On Aug. 31, the Reinhardt Eagles will face the Mercer Bears in the first college football game for Reinhardt and the first for Mercer since 1941. The game will mean that four Georgia colleges have taken up the sport (or renewed it) since 2010 — Georgia State kicked off that year; Point University, formerly Atlanta Christian College, did so last season — with Kennesaw State set to open next fall.
Given that Georgia is mad for the gridded game, it makes sense that institutions of higher learning would want their student-athletes to play it. It makes sense in the way that picking up a guitar was the thing to do in the ’60s and lifting a tennis racket was all the rage in the ’70s. Football is cool. Everyone wants to be cool, even those too cool to admit it.
But not every guitar-slinger became Jimi Hendrix, and not everyone who wielded a Wilson T2000 morphed into Jimmy Connors. Coolness isn’t always transferable. And here we wonder if there’s indeed a niche for so many football programs. Does pigskin have a saturation point?
This isn’t to suggest that schools shouldn’t try. Having a successful sports team is an easy way to gain publicity. (Had anyone heard of Florida Gulf Coast before the 2013 NCAA tournament?) Alums like the notion of having football, and marketing departments see opportunities. But the risk for every start-up is: Who’ll care enough to pay to watch?
Greg Manning, who was Georgia State’s athletic director from 1999 through 2004, never wanted the Panthers to take up football. His reasoning: Nearly everyone who enrolled at Georgia State already had chosen a bigger name to back, be it Georgia or Georgia Tech, Alabama or Auburn, Florida or FSU. At best, the football-playing Panthers would be a GSU student’s second-favorite team.
If a school wants to give the gridded game a go, more power to it. But such schools must realize they’ll be fighting the current. Georgia Southern made a place for itself because it was coached by Erk Russell and because it won Division I-AA (now FCS) championships, but there aren’t many Erks. Even as we wish Mercer and Reinhardt luck on their maiden voyages, we must also affix the kicker: They’ll need all they can get.
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