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August 2010
The F Word (Preview)
Georgia State University finally has a football team. So who's gonna win?
By Charles Bethea
Head coach Bill Curry / Christopher T. Martin
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Once upon a time, in the middle of the capital city of the South, there
was a university without a football team. This is a fact, true as the
field is a hundred yards long, almost too strange to believe. Football,
of course, is more than a sport around here. It’s a fever. It’s
religion. It’s the prophets Bobby Dodd and Vince Dooley and the
archangels Herschel Walker and Calvin Johnson. It’s Rick Bragg’s
metaphorical “knife fight in a ditch,” and the reason that very real
beer bottles are thrown across the Library bar in Athens at 1:45 on
certain fall mornings. It’s a language for describing life, and a way of
living it. “Dawgs football,” says Han Vance, author of the popular
University of Georgia fan site Big Hairy Blawg, “is pure poetry on the
level of Shakespeare.”
It’s also big money. Last December, Forbes estimated that the University of Texas’s football team, the most valuable college program in the country by Forbes’
accounting, was worth $119 million to its university, athletics
department, conference, and the city of Austin. The University of
Georgia’s football program placed ninth on this noticeably Southern
list—down from third in 2007—with an estimated value of $84 million.
But we’re not talking about UGA, or Georgia Tech, or even Valdosta
State. We’re talking about Georgia State University. Currently the
second-largest university in the state of Georgia, steadily gaining on
UGA with roughly 30,000 students, Georgia State has suffered its share
of indignities: What’s a Southern university without a grassy quad and a
pregame kegger? It’s not just a rhetorical question; it’s an economic
one.
Calling itself “the Southeast’s leading urban research institution,”
Georgia State is now anxious to rise from the fourth tier of U.S. News & World Report’s
academic excellence rankings, the magazine’s lowest university
category, and rid itself of a few sticky epithets: “commuter school,”
“concrete campus,” and, subtlest of all, “basketball school.” These
labels rile the school’s president, Mark Becker, much as they did his
predecessor, Dr. Carl Patton, who retired in 2008.
“Yes, we were once a commuter school oriented toward evening and
part-time programs,” says Becker, who came to Georgia State by way of
Penn State and the University of Michigan, both of which won football
national championships while he was around. “But we now have the full
palette for a traditional undergraduate: They can live on campus, and
there’s a complete athletics program with football on Saturdays.” It
sounds like such a simple thing. Yet when the Panthers, who will
eventually play in the Colonial Athletic Association, line up against
Shorter University for the first game on September 2, it will have taken
Georgia State ninety-seven years to play NCAA football. And its home
field? A cozy little place off Northside Drive called the Georgia Dome.
Georgia State will be competing on Downtown’s biggest stage, before many
of the city’s most powerful players. And as William Pate, president of
the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau, and A.J. Robinson,
president of Central Atlanta Progress, watch the Panthers from sweet
seats, they’ll have at least as much at stake as the padded players:
Downtown wants respect, too. Tourism brings more than 35 million
visitors to Atlanta annually, accounting for $11 billion in visitor
spending. But only $429 million was spent Downtown in 2007, and that
number includes tourists, workers, and residents. A successful college
football team in its midst—with a much bigger alumni fanbase than
Georgia Tech’s—would drum up even more business, the thinking goes.
Carl Patton, who understood the importance of the relationship between
school and city, began Georgia State’s continuing transformation into “a
real university,” as more students and local alumni are starting to
refer to it. Projects such as the $142 million Parker H. Petit Science
Center, a 350,000-square-foot facility unveiled in March, and the $168
million University Commons, a 4.2-acre complex opened in 2007 that
boards 2,000 students, have enhanced Georgia State’s physical identity
and sense of community and have helped the university command a
higher-caliber student. On-campus Greek housing, which opened this
summer, will also attract younger, full-time, “traditional” college
kids. But football, Georgia State believes, is still the linchpin.
“Right or wrong, football is king,” says Tom Lewis, senior vice
president for external affairs under Patton, and now senior adviser to
President Becker. “And it will remain king in the South.”
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