‘Pay to play’ era favors blue-bloods. Why is this Georgia G5 ‘bullish’ on future?
No huddle: How Georgia’s top-tier college football programs are navigating the fast-changing competitive landscape
College sports is fast becoming professionalized. Star quarterbacks and pass rushers now attract 7-figure paychecks through revenue-sharing deals with their schools. Players in search of better compensation or playing time can now switch teams through a quasi-free agency process known as the transfer portal. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution will explore how Georgia schools at various competition levels are navigating this changing landscape in this periodic series.
Today: Georgia Southern, tradition-rich but under-resourced, is “bullish” on its future at college football’s highest level.
STATESBORO ― They arrived at the jobsite on the edge of the Georgia Southern campus in pickups loaded with gravel, haulers pulling earth-moving equipment on trailers and dump trucks and box trucks packed with surplus building materials. They came late in the afternoons and on weekends. They carried shovels and brandished hammers.
The workmen weren’t members of construction crews. They were local community members, alumni and university faculty and staff. The year was 1983, and Georgia Southern was building a stadium for its start-up football program, one led by the bald-headed, cigar-chomping coaching legend, Erk Russell.
The 15,000-seat venue was to open for the 1984 season, and every person attached to Georgia Southern who lived within driving distance was determined to supplement the work of the professionals to meet the schedule.
Paulson Stadium opened for the fifth game of the 1984 season, and the Eagles would quickly become one of the college football’s unlikeliest success stories. Now, four decades later, Georgia Southern President Kyle Marrero still hears from those volunteer laborers.
“Somebody will tell me, ‘I helped build Paulson Stadium,’ and I used to think that meant they gave money or something,” said Marrero, who just began his seventh year leading the university. “No, they literally helped build the first iteration of what we’ve become. Obviously, there’s a pride in ownership here.”
That spirit, embodied in Erk Russell’s “GATA” (“Get After Their Asses”) rallying cry, has come to define the climb of the Eagles’ football program. From startup to small college powerhouse to mid-major upset-maker, the one-time rural ag school has had the community and alumni support — via checkbooks, not backhoes — to be competitive.
Now comes the biggest commitment test yet.
Schools can pay players for the first time, and Georgia Southern and its peers that compete outside the marquee conferences, known as the Group of 5 or G5, will need an unprecedented financial injection to contend at college football’s highest level.
This story is the initial installment in a periodic season-long series looking at how Georgia Southern is navigating this changing college sports landscape.
College sports changing landscape, a primer
A decade ago, federal courts ruled that the NCAA’s long-held amateurism rules were an unlawful restraint of trade. The O’Bannon v. NCAA ruling was the first of several legal decisions that led to a tsunami of changes, Here’s what to know.
O’Bannon v. NCAA: The former UCLA basketball star sued the NCAA after an NCAA licensee, EA Sports, used O’Bannon’s likeness in a video game without sharing profits from the sale of the game with the player. The courts ruled in O’Bannon’s favor, clearing the way for college players to sign sponsorship or name, image and likeness (NIL) deals. The decision also prompted the NCAA to expand the value of a scholarship to include the full cost of attendance, with up to $5,000 to cover miscellaneous expenses.
The new costs are staggering. Schools can spend up to $20.5 million per year on players. And that compensation is only part of the new financial reality. The NCAA expanded roster sizes, too, giving Georgia Southern the option to award as many as 174 additional scholarships. And a lawsuit settlement mandates backpay for student-athletes who competed between 2016 and 2024, although those effects are expected to be muted in the short-term.
G5 schools lack the revenue resources of the Georgias, Clemsons and Ohio States. Those powers, buoyed by TV rights money, will spend the $20.5 million on player compensation and fund an additional 100 or more scholarships for their expanded rosters. This has prompted an “existential crisis” for Georgia Southern and its less financially flush peers — literal “have-nots” to the powerhouse “haves.”
Some G5s have already slashed budgets or are reportedly considering dropping out of college football’s most competitive tier. Others are positioning to generate more revenue in hopes of becoming greater players in big-time college football.
Georgia Southern, true to its GATA roots, is among those leaning in.
Administrators have pledged to elevate the Eagles’ football program without eliminating non-revenue producing sports, cutting existing scholarships or increasing student athletic fees.
Georgia Southern leaders are “bullish” on its competitive future, said Athletic Director Chris Davis. “We’re on a rocket ship.”
Fans can ‘follow their passions’ in giving
The Eagles’ college football moonshot is well-fueled. Since the ease of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in 2021, Georgia Southern’s athletic brass has prioritized expanding or developing new revenue streams.
The business-minded Davis led that charge alongside his mentor and predecessor as athletic director, Jared Benko — with plenty of involvement from the affable and seemingly omnipresent Marrero, the school’s president. By the time Benko left to be Auburn’s No. 2 athletics administrator last October, Georgia Southern had left the fundraising launchpad.
The Georgia Southern Athletic Foundation set a fundraising record for the third consecutive year in recently concluded fiscal year 2025 and has raised about $41 million from donors over the last four years. Seven-figure gifts are now an annual occurrence. And Georgia Southern is likewise seeing revenue growth in licensing and sports properties, such as paid logos on the Paulson Stadium turf.
The Eagle Nation Collective, a private business established two years ago by booster Leonard Bevill and about 15 friends to fund name, image and likeness (NIL) opportunities for Georgia Southern’s star athletes, recently became part of the Athletic Foundation. Now known as the Eagle Nation Fund, the booster club will contribute much of the estimated $1.1 million to $1.5 million Georgia Southern will put toward player compensation, which they call licensing fees, this academic year. Davis aims to grow that pot by at least $1 million each year.
