The Austin Peay Governors might be Division I football’s best story in 2017. The FCS program from Clarksville, Tenn., lost a whopping 29 consecutive games until this September, when it snapped the streak on its home field and got an epic field-rushing from students who’d somehow stuck by the program.
The team that lost 29 games in a row just won to give itself an FCS playoff shot. Here’s their shirtless coach getting mosh-pitted.
Austin Peay could be the country’s best story.
Fast-forward a few months, and Peay is 8-4 on the season, including an 8-1 mark against FCS competition. The Govs have a chance to earn an at-large bid in the FCS playoffs after beating Eastern Illinois on Saturday. Let’s check in with their head coach, Will Healy, in the locker room after that game:
That’s a shirtless Healy in the middle of a mosh pit with his team.
What Healy told SB Nation about his program back in September about getting over all the losing, before Austin Peay got it together:
The Governors were the worst team in Division I football, and everyone knew it.
“It was the laughingstock of our campus as well as the laughingstock of college football,” Healy says now.
He remembers walking one day near 10,000-seat Fortera Stadium, on the school’s Clarksville, Tenn., campus, as an admissions tour group walked by.
“How’s your football team?” Healy says he overheard someone ask.
“They’re terrible. Don’t worry. You’ll probably never wanna go to a football game,” the tour guide responded, Healy recalls, unaware that the coach was within earshot.
“The truth hurts,” he says now. “We didn’t give ‘em anything to go watch.”
This team’s a great story. Now it might be a playoff story, too.
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