Jacksonville, AL – Jacksonville State hopes to get hopeful view of progression in FBS while facing another chicken that crossed the road, found quick success.
By Joe Medley
Jacksonville State and Coastal Carolina will play a football game Saturday, but its true significance will be to answer a question that’s preoccupied generations of jokesters.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
The Chanticleers clearly crossed from Football Championship Subdivision Road to win sooner than later on Football Bowl Subdivision Boulevard.
What could become clearer in Saturday’s 6 p.m. game at Myrtle Beach is how soon the Gamecocks might expect the other side to feel as good.
So far, so good for Jax State. The Gamecocks won their FBS and Conference USA opener against UTEP then routed FCSer East Tennessee.
In its first game as an FBS program, Jax State held a program with 15 bowl appearances to 14 points.
In Game 2 of the Gamecocks’ FBS era, they went from beating ETSU by a touchdown in the 2018 FCS playoffs to pounding the Bucs by almost seven touchdowns in 2023.
Those are next-level results for a team playing at Level 1, FBS ‘23.
If it hadn’t happened that way, one could argue that it shouldn’t have happened that way. Not this soon.
Such a start raises hopes that Jax State football can pull a Coastal Carolina, which won a conference title and made three bowl appearances since moving up in 2017.
Jax State coach Rich Rodruguez sees something aspirational in the Gamecocks’ next opponent.
“They’re probably a model for teams that have moved up from FCS to FBS and did it the right way and won games and committed to the program,” he said.
Even for Coastal, FBS success wasn’t instant. The Chanticleers went 3-9, 5-7 and 5-7 in their first three FBS seasons.
Then again, 11-1, 11-2 and 9-4 came in seasons four, five and six. That’s quick, as move-up processes go.
Coastal Carolina had Joe Moglia, who went from fancy titles with TD Ameritrade, Fundamental Global Investors and Capital Wealth Advisors to his current fancy title … chair of the Coastal Carolina Athletics Division, executive director for football and executive adviser to the president.
In between, Moglia coached the Chanticleers.
He spent 17 years climbing the corporate ladder at Merrill Lynch before becoming TD Ameritrade’s CEO in 2001.
A former Coastal Carolina coach once famously riffed, “We need more dogs.” Joe Moglia made bark and bite felt in the financial world, and every college program aspiring to cross the road should have a Joe Moglia.
Every aspiring program should also have a beach to sell recruits.
Coastal Carolina added investments to blessings. The South Carolina State Fiscal Accountability Authority approved a $20 million indoor practice facility in June, after upping the project’s budget from $15 million.
That’s after Brooks Stadium underwent a two-phase, $38 million expansion from 2017-19.
“They moved up with the intention of moving up to have success … ,” Rodriguez said. “There’s programs that move up that don’t really make the full commitment. To me, it looks like, from a facilities standpoint, from a commitment standpoint, they were all in with that, and they kind of developed their own brand, so to speak of, ‘Come ball at the beach,’ and sold it from a recruiting standpoint, and it’s worked for them.”
Jax State has made investments to make its athletics programs more attractive to FBS conferences. Burgess-Snow Field, expanded in 2010, holds three more thousand fans than Brooks holds.
The Loring and Debbie White Football Complex stands as a beams-and-concrete promise of more to come.
No beach, but Rodriguez says Jax State can sell the Appalachian foothills and small-town appeal.
Joe Moglia is taken, but the Gamecocks crossed the road with lots of dogs.
“It’s going to be quite a challenge, and we’re going to find out a lot about ourselves during that game,” Rodriguez said. “I think we’ll play hard. We’re going to have to play really well, better than we’ve played the last two games to win this one.”
