not only for what the school has done historically in football, but also for what it has done in basketball and on the baseball diamond in recent seasons.
Coastal Carolina is also more in line with both Appalachian State and Georgia Southern, in that it is a state-supported school, and it would offset what many feel is now becoming a private school league with Furman, Elon, Wofford and Davidson in basketball.
Another school that was a former Big South-turned-CAA member that would be kind of an out-of-the-box candidate would be Stony Brook, which is a program that has qualified for the FCS postseason each of the past couple of seasons, and really has been the class of the Big South in back-to-back seasons.
Stony Brook nearly knocked off FBS member Syracuse this past season, and in its first playoff season in 2011, nearly became the first FCS team to knock off Sam Houston State last fall prior to the Bearkats’ first of two national title losses to North Dakota State. Likely keeping the Seawolves out of the debate as one of the newest Southern Conference member is the travel for each of the league’s schools to play the Seawolves, however, also of note, the Stony Brook baseball program certainly made noise last season with an appearance in the College World Series.
Despite losing Appalachian State, the SoCon still has a pretty good footprint in the state of North Carolina with Elon and Western Carolina still football members in the league, and Davidson and UNC Greensboro still members in basketball. Georgia Southern was the only school from the Peach State in the SoCon, and that will likely where the league’s office looks first for a replacement. With Georgia Southern and Georgia State the only FCS football programs currently in the Peach State, the league office will likely look to a start-up program, like Kennesaw State or Mercer for membership.
Peach State Native And Paul Johnson Assistant At Georgia Southern, Navy And Georgia Tech Is Slated To Lead The Latest Start-Up Program In Georgia–Kennesaw State
Kennesaw State, who will begin play on the football gridiron in 2014 for the first time in the school’s history, would give the SoCon a program similar in nearly every respect to Georgia Southern.
Kennesaw State has an enrollment of 24,600 students, which is the third-largest school in the state of Georgia behind the University of Georgia and Georgia State University.
Kennesaw State has the kind of potential with its facilities, backing and the fact that its a public institution to offset those private schools, which would make it more of an attractive option to the SoCon office than Mercer would.
Adding Mercer would mean another private school for a conference that has added three private schools, in its last three additions, adding Wofford (1997), Elon (2003) and Samford (2008).
The reason that Mercer could become a member of the SoCon is because the league will be adding the private school with at least one other public school. The SoCon wants to keep both Western Carolina and Chattanooga from looking elsewhere, making it important to look at academically-sound, state-supported schools first, making it easier to add another private school, such as Mercer.
Mercer, which will restart football for the first time in 72 years this fall, will have a coach in Bobby Lamb who knows the Southern Conference football landscape quite well, spending 29 years as a player, assistant and head coach at charter SoCon member Furman.
Mercer will begin as a non-scholarship program, but it is clear that Mercer President William Underwood have visions of making the school more than just a glorified intramural program in the Pioneer League, as he hopes to put Mercer on the map as both a strong academic institution in addition to a school that fields strong athletic programs, which includes a basketball program that won the CollegeInsider.com Tournament in 2012, and this past season saw head coach Bob Hoffman’s Bears win the regular-season Atlantic Sun title, which included Sweet Sixteen participant Florida Gulf Coast, helping the school garner an NIT bid. The Bears opened with a first-round win at Tennessee before getting knocked out of the postseason with a loss at BYU.
Mercer in all honesty is probably a better addition to the SoCon if the league is looking to improve its standing as a basketball conference, and the academics at Mercer are on-par with Furman, Davidson and Wofford. However, the question is whether or not the Bears’ football program offers as much opportunity as Kennesaw State adds, which has a larger enrollment and less-stringent academic standards and likely a bigger alumni base willing to give to the program. Add to that the fact that Kennesaw State looks a lot like Georgia Southern when it got its program off running once again.
Set to lead the Kennesaw State football program coming up in 2014 will be Brian Bohannon, which sets the program in even a closer relationship with its predecessor school in the Southern Conference, as Kennesaw Director of Athletics Vaughn Williams chose Peach State product Brian Bohannon to lead the program. Bohannon has spent all 17 of his years as a football coach at the FCS and FBS levels under former Georgia Southern and current Georgia Tech head coach Paul Johnson.
