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Welcome to the official headquarters of
SnookPac (Snooky’s Restaurant Political Action Committee), chaired by veteran
coffee drinker and football demiurge Erk Russell, who admits that one of the
most important qualifications for membership is a rear end to sit on.
“Our record as a political action group is not very good,” says Russell, who
hasn’t had a bad hair day since 1958. “We base most of our discussions on the
four F’s.”
Three of them are football, fishing and farming.
Anyway, one guy new to town went to the restaurant for a year and sat on the
fringes, looking at the lively SnookPac table from a safe distance, eager to
join but hesitant.
“He thought he had to earn the right to sit over here,” says Russell.
“Finally, one day he felt like he’d waited long enough, so he moved over to
the table. It didn’t take him long to realize that he had wasted a year.”
It didn’t take then Republican
gubernatorial candidate Guy Millner long to figure out that he’d wasted his
time in South Georgia one dark day in 1994 at Snooky’s. Millner proved he
didn’t know Erk Russell from Rosalind Russell by saying, “How ya doin’‚
coach?” to the wrong guy. In Georgia, it was a faux pas. In South Georgia, it
was a mortal sin.
Russell, who built his legend as Georgia’s defensive coordinator, went on to
build a national football power at Georgia Southern from scratch. That
trademark Yul Brynner haircut, a look Russell was sporting before anybody had
ever heard of Vince Dooley, is part of the legend.
“Haircuts had gone up to the unheard of price of $1, and the barber spent
most of his time trimming at my ears and nose,” says Russell, the most famous
bald man in Georgia history, though you could have fooled Millner. “Anyway, I
figured I’d save a dollar and do it myself. Old Jerry the barber was in here
one day, and I asked him how much he thought I saved in 40 years of cutting
my own hair. He said about $7,000 or $8,000. I think it was more than that.”
Russell and SnookPac regulars like Doug Lambert and Bruce Yawn meet at
Snooky’s just about every morning. In Yawn’s case, there isn’t much of a
choice, seeing as how he owns the joint.
“This restaurant gave him credibility,” says Yawn, nodding in Russell’s
direction. “We made him famous.”
Suspicion lingers that the exact opposite might be true, but Russell doesn’t
argue the point. On the contrary. He is quick to point out that some of the
best advice he ever received came free of charge at Snooky’s.
“Get
a lead and hold it,” says Russell, now 74. “That’s the secret to success.”
You can take off the hip waders now, because only half of Coach’s tongue is
in his cheek. See, Georgia Southern has held onto, and extended its lead and
has been ridiculously successful ever since Russell was appointed to build
the football program 20 years ago.
“Georgia Southern is the model,” says Bucky Wagner,
former GSU athletic director and the man who fetched Russell from Athens.
“This is how to build a Division I-AA football program.”
It’s a model other schools want to imitate.
Generally, small-time football programs just don’t make money. What they can
do is enhance a school’s marketability, boost enrollment and raise funds.
Especially if they win.
“Georgia Southern has a name
recognition around the country that other schools with football programs our
size don’t have,” says Sam Baker, now in his sixth year as GSU athletic
director. “When I interviewed for this job, I talked to my father in
Virginia. He stopped and thought for a second and said, ‘Georgia Southern?
Didn’t they have that bald-headed coach?’ Because of that bald head, people
around the country started to learn about us.”
Building
the Model
In 1978, Georgia Southern President Dale Lick began toying with the idea of
resurrecting the football program, which had been dormant since 1941. Wagner
was hired in 1981.
“I was on the job about three days when he said we were definitely gonna
start a football program,” says Wagner. “I looked in his eyes and thought to
myself, ‘Oh hell, this guy really means it.’ He said we needed to raise
$250,000 to get the ball rolling.”
Ever try rolling a football? Well, a group of volunteers calling itself the
Dirty Dozen, which included Yawn, spent much of the spring of 1981 walking
the streets of Statesboro, asking for $5 or the odd sawbuck. If someone was
crazy enough to hand over $20, it was cause for celebration and running
quickly in the other direction, lest the giver demand change.
Meanwhile, Wagner was forming Southern Boosters, now the athletic
department’s official fund-raising arm, and hitting the lonesome highway.
“We held organizational meetings and solicited funds in about two dozen towns
throughout South Georgia,” says Wagner, who put a lot of miles on the
university’s 1978 Impala. “We raised $90,000 through those first town
meetings.”
Then the Southern Boosters kicked it into gear and began raising start-up
dollars, dough to buy and/or borrow used high school and college uniforms and
equipment. Russell’s hiring was announced in a May 1981 press conference. The
Bald Eagle had landed, but someone forgot the football.
