Players celebrate after a victory over Abilene Christian
On April 17th 2008, Georgia State University launched it’s football program. The team signed their first recruiting class in 2009, and had their inaugural season in 2010. The team had a decently successful first year as they finished 6-6 under Head Coach Bill Curry who was a coach with a very successful coaching resume.
As the teams schedule grew harder, the team suffered from the inevitable growing pains that come with starting a team which included suspensions, injuries, and a punter starting at quarterback to start the 2011 season. The Panthers finished 3-8 that second season followed up by an abysmal 1-11 record and the retirement of Head Coach Bill Curry.
To replace Curry, GSU hired Trent Miles, who was formerly the coach at Indiana State University. The team has struggled under Miles the past two seasons as the team has compiled a 1-24 record. The team is facing the challenge of adjusting to life as a Division I FBS school, and transitioning to the Sun Belt Conference, which they will be playing their second season in next year.
I recently sat down with Georgia State Associate Athletic Director Doug Justice and AJC beat writer Doug Robertson to discuss the current state of the GSU football, as well as many other issues surrounding college football including financial issues and how teams interact with their surrounding community and fans.
Put us on the map
The first thing I talked to Mr. Justice about was how football puts a school on the map. Sports have long been know to get schools recognized, especially smaller, little known local schools that can suddenly be thrown onto the map by something like an upset in a march madness basketball game, something GSU now knows very well.
Mr. Justice spoke about how historically most large institutions have had a football team, and how those teams have been something that unites entire campuses. “I think there is an aspect of americana that is football like friday night lights or tailgating on saturday then going to the games,” he said. “The pageantry of going to a football game is always great, and there is an aspect of trying to create that here with just starting football.”
When talking with Mr. Robertson, we discussed the goals GSU had when starting their program. One of those goals was putting the school on the map. “One of the things that the school made a point of is that it would raise the schools profile regionally and nationally,” Mr. robertson said. “Playing in different places around the country has gained them notoriety, so I think they have been accomplishing that goal so far.”
Using football to put a university on the map can mean putting a university back on the map for students and alumni. “We ask ourselves how do we create the environment to make people want to come down here?” Mr. Justice said. “We are able to get people to come back to campus for basketball game from time to time, but there is something special about being able to go outside on a beautiful saturday afternoon and spend all day tailgating, getting back with friends, and connecting with old friends.”
If football can put a school on the map, then that means it can also affect the schools image. The notoriety gained from a big win can generate buzz on twitter and social media. It can also lead to people looking up the school on Wikipedia, or visiting their website.
On the heels of discussing how schools can gain this notoriety, I ask Mr Justice if he thought there was a relation to the schools admissions. Does a team doing well increase the applicant pool? The answer is yes, it does. “ I worked at Appalachian State when they beat Michigan in football in 2007,” Mr. Justice said. The school had a record in applications after that. The quality of applicants also increased a bit too. As Mr. Justice put it, “It was using athletics as an icebreaker of sorts to get people to come to the school.”
Show me the money
The one thing a team needs more than wins and top-notch recruits is money. Generally in college football, only the top 25 or so teams are able to turn a profit. For GSU, only about 10% of their total athletic revenue came from football.
Much of a teams ability to keep the money flowing comes from donations, especially for teams that are unable to make a profit off football. “Our athletic club is constantly trying to get people to contribute for large projects like the new weight room at the practice facility,” Mr. Justice said. “We also are trying to offset our cost of providing scholarships.”
There are many cost that go along with paying for one player. When GSU jumped from FCS to FBS, so did their number of scholarships. Instead of paying for 63 players, they began paying for 85. “We find out things like, how much does it cost to outfit a player, or how much do that players books cost,” Mr. Justice said. “Housing is also something that we have to pay for which is pretty expensive living in downtown Atlanta.”
Another potential cost that looms on the horizon is the possibility of having to pay for a new stadium. Mr. Justice said that while the school dreams of a smaller, more intimate playing facility, they know it comes with a big cost. “There is definitely a desire to have something more intimate,” Mr. Justice said. “However we have to get to a point where we’re somewhat successful, we can't just throw money out there. With the Braves moving up north, maybe we could end up using that space, but we also have to decide Do we want to spend money on that?”
One of the main ways a team that is just starting up like GSU can make money is by playing in “guarantee games.” A guarantee game is a game where a large “power five conference” school will pay a smaller, non power five school to come play them at their stadium and likely get beat by a ton.
GSU has played in a couple guarantee games, most notably against Tennessee in 2012, and against Clemson this past season. Mr. Justice says there are many positives to playing in those games. “For our team to play in from of 100k people, its an experience for them,” he said. “You remember those experiences many years from now.”
He also sees these games as a learning opportunity for the team and athletic department. “When you look at what some of the bigger schools have, you can look at that and say how do we do something like this?” he said. “So there is the opportunity to learn from these games as well.”