Mercer has Lamb, who comes to the school having already had success on the FCS level as a head coach having posted a 67-40 record at the helm of one of top private schools at the FCS level, in Furman, and one of three private schools that has won a FCS national title, with that win coming in 1988. Lamb was named the Southern Conference’s Coach of the Year in 2004, helping Furman tie for Georgia Southern for the league crown and the No. 2 overall seed in the ’04 FCS playoffs.
Lamb and Bohannon have faced each other on opposing sidelines before, too. Lamb was an offensive assistant on that Furman team that went to Georgia Southern and claimed a 24-17 win over two-time defending FCS national champion Georgia Southern in the Division I-AA semifinals back in 2001. Bohannon served as the secondary coach on that ’01 Georgia Southern team that was defeated by Lamb’s Paladins.
Given the relationships that Lamb maintains throughout the Peach State, with his father Ray Lamb serving as the Director of High School coaches at Georgia and brother Hal Lamb the coach of Calhoun County High School, he will obviously help Mercer compensate for some of the academic challenges it will face on the recruiting trail when it goes up against Kennesaw State.
I don’t think the SoCon will add Kennesaw without Mercer, or vice versa. The Kennesaw-Mercer rivalry has been one of the most heated in the Atlantic Sun over the years, and one of the Owls’ two conference victories from this past season came against eventual league champion Mercer. The bad part of adding Kennesaw is its basketball program, in which current head coach Lewis Preston, who once starred in the SoCon for VMI in the early 1990’s, was left to try and pick up the pieces from a previous regime that left him with plenty of headaches to deal with the past couple of seasons. Kennesaw and Mercer might not be Appalachian State-Georgia Southern in terms of a football rivalry, but it has the potential to be a pretty good football rivalry given the opportunity.
ETSU Will Football Program For The First Time Since 2003 When The Program Takes The Field In 2015
A school that was once asked to leave the Southern Conference might be one that is an attractive addition once again. East Tennessee State, which fielded a football program from 1920-2003, including a 24-year relationship with the Southern Conference, as the Bucs joined the league in 1979 and were a member until shutting down their program for at least the cited reasons being financial ones in 2003.
With the funding and backing now in order for the school to bring back football to the Tri Cities on fall Saturday afternoons, will East Tennessee State be a candidate to re-join a conference which the Bucs called home for 24 years. The school hired former Tennessee head coach and 1998 national champion Phillip Fulmer to help a feasibility study and to garner support for bringing back the program.
The Bucs were a solid program in most seasons during their league membership, but certainly weren’t Appalachian State, Georgia Southern or Furman in terms of championship success. There were moments, however, such as the Bucs’ 29-14 win at North Carolina State in 1987, and that 1996 season which few ETSU fans will soon forget, which saw ETSU win 10 games, make a playoff appearance and win a playoff game against Villanova, and come within a game of the SoCon title, losing its only league game to juggernaut Marshall.
ETSU has had its share of talents equate at the next level, with the most notable of those next-level Donnie Abraham, who played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New York Jets, making a Pro Bowl appearance in 2000.
ETSU will play its home games at the MHSA Athletic Center once again–a place formerly known as the “Mini Dome” by much of the Southern Conference faithful that used to call ETSU a conference rival. It was announced this week that ETSU likely would begin football in the fall of 2015.
The Buccaneers’ basketball program, which has struggled the past couple of seasons in the Atlantic Sun, suffering its first 20-loss season in school history last season, started its tradition-laden success under Les Robinson on the college basketball hardwood in the mid-1980’s. In fact, the Bucs were the first dynasty in the modern era of Southern Conference basketball, winning four-consecutive crowns on the SoCon hardwood from 1989-92. The Bucs were ranked as high as No. 10 in the Associated Press in 1992, and gave birth to one of college basketball’s all-time assist leaders, in Keith “Mister” Jennings.
Whatever the league office decides to do, it has a lot of things to consider when it sits down to mull over the future of the league for what appears to be a new era not only for the SoCon Football, but FCS Football, at least for the immediate future. Does basketball tip the scales back in its favor, or will the SoCon try and position itself as a top mid-major basketball conference with the recent transactions? Only time will tell, and we should at least know something about Southern Conference realignment in a couple of weeks.