“When we held the press conference, Bucky had to run across the street to
Kmart to buy a football, because we didn’t have one,” says Russell. “That was
the first big challenge.”
For Russell, getting players motivated was never a great challenge. Getting
the players was.
“We really didn’t have a game plan to follow,” says Russell, whose move to
South Georgia was something of a leap of faith, considering that he came from
a Bulldog program that had just won the national championship and was a
perennial SEC powerhouse. But he was anxious to get his hands around a
program of his own.
“Everything was unknown,” he says. “Our first recruiting budget was $2,000.
At Georgia, it was something like a quarter or half a million dollars.
“So we went down the woodpecker trail looking for players. It was two
full-time coaches and me. We put the word out that we were gonna have a
football program and told everyone who wanted to come out to bring his own
shoes.”
But this was a man who at UGA would motivate his players by bashing his
forehead against helmets during pregame tackling drills. Only Russell didn’t
have a helmet.
“Sometimes my head would bleed,” says Russell. “When it did, the players
seemed to like it, so we kept doing it.”
By the time Russell retired, following a perfect (15-0) 1989 season, the
Eagle football program was well-heeled.
In 1983, part-time Savannah resident Allen E. Paulson, breeder of champion
racehorses and founder of Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., donated the first $1
million toward the construction of Georgia Southern’s $4.7 million football
stadium, on land donated by former state Sen. Glenn Bryant. Paulson
contributed another $300,000 to match a community fund-raising project to
complete Allen E. Paulson Stadium, which opened on Sept. 29, 1984.
It
didn’t take long for lightning to strike. The Eagles won their first national
NCAA Division I-AA title in 1985. They added two more championships with
Russell and have won six in the 20 years since the program’s rebirth.
“Of course, it helped to have the right bald guy to get the team up and
going,” says John Mulherin, president of Southern Boosters, which has grown
to 2,100 members and has so far contributed $30 million to Georgia Southern
athletics. “It wouldn’t have been possible without him.”
Naturally, Mulherin credits the university’s rapid growth during the Russell
years to success on the gridiron. Enrollment was steady at about 6,000 when
Russell arrived. By the time he retired, it had doubled. Today it’s 14,400.
“I started going to school here in 1983, and we had fewer than 6,000
students,” says Mulherin. “There were over 10,000 in 1988. Now, I don’t know,
but maybe it’s because the chemistry department got a lot better.”
Maybe, but with all due respect to GSU’s fine chemistry department, it’s X’s
and O’s — the ABCs of football — that have an economic impact of $2.3 million
on home-game Saturdays, according to a study completed last year by the
university’s Bureau of Business Research and Economic Development. The study
found that 45% of GSU students were influenced in their choice of school by
athletics, football in particular.
“We looked at the impact of putting on games, how that ripples through the
region’s economy and influences people,” says bureau director Dr. Phyllis
Isley. “We found that for 88% of our students, athletics contributed to their
awareness of the university.
“As an educator, I can say that it only had a slight influence on their final
choice,” she says. “But when people are choosing a school, like when they’re
choosing a car, they look at a lot of different things. The school that’s
right for them is going to have a menu that appeals to them, and athletics is
part of that menu.”
The Caste System
NCAA member institutions are divided into three divisions – I, II and III.
Division I schools that have a football program are classified as I-A or
I-AA. Division I-A programs are more elaborate and must meet minimum stadium
attendance requirements. Division I-A football programs can earn millions in
television contracts, licensing fees and conference revenue distributions.
These are the Tennessees, the Georgias, the Penn States, the Southern Cals of
college athletics.
In Divisions I-AA, II and III, by contrast, student activity fees are the
meal ticket.
Each year, member institutions provide an analysis of revenues and expenses
to the NCAA. For the 1999-2000 school year, GSU’s athletic department
reported $2,984,381 in revenue from student activity fees – almost half of
the athletic department’s $6 million budget. GSU students pay $294 per
semester in activity fees, $118 of which goes directly toward athletics. Last
year, the GSU athletic department had $6,800,000 in total revenue. GSU
athletics derived no revenue at all from television and radio and $16,667 in
Southern Conference revenue distributions – pocket change compared to such
SEC schools as Georgia and Florida, which received an average of $6.5 million
each from the conference in 2000-2001.
For smaller programs, activity fees, along with ticket sales and booster
bucks, make all the difference.
“In Division II, we live almost exclusively on student activity fees,” says
Ed Murphy, athletic director at the University of West Georgia, which revived
its football program 20 years ago. West Georgia football operates on a budget
of about $700,000 a year – less than Georgia Southern ($1.1 million) and
Valdosta State ($780,000).
West Georgia’s full-time students will pay $117 in athletics fees beginning
this fall semester. Valdosta students paid $101 last fall.
