On a warm Saturday afternoon in late August, as the Georgia State Panthers lined up against the Tennessee Volunteers in one of the great venues of college football, Neyland Stadium, two of the most excited fans were hundreds of miles away. They were pioneers in the university’s football program, and they knew better than anyone what a win over a Southeastern Conference stalwart like Tennessee would mean for the old school during the first game of the 2019 season.
“Carolyn,” said Bill Curry, Georgia State’s first coach, calling out to his wife as he sat in front of a television in his Atlanta condo, “come in here and watch this. We’re knocking them off the ball. We’ve got a chance.”
In North Carolina, Mark Hogan Jr., (B.B.A. ’13) who had received the Panthers’ first football scholarship, was leaving a game at Davidson College, where he coaches safeties. His phone rang. It was Kail Singleton, a former Georgia State teammate, telling him to get home fast and turn on the game. Hogan arrived in time for the last quarter, watching as quarterback Dan Ellington ran 22 yards for a touchdown to put the underdogs up by 15.
“I had never been so proud of them,” Hogan remembers.
“I got goosebumps,” Curry says.
On Aug. 31, 2019, in its 10th season and 107th game, Georgia State scored its first win over a Power Five conference opponent, defeating Tennessee 38-30. The Panthers had taken on a dozen traditional college football powerhouses over the years — marquee names like Alabama, Clemson, Penn State and Oregon — but had come close to beating only one of them: Wisconsin in 2016.
"We call those opportunity games," says athletic director Charlie Cobb, referring to the exposure and revenue such matchups can bring — a national broadcast on ESPN and more than $1 million in some cases.
The Tennessee game proved to be an opportunity that paid off in every way. The win put an exclamation point on the first decade, prompting an outburst of pride for a program that once seemed as unlikely as an August frost in Atlanta.
"I got emails from college presidents all over the country commenting on that game," says Georgia State President Mark Becker. "They were amazed at what we’ve done in 10 years. And it wasn’t a fluke. We dominated."
The Panthers celebrate after their victory over Furman on Sept. 7. This season, Georgia State set program records for the most wins in the regular season and at home.
The Panthers celebrate after their victory over Furman on Sept. 7. This season, Georgia State set program records for the most wins in the regular season and at home.
The Panthers’ radio play-by-play man since he was a student in the early 1980s, Dave Cohen (B.A. ’94) has broadcast every Georgia State football game.
“I thought I’d never see a football program here,” he says, recalling a novelty gag he encountered on campus long ago: a wallet schedule someone had printed that said “Georgia State Football” on one side. The other side of the card was blank.
Georgia State’s football history began, in a sense, at Georgia Tech, where the university traces its roots to an evening business school founded in 1913. The courses were popular with athletes, including football players for John Heisman’s legendary teams at Tech.
Twenty years later, when the school came under the aegis of the University of Georgia, a few athletic squads competed under various nicknames — the Redbirds, the Owls and finally the Panthers. As the institution grew and became a full-fledged university, no one seriously considered adding varsity football — certainly not Noah Langdale, president from 1957 to 1988. Langdale knew the glories of the gridiron firsthand from his student days in the early 1940s when he played tackle for the Alabama Crimson Tide. But he also understood he led a commuter school that had neither the fan base nor the political clout to take on football. In the university system he inhabited, that was reserved for Bulldogs and Yellow Jackets.
Carl Patton, the university’s seventh president, had opposed starting a football program since his arrival in 1992. When students occasionally asked about it, he had a standard response: “Over my dead body.”
It wasn’t that he disliked football. It was just that Georgia State needed so many other things.
“This was a different place 25 years ago. There was no student housing, no Rialto, no Aderhold [Learning Center], relatively little in the way of financial resources. We had so much to do,” Patton, who retired in 2008, says. “If I had gone to the Board of Regents and said we wanted to start a football program, they probably would have fired me. We weren’t ready. It would have failed.”
As the university expanded throughout downtown and began to build on-campus housing for thousands of students, football inevitably came up again. Tom Lewis, the university’s former vice president of external affairs, made sure of it.
“I firmly believe that athletics can help shape an institution,” Lewis says. “It’s one of the best things for molding an identity that students and alumni can share. I thought football could help put us in another realm.”
