A visitor to Snooky’s in Statesboro would be wise to don a pair of hip waders. Oh, it’s clean enough, the collard greens are good and the coffee’s strong. But you have to be wary of the conversation at the round table near the cash register. It can get pretty deep and messy.

Welcome to the official headquarters of SnookPac (Snooky’s Restaurant Political Action Committee), chaired by veteran coffee drinker and football demiurge Erk Russell, who admits that one of the most important qualifications for membership is a rear end to sit on.

“Our record as a political action group is not very good,” says Russell, who hasn’t had a bad hair day since 1958. “We base most of our discussions on the four F’s.”

Three of them are football, fishing and farming.

Anyway, one guy new to town went to the restaurant for a year and sat on the fringes, looking at the lively SnookPac table from a safe distance, eager to join but hesitant.

“He thought he had to earn the right to sit over here,” says Russell. “Finally, one day he felt like he’d waited long enough, so he moved over to the table. It didn’t take him long to realize that he had wasted a year.”

It didn’t take then Republican gubernatorial candidate Guy Millner long to figure out that he’d wasted his time in South Georgia one dark day in 1994 at Snooky’s. Millner proved he didn’t know Erk Russell from Rosalind Russell by saying, “How ya doin’‚ coach?” to the wrong guy. In Georgia, it was a faux pas. In South Georgia, it was a mortal sin.

Russell, who built his legend as Georgia’s defensive coordinator, went on to build a national football power at Georgia Southern from scratch. That trademark Yul Brynner haircut, a look Russell was sporting before anybody had ever heard of Vince Dooley, is part of the legend.

“Haircuts had gone up to the unheard of price of $1, and the barber spent most of his time trimming at my ears and nose,” says Russell, the most famous bald man in Georgia history, though you could have fooled Millner. “Anyway, I figured I’d save a dollar and do it myself. Old Jerry the barber was in here one day, and I asked him how much he thought I saved in 40 years of cutting my own hair. He said about $7,000 or $8,000. I think it was more than that.”

Russell and SnookPac regulars like Doug Lambert and Bruce Yawn meet at Snooky’s just about every morning. In Yawn’s case, there isn’t much of a choice, seeing as how he owns the joint.

“This restaurant gave him credibility,” says Yawn, nodding in Russell’s direction. “We made him famous.”

Suspicion lingers that the exact opposite might be true, but Russell doesn’t argue the point. On the contrary. He is quick to point out that some of the best advice he ever received came free of charge at Snooky’s.

“Get a lead and hold it,” says Russell, now 74. “That’s the secret to success.”

You can take off the hip waders now, because only half of Coach’s tongue is in his cheek. See, Georgia Southern has held onto, and extended its lead and has been ridiculously successful ever since Russell was appointed to build the football program 20 years ago.

“Georgia Southern is the model,” says Bucky Wagner, former GSU athletic director and the man who fetched Russell from Athens. “This is how to build a Division I-AA football program.”

It’s a model other schools want to imitate.

Generally, small-time football programs just don’t make money. What they can do is enhance a school’s marketability, boost enrollment and raise funds. Especially if they win.

 “Georgia Southern has a name recognition around the country that other schools with football programs our size don’t have,” says Sam Baker, now in his sixth year as GSU athletic director. “When I interviewed for this job, I talked to my father in Virginia. He stopped and thought for a second and said, ‘Georgia Southern? Didn’t they have that bald-headed coach?’ Because of that bald head, people around the country started to learn about us.”

Building the Model

In 1978, Georgia Southern President Dale Lick began toying with the idea of resurrecting the football program, which had been dormant since 1941. Wagner was hired in 1981.

“I was on the job about three days when he said we were definitely gonna start a football program,” says Wagner. “I looked in his eyes and thought to myself, ‘Oh hell, this guy really means it.’ He said we needed to raise $250,000 to get the ball rolling.”

Ever try rolling a football? Well, a group of volunteers calling itself the Dirty Dozen, which included Yawn, spent much of the spring of 1981 walking the streets of Statesboro, asking for $5 or the odd sawbuck. If someone was crazy enough to hand over $20, it was cause for celebration and running quickly in the other direction, lest the giver demand change.

Meanwhile, Wagner was forming Southern Boosters, now the athletic department’s official fund-raising arm, and hitting the lonesome highway.

“We held organizational meetings and solicited funds in about two dozen towns throughout South Georgia,” says Wagner, who put a lot of miles on the university’s 1978 Impala. “We raised $90,000 through those first town meetings.”

Then the Southern Boosters kicked it into gear and began raising start-up dollars, dough to buy and/or borrow used high school and college uniforms and equipment. Russell’s hiring was announced in a May 1981 press conference. The Bald Eagle had landed, but someone forgot the football.

