It is a tad over 400 miles to the furthest of Tech’s newest Sun Belt West compatriots, Troy. That’s the entirety of Mississippi west-to-east, and enough of Alabama that the joke of playing Sweet Home Alabama on loop in the car has officially gone from funny to annoying back to funny again.
And on November 7th, the Bulldog football team will make the trip to Troy for the first in the history of either school.
But this one is different. Every entry in this series so far has been a reunion. We knew ULM. We knew the Cajuns. We had a hundred years of grudge with Southern Miss and a historical pairing with Arkansas State. But not Troy, Troy is a stranger.
So we are going to have to build this from scratch. Fortunately, they gave us plenty to work with.
Reason 1: Who Are You Again?
Grievance Rating: 5/10
Here is the complete athletic history between Louisiana Tech and Troy University:
Football: N/A.
Two schools playing football since the Taft administration, with only Mississippi between them, and not once did anybody pick up the phone.
Women’s Basketball: N/A.
Zero meetings, which is remarkable given the Lady Techsters have played, and beaten, nearly everyone who has ever bounced a ball.
Men’s Basketball: 1-0 Tech.
A neutral-floor game in Chattanooga in 2012 that Tech won and I assume celebrated at Clumpie’s Ice Cream.
Baseball: Troy leads 4-2.
But Troy is not a program we were avoiding because they were beneath us. Troy has won eight Sun Belt football championships, including five in a row from 2006 through 2010. They have taken three West Division titles in the last four years and played in last season’s Sun Belt Championship Game on the back of an eight-win year. In basketball they swept the Sun Belt regular season and tournament in both 2025 and 2026 and went to the NCAA Tournament each time. Georgia Tech thought enough of the operation to hire away their athletic director in July of 2025 and their basketball coach the following March.
And don’t even get me started about their baseball success.
So even though we are walking into a league where we have history with five of our six division mates, that sixth seems to be running the show as of late.
And, to make things worse, they scheduled us for Homecoming.
The empty record book is nobody’s fault, but that slight is entirely theirs.
Reason 2: Des-TROY-ing LSU
Grievance Rating: 8/10
Although they’ve never been to Ruston, Troy has been to Baton Rouge three times.
In 2004, the Trojans lost to LSU 24-20, which is already closer than Tech has played the Tigers in a century. In 2008 Troy traveled back to Death Valley, and even went as far as leading 31-3 in the third quarter, just to watch LSU score the last 37 points to win 40-31, which is somehow both a loss and a flex. Then in 2017 Troy went into Tiger Stadium (perhaps for the last time ever) and won 24-21, ending a 49-game LSU non-conference home winning streak.
Meanwhile, Louisiana Tech has beaten LSU once, 6-0 in 1904. We do get another crack at it this year, and if the Bulldogs pull off the impossible, the grievance rating here will retroactively plummet.
Reason 3: 258*
Grievance Rating: 3/10
On January 12, 1992, in a basketball game, Troy State beat DeVry Institute 258 to 141 to set an unbreakable record over a computer training school.
That remains the highest-scoring game in NCAA history at any level. The scoreboard at Troy’s Sartain Hall was understandably not built to display a number that large, so when the Trojans passed two hundred the hundreds column simply went dark and the thing started over. Thirteen records fell in one night. Troy made 102 field goals, and went 51 of 109 from 3. DeVry never attempted a free throw, because Troy only committed a single personal foul all game.
But in 2017, SB Nation’s Jon Bois went through a recording of the game basket by basket and came out with 253. The official score is five points too high.
You know, give those five back and 253 starts to look like a record that a hot shooting night could threaten, assuming Talvin Hester finds enough Jacobi Boykins clones in the transfer portal.
But at 258, it’s just impossible. And neither Troy nor the NCAA seem prepared to rectify their mistake.
Reason 4: Watch Out for Matt Damons
Grievance Rating: 6/10
Before it was Troy, the town was Deer Stand Hill. Then Zebulon. Then Centreville. It settled on Troy in 1838, and the leading theories credit either Troy, New York or a North Carolina attorney general named Alexander Troy. So not a reference to Christopher Nolan’s 2026 completely original movie.
The team’s odyssey to find their identity took a bit longer. From 1909 to 1930 they cycled through the Teachers, the Normalites, and even the Bulldogs. In the 1930s the school hired a coach named Albert Elmore, an Alabama man, and he renamed them the Red Wave, a straight up knock-off of the Crimson Tide. Then, in the 1970s, seeking a more unique identity, Troy became the Trojans.
