Jacksonville, AL – Lots of keys to Jax State matching or exceeding the successes of 2023, but leadership just might be the X factor again.
Joe Medley
Jacksonville State enters another football season, its first as a full-fledged member of FBS, with expectations in a much different place than where they were a year ago.
That’s because the Gamecocks so far exceeded expectations as a transitioning program in 2023, winning nine games plus reaching and winning a bowl game.
It was as if Jax State skipped the whole transitioning thing and played like a program in its fifth or sixth year after moving up.
It told Jax State followers that Rich Rodriguez’s roster rebuild was ahead of schedule.
It told Jax State fans that, as a new Group of 5 program, the Gamecocks enter most games with an edge at head coach. Sharks infest Power 5 waters, but the third-year guy who so nearly became Alabama’s coach instead of Nick Saban in 2007 is a megalodon in Grouper waters.
The former West Virginia, Michigan and Arizona head coach so often matches wits with coaches hoping to get where he’s been as a head coach, and he will again tonight, when they play host to Tim Beck’s Coastal Carolina team.
All of those things remain true headed into 2024, but a subtle key to 2023 remains a question mark. What about player leadership?
With a roster of 60 new players, and Jax State inching toward a roster full of players with no attachment to the program’s recent FCS past, will the Gamecocks still have that intangible in sufficient number this season?
Led by seventh-year players Zion Webb and Jeremiah Harris, the 2023 Gamecocks mixed new talent around a core of former FCS guys who survived Rodriguez’s roster reworking to get the chance to prove themselves as FBS players.
Prove themselves they no doubt wanted to do, and prove themselves they did. They brought heart and soul to a team that left an indelible mark in Jax State history.
The first Gamecocks team to play more than guarantee game against an FBS program made a bowl and won it. That so rarely happens in the first FBS season.
Just ask Western Kentucky, one of Jax State’s new Conference USA rivals. The Hilltoppers suffered a 26-game streak before hitting their Group of 5 stride, regularly making low-tier bowls and winning their share of them.
No such wait for Jax State, and players who earned the right to stay and prove themselves in the 85-scholarship universe were the player leaders, even if not the most talented players on the roster.
Webb, Harris and others have moved on. As more portal players bring Jax State deeper and deeper into college football’s transactional new world, does the program still have enough guys who remember a different day?
Are there still enough guys burning to prove something bigger than earning playing time at Jax State?
Rodriguez said 12-15 players who attended his first team meeting with the Gamecocks remain.
“We’ve got a good senior class,” Rodriguez said. “There’s 25 guys, but about 10 of them or so are new. Those guys can help a little bit with leadership, but it’s really, like, J-Rock (Jaylen Swain) and Sean (Brown), the guys that have been here for three years, the whole time since we’ve been here, are the ones that have got to kind of take charge from a leadership standpoint.”
It has to come from guys like Swain, the Oxford High grad who initially didn’t have an offer from Jax State as an FCS program. He committed to Austin Peay, then one of Jax State’s Ohio Valley Conference rivals, and flipped when the school close to home saw the light.
He played for FCS Jax State. He played for transitioning Jax State. He’s an all-conference defensive lineman for FBS Jax State. Be it OVC, ASUN or CUSA, he’s been an all-conference player in all three conferences Jax State has called home over the last four years.
So, what does a guy like Swain tell his teammates who didn’t know Jax State when?
He tells them what he’s learned.
“You’ve got to come out and line up and play football,” he said. “No matter if you play FBS or FCS football, I think football is the same. Everybody is 18, 19, 20 years old. Maybe you have some that’s 24 or 25. You still have to line up and play physical.”
With enough of that perspective still around, Jax State just might back up last year’s astonishing season.
