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Georgia Southern firing head coach Tyson Summers. Here’s why, in 90 seconds.

An FCS power has gone off the rails at the next level.

NCAA Football: Georgia Southern at Indiana
NCAA Football: Georgia Southern at Indiana
Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports

The 0-6 Georgia Southern Eagles are firing head football coach Tyson Summers, sources confirmed Sunday to SB Nation’s Steven Godfrey.

Special teams coordinator and assistant head coach Chad Lunsford will serve as the program’s interim head coach, the school announced.

Why’s he out?

Because Georgia Southern’s declined rapidly under his watch, to the point where the Eagles are now one of the worst teams in all the FBS. The six-time FCS (or Division I-AA) national champions made the FBS jump in 2014, and the Eagles were great for the first two years. They won nine games in ‘14 and ‘15 under Willie Fritz, who then left to take the head job at Tulane. At his replacement, Summers went 5-7 last year. Then the Eagles stunk it up this season, and the losing became too much for him to keep his job. They got shellacked by UMass, which had been winless, in Week 8.

Was this the right move?

I think so. Summers is still just 37 and has room to grow as a coach, and it’s possible that Georgia Southern one day comes to regret letting him go. But the program has a proud fanbase that’s used to winning, and Summers’ tenure brought such a drop off from Fritz’s (and the school’s earlier successes under Erk Russell, Paul Johnson, Mike Sewak, and Jeff Monken) that keeping him was untenable.

It’s hard to build a consistent winner in the FBS, but Georgia Southern’s had a handful of coaches do great work there in the past. And while FBS ball is hard in general, the Sun Belt is one of the easiest conferences to make a mark in, if you’re doing things right. Rival Appalachian State’s made the FCS-to-Sun Belt transition look downright easy. If the Eagles hire the right guy, there’s no reason they couldn’t thrive, too.

SB Nation’s Godfrey and Matt Brown wrote Saturday about one possible path forward: shifting toward the triple-option schemes the Eagles have leaned on in the past.

Much like Troy and the directional Louisianas, Southern’s geography has made it easy to land talent.

“Fritz was able to work Monken’s talent into a great offense for a short amount of time. What’s happened since is a decline in that traditional, hard edge, Paul Johnson style that won them national titles in I-AA,” a former Georgia Southern coordinator told SB Nation. “The more they move away from the triple option and towards other shotgun concepts, the more they’ll lose the advantage they had.”

Multiple sources, including some connected to Georgia Southern, have suggested the Eagles move back towards the “traditional” under center triple option Johnson and Monken found success with.

“Georgia Southern is an easy job to figure out,” one head coach told SB Nation. “Every time they try to change what makes them Georgia Southern, they pay for it.”

Where was Summers before Georgia Southern?

He’d most recently been the defensive coordinator at UCF and then Colorado State. Summers has spent most of his career on that side of the ball. His offenses at Georgia Southern were not good, falling from 24th in yards per play the year before his arrival to 101st in his first season on the job. He’ll probably be a defensive assistant again.

It wasn’t all bad, right?

It was usually bad. Summers’ best win was in the last week of the 2016 season, when the Eagles beat Troy, 28-24, and kept the Trojans out of a share of the Sun Belt title.

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