However the biggest pro is still the payout that comes with playing in the game. “I think its a win if you can drive to a game and get paid 900k to play and say it cost 100k for travel and team amenities, because theres the ability to profit off of that,” Mr. Justice said. “That guarantee game kind of offsets the cost of travel for other sports too, because the money we make from that game goes into the athletic budget. It helps with other teams that aren’t making money.”
GSU does guarantee game’s in baseball, softball, and other sports as well. Some games will offer to pay for teams meals or hotel rooms, which is another sort of guarantee. However there are still cons, as Mr. Justice explained, “ The cons are that you are playing a program that has more resources and talent than you,” he said. “Injuries are also always a concern.”
For that reason Mr. Justice said that GSU usually like to only play in one guarantee game each year. “You could lose a key player and then not have the depth to replace that player like the bigger teams have, which can affect you in conference play which are games you need to win,” Mr. Justice said. “If you go into conference play with already two losses, then lose maybe three or four conference games, than you’re already at six losses. You don't want to stack the deck against yourself.”
Life as a “mid major.”
The SEC, ACC, Big 10, Pac-12, and Big 12 have been known throughout history as the “power-five” conferences. Everyone else has fallen into the category of being a “non-power five” team. GSU is a non-power five team that plays in the Sun Belt Conference. The difference between the power five and non power five is largely financial. “You know you have the Texas’ and teams like that who have a 60 million dollar budget, then you have everyone else,” Mr. Justice said.
Lots of times there can be a large disparity just between teams in the power five, and even between teams in same conference. “You know from say Wake Forest to Alabama, there's a disparity of maybe 20 million dollars and thats a lot of money when you’re trying to compete,” Mr. Justice said. “You look at us in our own conference, we’re better off than some teams in our own conferences, so there disparity even between our own conference.”
Another non-power five team was the University of Alabama-Birmingham Blazers. The Blazers made national news when the school announced it would be shutting down its football program due to a lack of funds to pay for the team. This decision was met with angry backlash from fans, students, and donors who said they had not even been contacted about helping save the team.
I spoke with both Mr. Justice and Mr. Robertson about this event, and if they thought it could potentially be a situation that GSU would have to face. Both could not see a scenario in the near future where something like that would happen. “President Becker is very supportive of of our athletic association, very supportive of football. He wants to make football work, which is huge,” Mr. Justice said. “I think we have some growing pains, I think we have to continue to grow in a way that shows we are serious about football, but don't go crazy spending.”
Mr. Robertson said he thought it would take a major change in either the school or athletic administration before GSU shut football down, which confirmed Mr. Justice’s point about having a supportive administration. It would take a lot,” Mr. Robertson said. “They would have to only win like one game a year, and I think there would have to be a change in leadership for that to happen.”
The road ahead
GSU coach Trent Miles has a tough task ahead
Credit: http://www.ajc.com/news/sports/college/georgia-state-fills-coaching-staff/nkPNb/
GSU is a young program that faces many challenges ahead. In order to win games, GSU needs to recruit good players, which can be impacted by the strength of the facilities and the amount of fans the school gets at their games.
Mr. Robertson sees facilities as one of the biggest challenges facing GSU football. Mr. Justice did mention that having nice facilities is helpful in recruiting, and they are currently looking to upgrade their facilities by building a new strength center adjacent to their practice fields. The facility is scheduled to open this fall, but they have not even broken ground yet.
According to a recent article written by Mr. Robertson, the university recently selected a firm to build this new facility. Now they need to agree on a price with the firm.
The Georgia Dome as the home field for the Panthers was another area where Mr. Robertson expressed concern. “The dome is nice when you get 30-40k people in it, but they obviously don't get that,” he said. “They will probably play in the new Falcons stadium for the first couple seasons it opens after the dome closes, which might help them attendance wise because they could get walk-in traffic of people who just want to see the new the new stadium without having to pay for Falcons tickets.”
Getting fans to come to the games is another challenge the team and the athletic department face. Last season, GSU’’s attendance at football games was ranked 119th out of the 129 FBS teams. “They didn't play a lot of quality teams at first so people didn’t go to games because of that,” Mr. Robertson said. “Now that they're in a league that people know about, the Sun Belt, which being in helps, but the results have still just been so poor that people are just not encouraged to come to the games.”
While the team has underperformed the last few seasons, they are still young, and early reports from their spring practices indicate significant improvement from last season. Mr. Justice believes that the team improving will go along well with the already exciting game day atmosphere they already have. “Its a good game day experience and we want people to come experience that,” he said. “We want to engage the whole downtown community even if you are not a GSU fan. I think we priced in a way that games are not that expensive to come to, and you're going to have a good seat”
Next season GSU opens up against the Charlotte 49ers, who are embarking on their first season as an FBS school, a situation the Panthers know all too well. They will travel out to Oregon to play in another guarantee game midway through the season, before wrapping up the season with rival Georgia Southern.
Until then, the team will try to continue to improve and continue their quest to truly become “Atlanta’s team.”
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