Statesboro, the home of Georgia Southern, is the farthest Tech will travel all season. In Conference USA, the Bulldogs regularly traveled to El Paso, a city closer to the Pacific Ocean than to Ruston. Not to mention reaching as far as Newark, Delaware and Miami, Florida. After four years playing that schedule, seniors left Louisiana Tech with a diploma and Platinum Medallion status.
And the farthest Louisiana Tech travels all season is also the last thing it does, as the Sun Belt put it on November 28th. So that means we’ll need to wait nearly a full football season before having any shot of adding to these reasons to hate Georgia Southern.
Reason 1: Two Streaks, One Swoop
Grievance Rating: 8/10
Heading into the 2020 New Orleans Bowl, Louisiana Tech had two streaks on the line. Six straight years with a bowl win, and nine straight victories over Sun Belt opponents.
But Georgia Southern ended both streaks in one 38-3 swoop.
The game was never close. Georgia Southern QB Shai Werts ran for three touchdowns and threw a 65-yard touchdown pass, while playing through a shoulder injury. The Eagles ran for 322 yards. Aaron Allen and JD Head combined for four interceptions, including three deep inside Eagles territory.
It was one of the most embarrassing losses of the Skip Holtz era (although not #1), and marked the beginning of the end of his tenure in Ruston. And we could probably just end the blog post here if we wanted to.
Reason 2: Draining the Swamp
Grievance Rating: 4/10
In 2013, Georgia Southern’s final year as an FCS program, the Eagles bussed down to Gainesville and beat the Florida Gators 26-20.
Even more remarkable though is that Georgia Southern accomplished this feat without completing a pass. The Eagle offense put up 429 yards, just entirely on the ground. Only one of six times an FCS school has taken down an SEC opponent, and the Eagles managed it by playing like the forward pass had yet to be invented.
Seven years later they ran a softer version of the same gameplan on us (see above). And yeah, I can still be mad enough about that game to have it span two reasons like this.
Reason 3: From Professors to Poultry
Grievance Rating: 6/10
Georgia Southern has some endearing traditions that go back to their days of trying to restart a football team on a shoestring budget in 1982. The team rides to home games in yellow school buses the university bought off the local district for a dollar apiece, singing the whole way. There was no money for equipment, so the head coach bought plain blue helmets and had the players run a strip of white tape down the middle.
So it is a little surprising that one of the most tradition-forward athletic departments in this league picked its nickname out of a hat in 1959.
They were the Blue Tide from 1924 to 1941. After the war, when the school was still a teachers college, they were the Professors, which must have just been chaos in the classroom. Then in 1959 the school asked students to suggest a new nickname. 104 suggestions were sent in, and a committee picked the winner.
I found that 104 suggestions mentioned in a few places, and I really wanted to see what 1959’s version of Boaty McBoatface was. So I found the digitized copies of Georgia Southern’s student newspaper from the era. But nowhere was the full list published.
So now I’m mad that Georgia Southern adopted such a generic nickname, without any history attached, and that I wasted 45 minutes going through old newspapers.
Although I did find this gem just below the official sketch of the new team name:
And unlike the tease that was the 104 name options, I’ll do you the favor and show the results in the following week’s paper:
Do you think there’s pain behind that smile?
Reason 4: Strong-Arming Armstrong
Grievance Rating: 6/10
Armstrong Junior College, later Armstrong State University, opened in Savannah in 1935, founded by the mayor during the Depression and housed in a donated mansion next to Forsyth Park. By the end it had about 5,000 students, a Division II athletic department, and a national reputation in health sciences. The state had formally designated it a Regional Health Professions Education Center.
But in January 2017 the Board of Regents approved consolidating Armstrong into Georgia Southern. It was carried out without student or faculty input. Armstrong took on Georgia Southern’s name, leadership, academics, and athletics. The combined school became the fourth largest public university in Georgia.
The official reasoning was cost savings and enrollment. But I want to dive into the conspiracies. One holds that Georgia Southern wanted Armstrong’s nursing and health sciences programs, the crown jewel of the Savannah-based school. Another holds that Georgia Southern had money problems and a merger was the cleanest way out of them.
What we do know is that this didn’t come out of nowhere. In 1990 the Regents designated Georgia Southern the regional university for southeast Georgia and gave it authority over every graduate program in the region, Armstrong’s included. For the next 27 years, Armstrong’s own master’s degrees were awarded by Georgia Southern in affiliation with Armstrong.
From Statesboro this was a strategic win. From Savannah this was a comic book villain plot. A bigger school 60 miles inland spends decades quietly absorbing your degree programs, until it devours you completely.
And it may not be over. Galactus Georgia Southern must be fed. In 2025 the Chancellor recommended consolidating East Georgia State College into Georgia Southern.
Reason 5: The Main Main Main Main Event
Grievance Rating: 3/10
In December of 1864, the right wing of Sherman’s Union army came through Bulloch County on the way to Savannah. An officer stopped at a saloon and asked for directions to Statesboro. The proprietor informed him he was standing in the middle of it.
The town’s courthouse, which doubled as a barn when court was not in session, was razed. The army that had just leveled Atlanta needed quite a bit less kindling to burn Statesboro to the ground.
When the town finally got going around the turn of the century, stores and banks went up along four major streets, and each, trying to sound important, named themselves Main Street.
Today they all still exist as North Main, South Main, East Main and West Main, and all four carry their own individual listings on the National Register of Historic Places, added in 1989. You can stand downtown at the corner of Main, Main, Main, and Main
I mean, after all, no Union soldier could ever again mistake downtown Statesboro for open pasture.
Reason 6: The Chicken Came First
Grievance Rating: 4/10
In March 1990, two childhood friends named Zach McLeroy and Tony Townley opened a restaurant across from the Georgia Southern campus. They called it Zax, later changed to what we now know as Zaxbys.
Louisiana’s own Raising Cane’s wouldn’t open their doors until 1996, but I think we can all agree which makes the better chicken fingers.
Well, neither of them really invented anything. Both were running the Guthrie’s playbook, a small Alabama chain that dropped everything but chicken fingers back in 1982.
And again, Cane’s is just objectively better, and everyone knows it. Zaxbys’ expansion has stalled out across a mostly southeastern footprint while Raising Cane’s more than doubled its store count over the same span.
A chain that puts a Z in everything came in first and still managed to finish lazt.
The Rematch
In 1928, Blind Willie McTell recorded the song “Statesboro Blues” about his hometown. The Allman Brothers Band performed the version everybody knows, and it turned into one of the definitive slide guitar performances in American rock music.
It is a magnificent song, but it is a song about waking up in Statesboro feeling terrible.
Ninety seven years later, Georgia Southern’s president chaired the Sun Belt board when the league voted Louisiana Tech in. He said publicly that when the time came to add a member, it was clear Louisiana Tech was the right fit.
And on November 28th, that right fit might just give Eagles fans a reason to wake up the next morning with the Statesboro Blues.