That’s far from $20.5 million that college athletics’ blue bloods will distribute this year, Davis acknowledges. But then Georgia Southern’s revenue, projected at $8.3 million this school year, is a fraction of the $125 million expected by the state’s college athletics powerhouse, Georgia. And the Bulldogs’ athletic fundraising arm collects around $100 million a year, 10 times Georgia Southern’s recent average.
Another measure of where Georgia Southern stands on player compensation is in comparison to its G5 peers. Projections top out around $6 million for schools in sizable media markets, such as Las Vegas and Memphis. But even the Eagles biggest Sun Belt Conference rivals, Georgia State and Appalachian State, are projected to outspend them.
To Davis, though, the sustainability of Georgia Southern’s player compensation funding mechanism is contingent on a significant expansion in Georgia Southern’s donor base. Even with record-setting fundraising last fiscal year, only about 3,500 of the school’s 162,000 living alumni gave to athletics.
The Athletic Foundation’s recent successes have convinced Davis he can reach a “meter-moving” number of those other graduates — an alumni base growing each year as graduating classes now surpass 4,000 students. But rather than push them toward the Eagle Nation Fund and its focus on player compensation, the approach is to give prospective new donors options for investment through what is called the Eagle Victory Plan.
The Eagle Victory Plan explained
Georgia Southern donors have five options in giving to the athletics program. Here’s what each of the buckets in the Eagle Victory Perch Plan funds.
- Erk Russell Fund: Scholarships
- Eagle Nation Fund: Player compensation
- Competitive Excellence Fund: Retention bonuses and pay increases for coaches, staff
- Capital Projects Fund: New athletic facilities and facility enhancements
- Sport-specific Agency Fund: Team-specific uses
The program allows donors to designate their giving for five specific uses: scholarships, facilities, coach and staff retention, sport-specific improvements and player compensation. The strategy is to tap into givers “passions,” Davis said, as they develop a greater comfort level with paying players.
“A lot of fans and alumni didn’t understand NIL and how players make money when the collective started, and it’s hard to give money to something you don’t understand,” said Spence Mullis, president of the Georgia Southern Athletic Foundation. “The Eagle Victory Plan gives them a chance to get a better grasp of this new landscape and still give to athletics in some way.”
Erk Russell’s ‘lasting imprint’
Nothing wins over donors like wins on the field.
Georgia Southern opened its 43rd season of football on Labor Day weekend at Fresno State and played perennial power Southern Cal in the Los Angeles Coliseum on Saturday.
The Eagles are picked to finish second in the 14-team Sun Belt Conference in a preseason poll and have the most preseason all-conference players in the league. Twenty football players are paid to play at Georgia Southern. Third-year Head Coach Clay Helton is active in the transfer portal, signing 19 players since the end of the 2024 season.
One of Georgia Southern’s biggest recruiters — of both donors and players — foresees a new golden GATA era for the Eagles. College Football Hall of Famer Tracy Ham quarterbacked Georgia Southern’s first teams and won two Division I-AA national championships alongside Russell.
Ham now works for the athletic department. He senses fan pride and excitement surging in a way similar to that seen during the title winning years and then again in 2014 when the Eagles moved to college football’s highest tier and went undefeated in their first Sun Belt season.
He credits Russell’s “lasting imprint” for the recent fundraising success, as many of those who grew up or went to school during the Russell years are now at the peak earning stage of their lives. Ham also said that as college football has become more professionalized with the advent of the transfer portal, NIL and player compensation, Georgia Southern has taken an assertive yet measured approach that donors appreciate.
“No matter the level we’re playing at, we’ve stayed true to who and what we are,” Ham said. “That’s how we’ve always done it and it’s why we’ve been successful. The fans feel a very real ownership in the program.”
Georgia Southern football: A timeline
1981 — President Dale Lick announces plans to launch a football program and hires Erk Russell, the Georgia Bulldogs’ defensive coordinator, as head coach.
1982 — Georgia Southern plays its first season as a club team, finishing with a 7-3-1 record.
1983 – Construction begins on Paulson Stadium, a 15,000-seat on-campus playing venue.
1984 — Eagles begin competition at the Division I-AA level (now known as the Football Championship Subdivision) and play first season at Paulson Stadium.
1985 – Georgia Southern wins the first of six Division I-AA national championships.
1989 — Russell retires after the Eagles win their third national title.
2000 — Coach Paul Johnson, a Russell protégé, coaches Georgia Southern to its sixth and final Division I-AA national championship.
2013 — Georgia Southern announces move to college football’s highest competition level, the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), and begins a Paulson Stadium expansion that includes construction of a football program office/team complex.
2014 — The Eagles go undefeated in Sun Belt Conference play in their first season in FBS.
2015 — Georgia Southern plays in its first bowl game, the GoDaddy Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, and defeats Bowling Green 58-27.
2018 — The NCAA revises its rules to allow players to transfer schools without penalty and creates a transfer portal to facilitate the process.
2022 — Construction begins on the Anthony Tippins Family Training Facility, a roofed structure with open sides that allows the football team and other Eagle programs to practice in inclement weather.
2023 — The Eagle Nation Collective is formed by 20 Georgia Southern boosters shortly after the NCAA legalized name, image and likeness deals for players.
2025 — Georgia Southern begins paying players under the new NCAA revenue-sharing rules, bringing the Eagle Nation Collective under the umbrella of the Athletic Foundation.
About the Author
Adam Van Brimmer is a journalist who covers politics and Coastal Georgia news for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