The student activity fees are part of the circle of life for small-time
college football. More students equals more money for football, and football
equals more students for the college. Get it?
“Each year our football program has 75 to 100 students, the majority of whom
would not be at Valdosta State if there were no football program,” says VSU
Athletic Director Herb Reinhard. “And that doesn’t include the marching band
or the cheerleaders.”
VSU’s longtime and recently retired president, Hugh Bailey, made it his
mission to bring college football to the capital of high school football. In
fact, there have been times when the 20-year-old college program has felt
like it was in competition with mighty Valdosta High School. Some years the
high school outdraws the college. Many consider this to be the natural order
of things.
But VSU became a national Division II power in the 1990s and has held its own
at the box office, setting an attendance record last year with almost 8,000
fans per home contest, ranking the team among the Top 10 Division II draws in
the nation.
“The athletic director of another school in our conference (Gulf South) told
me that I was crazy to start a college team in Valdosta, that these people
were too devoted to high school football,” says Bailey. “To some extent, it
still is a high school town.
“We share a common stadium, but we continue to work together with the local
board of education, trying to build a joint facility. The negotiations
continue but it’s been as slow as steam rising.”
A local school board member once told Bailey that they couldn’t build another
stadium because it would offend the ghosts of Bazemore-Hyder Stadium. (Among
them are the formidable spirits of coaches Wright Bazemore and Nick Hyder,
who took the Wildcats to numerous state and national titles.) Bailey offered
to move the ghosts himself.
There
are 13 college football programs in the state of Georgia and 11 of them are small
(not Division I-A). Most are Division II: Albany State, Clark Atlanta, Fort
Valley State, Morehouse, Valdosta State and West Georgia.
Former Division II institutions Savannah State and Morris Brown are making
the move to I-AA this year, which means they must sponsor more sports to
comply with NCAA requirements. It also means they can offer more athletic
scholarships. Division II schools are limited to 36 scholarships for
football. At I-AA the figure jumps to 63. It costs more, but it’s worth every
penny according to those who are making the leap.
“It’s going to help our marketing tremendously,” says Athletic Director
Russell Ellington. “This will give us more exposure. The first thing a kid
wants to do now is play in Division I.
“Things were getting stagnant in Division II for us. We couldn’t generate any
revenue and couldn’t get into any of the football classics popping up around
the country.”
Morris Brown has applied for membership in three conferences so far, but will
play football as an independent this fall.
For Savannah State, the reasoning sounds a bit more intuitive.
“We saw that our destiny lay elsewhere,” says SSU President Carlton Brown.
“We historically pursue our destiny, leaping boldly into the future with
little regard for own safety. Our leaps of faith have resulted in our best
landings.”
Sounds noble, but the bottom line is SSU was dissatisfied with its Division
II conference, the SIAC (Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference).
“We were making all the noise and money we could in Division II,” says Brown,
whose school’s football history dates back to 1902. “And we did not believe
the conference was doing all that it could for us.”
Meanwhile, over in Athens, UGA is paying fired head coach Jim Donnan a
dismissal bonus of $255,000 — more than twice the salary of Georgia Southern
Head Coach Paul Johnson ($95,247 in 1999-2000), who is working on his third
consecutive national championship. Not to mention the $2.1 million UGA is
paying Donnan to buy out the remaining years on his contract.
Then
again, Statesboro ain’t Athens.
But Georgia Southern today gleams like the top of Russell’s head. Over the
past 10 years, about $150 million has been invested in new buildings and
improvements on the 634-acre campus. GSU is cranking up a new school of
information technology, and President Dr. Bruce Grube vows to take GSU to a
new level of academic excellence (see page 82). Academic purists may argue —
Don’t they argue about everything? — but football plays a considerable role.
“When Coach Russell started the football program, and we had some success,
enrollment really took off,” says Athletic Director Baker. “During one span,
this was the fastest-growing college in America. We had to do things to meet
the academic needs of those students. The number of professors increased, and
that meant more facilities.
“Alumni who haven’t been here in 10 years come back and marvel,” he says.
They come back to marvel at Adrian Peterson, the superb Eagle fullback who
can stumble out of bed and pick up a first down. Or they gape at the
championship trophies on display in the lobby of the new $1.1 million Dan J.
Parrish Sr. Football Center, home of the Eagle brain trust. Or maybe they
gawk at the pretty coeds (twice as many as there used to be, and according to
Russell, all of ’em rich) and gaze at the school buildings, retail centers
and restaurants that didn’t exist 20 or even 10 years ago.
“They oughta just take a picture of Erk and Bucky,” says local hotel owner
and loyal SnookPac member Doug Lambert, “hang it at the Chamber of Commerce
and call that the economic development plan.”
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