CFB · RIVALRIES · STORYLINES · GEORGIA-SOUTHERN · APP-STATE · DEEPER-THAN-HATE
Georgia Southern and App State Took the Same Road Up, and Hated Each Other the Whole Way
By MVPeav · @MVPeav ·
Most rivalries come from a border or a trophy. This one is more like the rivalry between twin brothers who were always doing the same stuff together, and constantly trying to one up each other in the process.
Both started as teachers' colleges. Both built I-AA dynasties out of nothing, a few years apart, with a coach who became the face of the whole town. Both left for the Sun Belt in the same breath, and last December they played a bowl game against each other because the sport finally ran out of other ways to make them meet.
Georgia Southern has won the last three. App State is 5-2 and we're 3-4, and Saturday night in Statesboro is a White Out with Erk Russell's name on it.
I consider this a great and fun rivalry, and I'm going to make that case by telling you the whole story, 59-0 included.
Two Teachers' Colleges That Couldn't Have Known
The first one was Nov. 25, 1932, in Statesboro, and we weren't Georgia Southern yet. South Georgia Teachers beat Appalachian State Teachers 33-0, which is a lovely way to open a rivalry since we were the ones holding the shutout.
They played five times that decade, a 0-0 tie in Boone included, and App State finished it off with a 59-0 in 1939 that's still the biggest margin either side has ever hung on the other. Every Eagle fan knows that number exists. Nobody in Statesboro says it out loud.
Then the whole thing went to sleep. Georgia Southern shut football down in 1941 and didn't play again for forty years, so the two schools spent four decades as just someone that we used to know.
The name "Deeper Than Hate" came along much later, and I'd love to tell you who said it first, but nobody has written that part down anywhere I can find. It fits, tho. These two were never neighbors. They were the same kid raised in two different states.
Erk, the Snow, and the Day the Rivalry Actually Started
You can't tell this story without Erk Russell, so here's the short version. In 1981 the most beloved defensive coordinator in Georgia's history left Athens for a school that had no football team, no stadium budget and no real reason to think it could pull this off.
The Eagles played as a club team for two years. When they moved into I-AA in 1984 they wore their white practice pants as game pants, Erk bought plain blue helmets and had the players tape a stripe down the middle, and the program bought surplus county school buses for a dollar each because there was no money to get the team to its own games.
Two years into real football they won the national title. A year after that they won it again. That's the program App State ran into on Dec. 5, 1987, in Boone, in a I-AA quarterfinal, on the coldest game day anybody could remember at Kidd Brewer Stadium.
The field was ice. App students carved "Can You Score?" into the snowy hillside behind the end zone. The story that gets passed around, from a Savannah sportswriter who covered the team for years, is that Erk came out to warm up in shorts and a T-shirt, a team official told him he might die out there, and he went back in and came out looking like Nanook of the North.
No. 2 App State won 19-0. App outgained us 328-261, we turned it over three times to their one, and Bjorn Nittmo kicked field goals from 44 and 21. It was the only shutout Erk Russell ever took at Georgia Southern, and it ended the two-title run.
Erk went 15-0 two years later, won a third title and retired. App State took the loss that still stings the most in Statesboro, and Wikipedia will tell you flat out that this is the game where the rivalry's roots are. On that one, the two schools agree.
Jerry Moore's Boone and Paul Johnson's Statesboro
The yearly version starts in 1993, the year Georgia Southern joined the Southern Conference, and it starts with an App State team that was 1-5 at the time in the only losing season Jerry Moore ever had in Boone.
Scott Satterfield was App's quarterback that day, years before he coached them. He remembers guys trash talking before the game and a blocked punt deciding it, 34-28 Eagles, and he's said that game was where the dislike started for him. Nobody had to explain the rivalry to either locker room after that.
We took the next one 34-31 on a field goal in the final seconds. App took the one after that in a 12-win season. By then it was obvious these two were going to be at the top of the Southern Conference together for a long time, and they were.
The game App State fans bring up first is Oct. 16, 1999. Georgia Southern walked into Boone ranked No. 1 in I-AA. App built a 17-0 lead on two fumble recoveries, Greg Hill ran for two touchdowns to get us within a point, and Corey Hall's interception ended it 17-16 in front of 19,891 people.
