The first Saturday of bowl season proved every game matters

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When the winning head coach is on the turf in tears, you’re watching something special.

Updated bowl game scores and schedule here.

Fans of the winning school bawled in the stands. The winning head coach hugged his bawling family near midfield, then gave a post-game interview with bloodshot eyes. He gushed about his team’s character and perseverance.

You’d have thought you were watching a national title winner.

You weren’t — it was 2018 Camellia Bowl champion Georgia Southern and its head coach, Chad Lunsford.

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Last year, I wrote about the beauty of simply fielding a football team and how there will never, ever be too many bowl games for my liking.

There is an orchestral beauty to putting on a football game. There are players and coaches. Walk-ons. A grounds crew. A support staff back at the office. A radio crew. Someone to fly the planes or drive the buses. Someone to arrange for countless hotel rooms and keep track of tickets for family members. Team doctors. Someone to inflate the footballs.

Someone to get balls from the sideline to the referees (who had to get their assignments and find a way to the game from out of town) between plays. Someone to arrange for the head coach’s midweek call-in show. Fans to call in. Someone to tack the decals on the helmets and sew the names on the jerseys. Someone to track the play-by-play stats. The band, cheerleaders, and mascots. Someone to schedule the game. An opponent dealing with all the same logistical hurdles. Postgame meals. And then you do it at least 11 more times, all while someone checks to make sure all those players keep going to class.

Simply winning as many games as you lose and earning the right to go through the trouble of putting on a football game in Montgomery, Ala., or Albuquerque, N.M., is incredible for some schools or programs. It can mean a family vacation for fans or a pay raise for coaches.

For Georgia Southern this year, it meant even more.

Barely 14 months ago, the Eagles’ entire FBS experiment was a pile of rubble. After erupting for nine wins and the 2014 Sun Belt title in their first year in college football’s top subdivision, they won nine games again in 2015, but cracks were showing. They didn’t appear prepared to pony up and retain head coach Willie Fritz, and after nearly beating Georgia just two weeks earlier, they finished the regular season getting crushed by Georgia State— the school whose own FBS jump prompted theirs— and then losing Fritz to Tulane.

And then they learned the power of a bad hire. They hired former UCF defensive coordinator (and former GS assistant) Tyson Summers to spruce things up a bit. The 35-year-old wasn’t ready for the task. The Eagles began 2016 at 3-0 but lost seven of nine to end the season, then began 2017 with six straight losses.

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Panicked, the school fired Summers after just 18 games and appointed Lunsford, a GS lifer, the interim. The Georgia College alum, who has now spent half of his coaching career in Statesboro, did just enough. The Eagles won two of their last three games, and that was enough. He got the job full-time.

The free-falling program might have struggled to attract a ton of interesting outside coaches, so they went with the guy with a blue and white résumé and boundless love for the university.

In one year, GS went from 2-10 to 10-3.

The option attack showed life again, and the defense was the Eagles’ best since Fritz’s last year. This was the equivalent of a near-death experience. As quickly as the Eagles fell, they rose again.

They walloped rival (and fellow Saturday bowl winner, in a New Orleans beatdown of Middle Tennessee) Appalachian State on national television midway through the season, then capped the absurd turnaround by taking down Eastern Michigan via last-second field goal. Quarterback Shai Werts, who had scored two first-half touchdowns, scrambled for 29 yards on a fourth-and-10 to set up Tyler Bass’ 40-yard game-winner.

The gravity of the moment was evident.

A friend of mine recently got a chance to run a lower-level English professional soccer team.

He said he came in with a business-like plan and a ton of ideas, but the impact of actual wins and losses made the plan almost impossible to pull off. He said the club offices a day after a loss were just so emotionally wrecked, and morale so quickly careened between great and terrible, that he found himself wanting to fix everything at once, abandon long-term goals and make everybody happy that next Saturday.

It’s so easy to get knocked off course, and it’s so hard to simply hug a program back into prominence. But Lunsford somehow pulled it off.

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Of course, the Camellia Bowl was guaranteed a wonderful turnaround story no matter what.

On December 12, 1987, on a rainy night in Fresno, Jim Harkema’s EMU Hurons (as they were then known) took a 30-27 California Bowl lead with 3:59 left on a 32-yard touchdown pass from Ron Adams to Craig Ostrander. A SJSU receiver dropped a fourth-down pass in the closing seconds to give EMU the win.

Under Harkema, EMU would have nice seasons in 1988 and 1989 (and would’ve made bowls. had there been 39 or so of them) but began to fade. The program would become one of the most moribund. EMU averaged 3.5 wins per year in the 1990s, then 2.7 in the 2000s. Bad hires and worse program support made winning impossible even in a parity-friendly MAC.

Ron English began his EMU tenure by going 2-22 in 2009-10, and after nearly reaching a bowl by going 6-6 in 2011, EMU went 4-20 in 2012-13. The program was as pointless as ever.

But Chris Creighton took the job anyway. And his solution to the losses, the horrible post-Saturday morale, was to grind.

The Eagles went just 3-21 in Creighton’s first two years but surged to seven wins in 2016, qualifying for the Bahamas Bowl.

They improved again in 2017, rising to 69th in S&P+, but an incredible string of six consecutive one-possession losses prompted a slide to 5-7.

Another four-game string of such losses made bowl eligibility perilous this fall, but the Eagles won four of their last five games to reach 7-5. And on December 16, on a misty night in Montgomery, Creighton’s Eagles took a 21-20 lead with 3:33 left on a five-yard, fourth-down pass from Mike Glass to Arthur Jackson.

The parallels to that 1987 night in Fresno were incredible. But instead of throwing incomplete on Southern’s ensuing first down, Werts squirted upfield and into field goal range. GS got to be the team crying at midfield, while EMU cried in the locker room. Lunsford got to be the bloodshot-eyed coach interviewed, while Creighton addressed his team backstage.

The Camellia Bowl mattered, truly mattered, to a few thousand people in Statesboro, Ga., and Ypsilanti, Mich., and 17,710 of them made their way to Montgomery’s Cramton Bowl to witness it in person.

Fresno State’s Jeff Tedford’s voice cracked as he talked about what the Bulldogs’ Vegas Bowl win over Arizona State meant to him.

Fritz, in his third year at Tulane after leaving Georgia Southern, gleefully avoided a Gatorade bath in the closing moments of the Tulane’s romp over UL Lafayette in the Cure Bowl, the program’s first bowl win since 2002.

Saturday was defined by turnarounds. And the Camellia Bowl was always going to headline that story.