Chad Lunsford reportedly keeping Georgia Southern head coaching job after leading Eagles’ first 2 wins of 2017

Georgia Southern has found its next head coach, and it comes in the form of the man they named the interim, a former Georgia Southern assistant head coach who took over for a fired Tyson Summers last month. That’s Chad Lunsford.

The Eagles have gone 2-3 so far under Lunsford, with a chance to get to get to three wins with a game against Coastal Carolina this weekend. Prior to him taking over, Georgia Southern was winless, and in the last two games it has beaten South Alabama and upset Louisiana Lafayette, which came in at 4-2 in conference play. Lunsford is in the fifth season of his second stint at Georgia Southern.

Following his stint as the Eagles’ wide receivers coach in 2013, Lunsford worked two seasons with the tight ends and served as recruiting coordinator in 2014 and 2015. In 2014, he coached the Eagle H-Backs/tight ends and was also named special teams coordinator in 2016. At the start of this season, he was named assistant head coach. Here’s Underdog Dynasty on the hire:

The only question remains: How will this team fare against the top of the conference when the season kicks off in 2018? The team dropped games to Troy, Georgia State and Appalachian State in three consecutive weeks under Lunsford’s watch, although how much of that can be chalked up to undoing Summers’ incompetence remains to be seen.

Either way, the players clearly love the guy:

“Chad is as ‘True Blue’ as they come and I’m excited to have him lead our team for the remainder of the 2017 season,” Eagles AD Tom Kleinlein said when he announced Lunsford as the interim. “The players respect him and I have full confidence in his abilities as we head into the final six games of the season.”

SB Nation’s Steven Godfrey and Matt Brown wrote last month 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.”

Previously, Lunsford spent four seasons at Auburn, where he served as the Tigers’ Director of Scouting and Director of Player Personnel. Before that, he was at Georgia Southern coaching the slotbacks from 2003-05.