“When we held the press conference, Bucky had to run across the street to Kmart to buy a football, because we didn’t have one,” says Russell. “That was the first big challenge.”

For Russell, getting players motivated was never a great challenge. Getting the players was.
“We really didn’t have a game plan to follow,” says Russell, whose move to South Georgia was something of a leap of faith, considering that he came from a Bulldog program that had just won the national championship and was a perennial SEC powerhouse. But he was anxious to get his hands around a program of his own.

“Everything was unknown,” he says. “Our first recruiting budget was $2,000. At Georgia, it was something like a quarter or half a million dollars.

“So we went down the woodpecker trail looking for players. It was two full-time coaches and me. We put the word out that we were gonna have a football program and told everyone who wanted to come out to bring his own shoes.”

But this was a man who at UGA would motivate his players by bashing his forehead against helmets during pregame tackling drills. Only Russell didn’t have a helmet.

“Sometimes my head would bleed,” says Russell. “When it did, the players seemed to like it, so we kept doing it.”

By the time Russell retired, following a perfect (15-0) 1989 season, the Eagle football program was well-heeled.
In 1983, part-time Savannah resident Allen E. Paulson, breeder of champion racehorses and founder of Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., donated the first $1 million toward the construction of Georgia Southern’s $4.7 million football stadium, on land donated by former state Sen. Glenn Bryant. Paulson contributed another $300,000 to match a community fund-raising project to complete Allen E. Paulson Stadium, which opened on Sept. 29, 1984.

It didn’t take long for lightning to strike. The Eagles won their first national NCAA Division I-AA title in 1985. They added two more championships with Russell and have won six in the 20 years since the program’s rebirth.

“Of course, it helped to have the right bald guy to get the team up and going,” says John Mulherin, president of Southern Boosters, which has grown to 2,100 members and has so far contributed $30 million to Georgia Southern athletics. “It wouldn’t have been possible without him.”

Naturally, Mulherin credits the university’s rapid growth during the Russell years to success on the gridiron. Enrollment was steady at about 6,000 when Russell arrived. By the time he retired, it had doubled. Today it’s 14,400.

“I started going to school here in 1983, and we had fewer than 6,000 students,” says Mulherin. “There were over 10,000 in 1988. Now, I don’t know, but maybe it’s because the chemistry department got a lot better.”

Maybe, but with all due respect to GSU’s fine chemistry department, it’s X’s and O’s — the ABCs of football — that have an economic impact of $2.3 million on home-game Saturdays, according to a study completed last year by the university’s Bureau of Business Research and Economic Development. The study found that 45% of GSU students were influenced in their choice of school by athletics, football in particular.

“We looked at the impact of putting on games, how that ripples through the region’s economy and influences people,” says bureau director Dr. Phyllis Isley. “We found that for 88% of our students, athletics contributed to their awareness of the university.

“As an educator, I can say that it only had a slight influence on their final choice,” she says. “But when people are choosing a school, like when they’re choosing a car, they look at a lot of different things. The school that’s right for them is going to have a menu that appeals to them, and athletics is part of that menu.”

The Caste System

NCAA member institutions are divided into three divisions – I, II and III.

Division I schools that have a football program are classified as I-A or I-AA. Division I-A programs are more elaborate and must meet minimum stadium attendance requirements. Division I-A football programs can earn millions in television contracts, licensing fees and conference revenue distributions. These are the Tennessees, the Georgias, the Penn States, the Southern Cals of college athletics.
In Divisions I-AA, II and III, by contrast, student activity fees are the meal ticket.

Each year, member institutions provide an analysis of revenues and expenses to the NCAA. For the 1999-2000 school year, GSU’s athletic department reported $2,984,381 in revenue from student activity fees – almost half of the athletic department’s $6 million budget. GSU students pay $294 per semester in activity fees, $118 of which goes directly toward athletics. Last year, the GSU athletic department had $6,800,000 in total revenue. GSU athletics derived no revenue at all from television and radio and $16,667 in Southern Conference revenue distributions – pocket change compared to such SEC schools as Georgia and Florida, which received an average of $6.5 million each from the conference in 2000-2001.

For smaller programs, activity fees, along with ticket sales and booster bucks, make all the difference.
“In Division II, we live almost exclusively on student activity fees,” says Ed Murphy, athletic director at the University of West Georgia, which revived its football program 20 years ago. West Georgia football operates on a budget of about $700,000 a year – less than Georgia Southern ($1.1 million) and Valdosta State ($780,000).