Lewis asked Patton what it would take to reconsider football. The answer came in 2006 when the university commissioned a feasibility study and hired Dan Reeves, the former head coach of the Atlanta Falcons, as a consultant. Thousands of students, faculty and alumni were surveyed, and about two-thirds of them were in favor of a football program. But the study, conducted by C.H. Johnson Consulting, also warned that the enterprise would be costly and would have to be funded by an increase in the student athletic fee because Georgia State couldn’t count on the revenue streams that fuel more established programs, such as lucrative television contracts and lavish support from generations of football-loving alumni.
Patton insisted on two conditions before moving forward. He wanted the alumni to raise $1 million seed money, and he wanted to make sure students supported hiking the activity fee.
The money was raised in 30 days. The student activity fee committee unanimously approved the increase.
“I ran out of excuses,” Patton says.
With that, Georgia State finally asked the Regents for permission to gear up football.
When Bill Curry took the job as he university’s first football coach in 2008, he told some of his New York friends that he was going to GSU.
“‘You’re coaching at Georgia Southern?’” he remembers them saying. “They hadn’t heard of us.”
Curry was the perfect choice to change that. An Atlanta native, he played as an offensive lineman for three of the game’s greatest coaches: Bobby Dodd of Georgia Tech, Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers, and Don Shula of the Baltimore Colts and Miami Dolphins. Curry went on to coach at Tech, Alabama and Kentucky, and he was finishing a decade as a college football analyst on ESPN when Georgia State came calling. He was 65 and came to regard the Panthers with the affection an aging father shows for the last child who was unplanned.
“We needed everything from footballs to chin straps,” he says. “We didn’t even have a place to practice.”
Until a facility could be built, the team practiced at middle and high school fields in Atlanta. One of them had yellow jacket nests on the edge of the turf, which made footwork drills rather lively.
The team spent its first year in 2009 doing nothing but practicing. Every Saturday, players would line up against each other as if a game were scheduled.
“We had 60 scrimmages that fall with no actual games to look forward to,” says Hogan, the linebacker who became the program’s first recruit. “It definitely built character.”
The first game, played at the Georgia Dome on the evening of Saturday, Sept. 2, 2010, was a red-letter date in the university’s history. It attracted more than 30,000 people, still the largest crowd ever to see the Panthers play. In the glow of the excitement, even spectators who had been lukewarm about football felt themselves warming.
Pearl McHaney, a longtime English professor at Georgia State, had reservations about her school getting into the football business. She was particularly concerned about the athletic fee and considered it unfair that students who might care nothing about touchdowns would be asked to subsidize scholarships for fellow students who happened to be football players.
She began to appreciate what a football team could mean for Georgia State when two of her students who were headed to France for study abroad debated whether they should miss the orientation session so they could attend the inaugural game. They went to France as scheduled, and McHaney went to the game and collected programs and other souvenirs to give them when they returned.
As she looked around the stands at the Dome, she began to understand why her students hadn’t wanted to miss the event.
“It was moving to see that many people in one place all pulling for Georgia State,” she says. “I had never experienced anything like that. I thought to myself: ‘So, this is what it’s all about.’”
She wasn’t the only one who was touched. Becker, then in his second year as president, remembers his eyes filling with tears. Curry says it was one of the highlights of his career.
“It was like running on the field at the Super Bowl," he says — and he should know, having played in three of the first five Super Bowls with the Packers and the Colts.
Best of all, Georgia State won, beating Shorter University 41-7.
The Panthers finished their first season with a winning record, but they wouldn’t have another one for seven years.
“I thought we’d be instantly competitive,” Curry says. “We weren’t. That was an education for the old coach.”
Things got tougher after Curry retired and was succeeded in 2013 by Trent Miles, the former head coach at Indiana State. In his first year, Georgia State moved up to the top classification of college football, the Football Bowl Subdivision, which comprises 130 schools and includes the members of highly regarded leagues, such as the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference. Facing stiffer competition in the Sun Belt Conference, the Panthers went winless in 2013 and secured only one victory the following season. Miles led the team to its first bowl game in 2015, but they lost, ending with a 6-7 record — another losing season.
But better days were just around the corner. In 2017, Georgia State got a new coach, Shawn Elliott, who had been the interim head coach at South Carolina. And it got a new address when Georgia State purchased Turner Field, the home of the Atlanta Braves, who were moving to a new stadium in Cobb County.
The Panthers weren’t going to be a tenant anymore. They were going to have their own home.
At the PantherWalk two hours before kickoff, the team parts the crowd in Victory Plaza with an escort from the Georgia State Panther Band.
At the PantherWalk two hours before kickoff, the team parts the crowd in Victory Plaza with an escort from the Georgia State Panther Band.