Here's the part Statesboro remembers. Paul Johnson's team went and won the national title that same year anyway. App State got a souvenir and we got a trophy, which is the Georgia Southern side of this rivalry in one sentence.
Then came the longest streak either side has ever put together. Four straight Eagles wins, 2000 through 2002, including the only two games in a single season (until last years bowl game). The 2001 regular-season meeting we led 14-0, fell behind 15-14 and won 27-18. The playoff quarterfinal that December in Statesboro we won 38-24, and it was Johnson's last season before he left for Navy.
App State broke the streak in 2003, 28-21 over a No. 10 Eagles team, and Boone lost its mind. The goalposts came down and got paraded toward the duck pond at Trivette Hall. One of them went through a window of the Georgia Southern team bus, and the pizzas waiting for our postgame meal got trampled. If that doesn't scream rivalry, then I don't know what does.
What followed was App's turn to do the thing we'd done a decade earlier. Three straight national titles, 2005, 2006 and 2007. The games in those years went App 24-7 in Boone, App 27-20 in double overtime in Statesboro, and then Georgia Southern 38-35 in Boone in 2007, the year they won the whole thing, in their building. Hold onto that one.
The decade after that was App's. A 37-36 game in 2008, a 21-14 overtime Eagles win in 2010, and otherwise a lot of Mountaineer wins while we rebuilt. Between the two of them, the fan sites count nine I-AA titles in 23 years. Nobody else in that division was living like this.
They Left Together, Because of Course They Did
When the FBS came calling, they moved up in the same year, to the same conference. Almost like that toxic ex that you can't stand to be around but also never want to leave.
The last Southern Conference meeting was Oct. 26, 2013, in Boone, nicknamed the Ineligibowl because both schools were already headed up and neither could play for anything. App State won 38-14, Kameron Bryant went 27 of 33 for 381 yards, and the Mountaineers put up 515 yards in front of 23,901. A going-away gift, except we were the ones who left with nothing.
The Sun Belt debut was Sept. 25, 2014, in Statesboro, and it went the other way, 34-14. Breida, Ellison and Ramsby ran for 337 yards between them, and that team finished 8-0 in the league in its first season. The App State game was the one that told everybody the Eagles weren't going to wait their turn.
App answered a year later in Boone, 31-13, with both teams 5-1 and sitting on top of the Sun Belt standings, the winner becoming bowl eligible for the first time as an FBS program. The lasting off-field story from that weekend involves a stolen ambulance driven around Boone, which tells you what kind of weekend it was.
Willie Fritz told his team that week that the App State game was "worth one, just like last week and just like next week," and people in both towns took it personally. Two years into the league, they'd already decided this wasn't a game you got to be calm about.
App took 2016 and 2017 too, 34-10 and 27-6, and for a minute it looked like the FBS version of this was going to be lopsided.
The one I still bring up is 2018. Thursday night in Statesboro, App State in town ranked No. 25, and it poured from kickoff to the end. The Eagles ran them off the field, 34-14, and the night finished with us storming it in the rain.
What made it a scene was the calendar. That game usually falls on Georgia/Florida weekend, and Statesboro is right on the route to Jacksonville for a lot of the UGA students. Everybody grew up together, so the Georgia crowd had a routine: out of Athens early Thursday, the App State game and the party in Statesboro, frat beach on Friday, the Cocktail Party on Saturday.
So that night my friends and I had a whole crowd of our friends from home, the UGA kids, in town with us. The place was full, the rain never let up, and you had to walk around the building to find the back of the Blueroom line. None of us cared. App State came in ranked and left with a loss, and that was the whole point of being there.
We went to Boone on Halloween 2019 and won 24-21, our first win there since 2007. App got the next two, including a December game in 2020, which tells you what kind of year that was. Then the series turned into what it is now.
The Last Four Are Why It's Fun Right Now
For four straight years this game has flipped on something ridiculous in the fourth quarter, and it keeps alternating who gets to be the idiot.
Nov. 26, 2022, in Statesboro, is the one everybody else brings up. Kyle Vantrease threw for 385 yards and three touchdowns, Nate Noel ran for 171 yards and three scores on 12 carries for App and lost, and a missed 30-yarder at the end of regulation sent it to overtime at 38-38. The winner was a 25-yard throw to Ezrah Archie in the second overtime, 51-48, the most points these two have ever scored on each other. The win sent us to a bowl, and the loss kept App out of one.
