Throwback Thursday – The First Florida Game – August 30, 1986

Coach Erk Russell didn't come up with any catchy phrases for the 1986 season opener against Florida, saying "playing Florida is enough motivation for anybody."

For the game in 1986, Georgia Southern sold out its allotment of 7,200 tickets. Just two years prior, the Eagles had played in front of its biggest crowd ever, 25,000-plus at East Carolina. For this game, they would be in a stadium with three times as many spectators and while Russell, the former defensive coordinator at Georgia, may have been familiar with an opponent like Florida, Eagle fans were not.

Georgia Southern Football had been on a fast track. When the Eagles kicked off against Florida on August 30, 1986, only… ONLY… 1,926 days had passed since May 23rd, 1981, when athletics administrators had to run to the local K-Mart to purchase a football just prior to Coach Russell's press conference.  In that timeframe, Georgia Southern had won a national championship, constructed Allen E. Paulson Stadium and raised several million dollars to fund the athletic program.

"I was very surprised and caught off guard by the announcement that we were playing Florida," said wide receiver Monty Sharpe. "We learned about it right after the Furman game last year. I was shocked that we would be playing that caliber of a team in so short a time, but the more I looked at the films, I began to realize that we were just as good as some of the teams Florida played. "

As Anthony Stasny wrote the day after that first meeting, "the game was billed as one in which Georgia Southern had nothing to lose and everything to win."

A Florida Today article pointed out some of the differences between Florida and Georgia Southern College off the football field. The first, the budget deficit, with the Gators' football budget weighing in at $3.54 million to Georgia Southern's $900,000. The Eagles received $108,000 guarantee for the game and used its "Eisenhower-era" bus and rented another to bring the squad to Gainesville.

Coach Russell deemed Roger Inman the team MVP, before the Eagles had even played a game that season. Georgia Southern only had a chance to win if it could get to the game and Inman, the equipment manager and bus driver was also the mechanic for the "Eagle Special."  Russell quipped to the Statesboro Herald the week of the game that "we don't know if our trip's going to take four hours or four days," about Georgia Southern's unreliable mode of transportation.

Regardless of how long the trip would take, quarterback Tracy Ham was returning to his old stomping grounds. A Floridian, he was raised not 20 minutes away from Gainesville and was recruited by the Gators to play defensive back. He opted, no pun intended, for Georgia Southern instead, where he would define the standard for an Eagle quarterback. He still owns numerous game, season, career, playoff and NCAA records.

He is the best quarterback in Georgia at any level, and possibly the best in America at doing what he does," said Head Coach Erk Russell about Tracy Ham and how he ran the "Hambone" offense. The offense was so named by former Savannah Morning News sportswriter Steve Brunner.

Brunner wrote in 1983, "Some teams run the wishbone and others use the wingbone, but Georgia Southern relies on the Tracy Ham-Bone. It's a simple offense, really. All a team needs is a quarterback who can break an option play 75 yards, throw cruise missiles and psychoanalyze opposing defenses. Ham does all of the above."

Ham would finish the game with 107 yards rushing and ran for the Eagles' final touchdown in the game. He went 10-19 for 93 yards in the air. He was disappointed in his play and in the 38-14 loss in the first game of the year. Few could foretell that a short four months later that Ham and the Eagles would bring a second national championship home to Statesboro.

Information culled from numerous sources including the Statesboro Herald, Savannah Morning News, and recaps and notes from Georgia Southern Sports Information.