Georgia State will get its first taste of Rocky Top next season.
That’s right, the Panthers will play at Tennessee in college football on Sept. 8. Georgia State will receive $500,000 for the game. The Panthers received more than $425,000 for their trip to play Alabama last season.
It will be the third FBS (formerly Division I-A) team the Panthers will play in their short history, joining the Tide and the upcoming game against Houston on Sept. 24. It also underlines coach Bill Curry’s belief that the players and team won’t grow unless they are challenged.
“Are these things going to help leapfrog our program, or are they going hinder it? I’ve always felt like we are better off to play them,” Curry said.
He said the advantages are obvious: financial gain, attention and most important, memories.
“I still get people coming up saying, ‘Thanks for taking us to Tuscaloosa,’” he said.
Curry is familiar with cavernous Neyland Stadium, which seats more than 100,000 people, from his time as a player at Georgia Tech, head coach at Alabama and Kentucky and an ESPN commentator.
However, he said he hopes his team plays better than he did in his first collegiate action, which occurred at the stadium.
He entered the game as a long-snapper on a punt attempt because the starting center had just gotten hurt. Curry had recently gotten a cast removed from his right hand and was nervous.
He got into his crouch and looked back. The punter, Billy Lothridge, looked like he was a mile away.
“I better snap this really hard,” he remembers thinking.
He jokes that his snap set a stadium record by sailing 35 yards down the field.
His wife, Carolyn, who he said isn’t emotional, burst into tears and to this day has never watched another long snap, and Curry was a long-snapper for 10 years and his son, Bill Jr., was a long-snapper at Virginia, where he played with current Tennessee coach Derek Dooley.
So, while Neyland Stadium is old hat for Curry, he wants his players to savor every moment of playing in one of college football’s grand cathedrals, just as some of them did at Tuscaloosa.
“I thought they would be intimidated during warm-ups,” he said. “Instead they were teary-eyed. They were grateful.”