Then 2023 was the hangover. We led 14-3 after a quarter in Boone, App cut it to 14-10, we fumbled the kickoff and Kanye Roberts scored six seconds later. From there it was 52-13 the rest of the way, 55-27, four touchdown passes for Joey Aguilar, and App went on to the Sun Belt title game. I own that one. It was ugly.
Nov. 30, 2024, in Statesboro, 29-20 Eagles. Jalen White ran for 125 yards and three touchdowns, and it was the last game Shawn Clark ever coached at App State. A rivalry game ending a coach's run is about as rivalry as it gets.
Nov. 6, 2025, in Boone, we led 22-3 in the third quarter and then spent the fourth trying to give it back. App scored with 1:56 left to make it 25-23, the onside kick came, and Phillip Gladney fell on it. JC French IV threw for a career-high 352. AJ Swann threw for 348 and Jaden Barnes caught 13 balls for 160 and it still wasn't enough. Only our second win in Boone since 2007, so yes, I enjoyed every second.
Seven weeks later the sport did something it had never done in 93 years of this and put them on a neutral field. App State got into the Birmingham Bowl at 5-7 on its academic score after a pile of teams opted out, and Dowell Loggains said he'd have taken the game in a Walmart parking lot. Clay Helton called it a chance to do something that had never been done.
We won it 29-10. OJ Arnold went 11 carries for 152 yards and took the MVP, the defense picked off four passes, and the Eagles dropped 16 unanswered in the third quarter. First bowl meeting in a series that goes back to 1932, first postseason win for Helton at Southern, and three straight over App State for the first time since Paul Johnson was walking the sideline.
Depends Who's Counting, and Then Saturday
Wikipedia has the series at 41 games with App State up 21-19-1. Winsipedia says the same. Georgia Southern's own game preview this week says the same.
App State's own history page starts at Dec. 5, 1987, which is a bold place to begin counting when the stretch you're skipping includes a 59-0 in your favor. Since the snow game, their page has App State at 13-15.
Georgia Southern's own page covers 36 games from 1987 to 2025 and has the Eagles at 17-19. App's page covers 28 games in the same stretch. Same era, same two teams, and they can't even agree on how many times they've played. I'm not telling you which page is right, because I can't, and because arguing about it is the rivalry.
The record I quote at the bar has nothing to do with the series. We have more national championships than Crapp State. Six to three by the usual count, and there's no database in Boone that trims that one.
Plenty of these games were duds, sure. 2013 through 2015 went 38-14, 34-14 and 31-13, three straight that were never really in doubt. A rivalry doesn't need every game to be close, tho. It needs both sides to keep showing up with a different number on the napkin, and these two have been doing that since 1932.
Saturday is Oct. 31 at Paulson, 6:30 ET, a White Out, and the Erk 100 celebration, with three Eagle Legends busts going up at 3 p.m. The man whose only shutout loss came in Boone gets his party against App State, exactly how the man who put Statesboro, Georgia on the map would want it.
App State comes in 5-2 and Georgia Southern comes in 3-4, and if you think that settles anything you haven't been reading. My sims are about as undecided as the history. App State takes 52 of every 100 sims, the typical one lands App State 26, Georgia Southern 24, and half of them finish somewhere between App by 11 and the Eagles by 10.
What decides it in my sims is the run game. App State wins its sims at about 177 rushing yards and loses them at 121. The Eagles win theirs at about 142 and lose at 99. Whoever gets to run it is the one who gets to celebrate.
Neither team has actually run it this year, tho. App State is at 143.7 a game and we're at 119.1, and that's 107th and 109th in the country. Both throw it fine, top 30 apiece, so Saturday comes down to which of two teams that can't run suddenly remembers how on White Out night.
Now that I got the nerdy part out of the way, let me make it abundantly clear Georgia Southern ain't gonna be losing this football game. Not with the spirit of Erk in the building and the Power of Paulson behind us. Give me the Eags by 2 touchdowns and we will remind that why we have twice the number of Nattys that they do.
HAIL SOUTHERN and GATA