West Georgia’s full-time students will pay $117 in athletics fees beginning this fall semester. Valdosta students paid $101 last fall.

The student activity fees are part of the circle of life for small-time college football. More students equals more money for football, and football equals more students for the college. Get it?

“Each year our football program has 75 to 100 students, the majority of whom would not be at Valdosta State if there were no football program,” says VSU Athletic Director Herb Reinhard. “And that doesn’t include the marching band or the cheerleaders.”

VSU’s longtime and recently retired president, Hugh Bailey, made it his mission to bring college football to the capital of high school football. In fact, there have been times when the 20-year-old college program has felt like it was in competition with mighty Valdosta High School. Some years the high school outdraws the college. Many consider this to be the natural order of things.

But VSU became a national Division II power in the 1990s and has held its own at the box office, setting an attendance record last year with almost 8,000 fans per home contest, ranking the team among the Top 10 Division II draws in the nation.

“The athletic director of another school in our conference (Gulf South) told me that I was crazy to start a college team in Valdosta, that these people were too devoted to high school football,” says Bailey. “To some extent, it still is a high school town.

“We share a common stadium, but we continue to work together with the local board of education, trying to build a joint facility. The negotiations continue but it’s been as slow as steam rising.”

A local school board member once told Bailey that they couldn’t build another stadium because it would offend the ghosts of Bazemore-Hyder Stadium. (Among them are the formidable spirits of coaches Wright Bazemore and Nick Hyder, who took the Wildcats to numerous state and national titles.) Bailey offered to move the ghosts himself.

There are 13 college football programs in the state of Georgia and 11 of them are small (not Division I-A). Most are Division II: Albany State, Clark Atlanta, Fort Valley State, Morehouse, Valdosta State and West Georgia.

Former Division II institutions Savannah State and Morris Brown are making the move to I-AA this year, which means they must sponsor more sports to comply with NCAA requirements. It also means they can offer more athletic scholarships. Division II schools are limited to 36 scholarships for football. At I-AA the figure jumps to 63. It costs more, but it’s worth every penny according to those who are making the leap.

“It’s going to help our marketing tremendously,” says Athletic Director Russell Ellington. “This will give us more exposure. The first thing a kid wants to do now is play in Division I.

“Things were getting stagnant in Division II for us. We couldn’t generate any revenue and couldn’t get into any of the football classics popping up around the country.”

Morris Brown has applied for membership in three conferences so far, but will play football as an independent this fall.

For Savannah State, the reasoning sounds a bit more intuitive.

“We saw that our destiny lay elsewhere,” says SSU President Carlton Brown. “We historically pursue our destiny, leaping boldly into the future with little regard for own safety. Our leaps of faith have resulted in our best landings.”

Sounds noble, but the bottom line is SSU was dissatisfied with its Division II conference, the SIAC (Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference).

“We were making all the noise and money we could in Division II,” says Brown, whose school’s football history dates back to 1902. “And we did not believe the conference was doing all that it could for us.”
Meanwhile, over in Athens, UGA is paying fired head coach Jim Donnan a dismissal bonus of $255,000 — more than twice the salary of Georgia Southern Head Coach Paul Johnson ($95,247 in 1999-2000), who is working on his third consecutive national championship. Not to mention the $2.1 million UGA is paying Donnan to buy out the remaining years on his contract.

Then again, Statesboro ain’t Athens.

But Georgia Southern today gleams like the top of Russell’s head. Over the past 10 years, about $150 million has been invested in new buildings and improvements on the 634-acre campus. GSU is cranking up a new school of information technology, and President Dr. Bruce Grube vows to take GSU to a new level of academic excellence (see page 82). Academic purists may argue — Don’t they argue about everything? — but football plays a considerable role.

“When Coach Russell started the football program, and we had some success, enrollment really took off,” says Athletic Director Baker. “During one span, this was the fastest-growing college in America. We had to do things to meet the academic needs of those students. The number of professors increased, and that meant more facilities.

“Alumni who haven’t been here in 10 years come back and marvel,” he says.

They come back to marvel at Adrian Peterson, the superb Eagle fullback who can stumble out of bed and pick up a first down. Or they gape at the championship trophies on display in the lobby of the new $1.1 million Dan J. Parrish Sr. Football Center, home of the Eagle brain trust. Or maybe they gawk at the pretty coeds (twice as many as there used to be, and according to Russell, all of ’em rich) and gaze at the school buildings, retail centers and restaurants that didn’t exist 20 or even 10 years ago.

“They oughta just take a picture of Erk and Bucky,” says local hotel owner and loyal SnookPac member Doug Lambert, “hang it at the Chamber of Commerce and call that the economic development plan.”