The Trojans. Of Troy. That is not a nickname, that’s a demonym. It is just about as straightforwardly obvious as an NFL team going by the “Houston Texans.” Or naming the mascot of Troy “T-Roy.”
Worse yet, the Trojans lost! Sorry for the spoiler alert, but that is the entire story. The single most famous fact about Troy is that Troy fell, and it fell because somebody wheeled a large wooden horse through the front gate. Between that and giving up 141 points to DeVry, I’m starting to think this school may not think too much about defensive tactics.
Reason 5: A Remarkable Number of Troys Have Fallen Recently
Grievance Rating: 3/10
For decades, Troy was in the business of building more Troys. There was a campus in Montgomery, fifty miles northwest. A campus in Dothan, sixty miles southeast. A campus in Phenix City, which grew out of a satellite office at Fort Benning in 1974. And a network of teaching sites reaching across seventeen states and eleven countries.
Every last one of those is named Troy. Troy University at Montgomery. Troy University at Dothan. None of them are in Troy. The name traveled and the town stayed home.
But now, the empire is contracting hard. The Board of Trustees voted in 2025 to close the 50-year-old Phenix City campus just ten years after opening a new $11.5 million building there.
On top of that, the campuses in North Carolina, Virginia, and the Pacific Region were already gone, and the campuses in Florida, Georgia and Tennessee were all slated to close by the end of 2025. That is nine campuses shut down in one stretch.
That is not a university, that’s a failing franchise. A school is supposed to be a place. Maybe a satellite center or two to support the local community. But instead Troy treated its name like signage, hung it wherever the enrollment was, and took it back down when the numbers moved.
Troy spent decades chasing dollars from extension courses at military bases only to be undermined by the rise of online schooling. They offered their first online course in 1997, which means this time they built the horse themselves.
Reason 6: Be Kind, Rewind the Name Change
Grievance Rating: 4/10
Veterans Memorial Stadium opened in 1950, named for the students of Troy State Teachers College and the residents of Pike County who died in the Second World War.
But after HealthSouth founder Richard M. Scrushy funded much of the 1998 expansion, the school named the playing surface after him. That arrangement, let’s say, “aged poorly” when Scrushy was forced out of HealthSouth amid one of the largest accounting scandals in American corporate history. The field quietly became Larry Blakeney Field in 2011, named for the winningest coach in school history, and has not (at least yet) been forced out of a Fortune 500 company.
Then, in 2003, Troy sold the naming rights to the stadium itself to Movie Gallery, a Blockbuster competitor. It was one of the first times a program at this level sold the name of an on-campus stadium to a private business.
Movie Gallery filed Chapter 7 on April 30, 2010 and had closed every store in the country by August. Meaning Troy missed out on roughly $3.75 million of the contract.
So not only did Troy sell out twice on their naming rights, they ended up burned in the process and ended up right back at Veterans Memorial Stadium, a name that really never should have been dropped to begin with.
Reason 7: A Better Troy Story
Grievance Rating: -2/10
August 29, 1998. Memorial Stadium, Lincoln, Nebraska. The Cornhuskers had won three national championships in four years and were breaking in a season opener against Louisiana Tech.
Why do I bring this up in a post about Troy? Because Troy Edwards caught twenty-one passes for 405 yards and three touchdowns in that game.
It is still the FBS record. It has stood for twenty-eight seasons and, like the Trojans’ basketball record, it is not particularly close to falling. The closest anyone has come since is Jeremy Gallon’s 369 for Michigan against Indiana in 2013, and that is still thirty-six yards short.
Edwards finished that year with 140 catches, 1,996 yards and 27 touchdowns. The touchdown number is also still the FBS record. He won the Biletnikoff Award as the best receiver in America, made consensus All-American, and went to the Steelers with the thirteenth pick of the 1999 draft. So who needs Troy University when we had Troy Edwards?
The Non-Reunion
Before every home game in Troy, the public address announcer reads from Julius Caesar and thirty thousand people in Pike County shout one word back at him: “Havoc!”
It is a genuinely cool tradition. Loud, theatrical, the kind of thing that makes a Saturday feel like something. It is also, if you know the line that the PA reads, an invitation.
“Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.”
And on November 7th, in front of a homecoming crowd in Troy, Alabama, the Bulldogs might just let slip through “the lines for a touchdown or two.”