It’s an hour before kickoff, and Charlie Cobb is sitting at his desk in the building that once housed the Braves’ offices and now holds the university’s athletic staff (except for basketball and volleyball, which are still at the Sports Arena). The football operations center, with a spiffy new weight room and locker room, is downstairs. Across the street is Aspen Heights, a new apartment complex with 700 beds for students, where 120 Georgia State student-athletes live.
Beyond his picture window is the football field and a stadium that holds almost 26,000 fans for football games in the lower bowl. The upper deck, unneeded for now, is covered with a blue tarp and letters that spell out “Georgia State Panthers.” It’s like an enormous advertisement for the university.
“The traffic helicopters love that thing,” Cobb says.
A block to the north, ground will soon be broken for a new convocation center with 8,000 seats for Georgia State basketball. Eventually, a baseball field and grandstand will be built between the two buildings on the footprint of Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, where Hank Aaron became the home run king.
On this chilly November evening, the Panthers are facing a difficult foe: Appalachian State, the only Sun Belt team to be ranked in the Top 25. Win or lose, 2019 has already been a successful year — the program’s third winning season — with signal triumphs over renowned opponents Tennessee and Army. As a result, the CBS Sports 130, a weekly ranking of every Football Bowl Subdivision school, had Georgia State as high as the 40s earlier this season and still has the team at No. 64, ahead of six Southeastern Conference schools and 47 places above Georgia Tech.
Down in the stands, the 240-member Panther Band, a happy byproduct of the football program, booms to life as fans start to gather in their seats. Among them are season ticket holders Joe Lawson, a former Georgia State student and a retired graphic designer who attends all the games with his wife, Sherrill Moss (B.A. ’75). He’s easy to spot in his blue sequined jacket and matching sequined bow tie and tennis shoes, topped by a cap with a mop of blue hair. Fans frequently stop him to pose for photos. Lawson is such a familiar presence at Georgia State games that he says President Becker once came up behind him when he was out of costume and looked surprised when he glimpsed his face. “Joe,” he said, "I didn’t recognize you without your blue hair.”
Like Cobb, Lawson is optimistic about football’s progress at Georgia State but realistic about fan support.
“It’s growing,” he says, “but it’s going to take time.”
That’s especially evident in the student section, the Panther’s Den, where less than half of the seats are filled. Georgia State has more than 5,000 students living on campus now and thousands more in nearby private housing, but many of them work and can’t attend games.
“A lot of people go home on weekends, too,” says Kerrison Carter, a freshman from Canton, Ga., who came with a dozen other undergrads. “They don’t stay downtown, so they don’t go to the games.”
“It’s a good deal,” chimes in Lauren McGenney, a freshman from Savannah, Ga. “Students get in the games for free, and you don’t pay for parking or transportation. We need more of us here.”
Despite the relatively small student turnout, Georgia State’s average attendance over the first decade has been about 15,000, and the winning 2019 season attracted an average crowd of almost 17,200 — a record.
“Now we need get more consistent and get closer to filling this stadium,” Cobb says. "I see no reason why we can’t do that. I’m bullish about this program.”
His eyes dart toward the television on his office wall, where the Georgia Bulldogs and Auburn Tigers are playing. It’s one of the oldest rivalries in the South, dating to 1892.
“They’ve been doing that for more than a hundred years,” he says. “We’ve been doing it for 10. We need to look at this as a long-term investment.”
Fireworks light the sky following a Panthers' home victory.
Has the investment been worth it?
Becker thinks so. With a doctorate in statistics from Penn State, his academic specialty is analyzing numbers. He points to one that suggests the impact football may have had: Freshman applications at Georgia State have more than doubled in the past decade.
“Having a football program didn’t make that happen,” the president cautions, “but it’s a contributing factor. Students say it makes us more of a complete university. And I know it matters to our alumni.”
Ultimately, the effect of collegiate football on an institution like Georgia State is more a matter of intangibles.
“Football makes people feel better about their school,” Becker says. “When I was at Penn State, people thought it was a better university on Monday if we had won on Saturday. It was very noticeable. I saw that same immense pride at Georgia State after we beat Tennessee.”
Now the challenge is making that feeling become a habit.
*Jim Auchmutey (B.A. '77) is a veteran Atlanta journalist and the author of "Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America" and “The Class of ’65: A Student, a Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness.” He spent almost 30 years as a writer and editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Photos by Meg Buscema, Carolyn Richardson, Steven Thackston and courtesy of Georgia State University Athletics.