Georgia State coach Trent Miles knows what the trajectory of a reclamation project is supposed to look like.
At Indiana State, his alma mater, it took two years of brutally consistent losing before a winning culture took hold. And at Georgia State, a start-up program whose transition to the Football Bowl Subdivision was starting to look a bit hopeless, Miles faced a similar time frame and initial results.
The difference was that midway through his third season, with the Panthers stuck at 2-6, it was unclear from the outside whether the same kind of progress was happening.
“I wasn’t worried because of the character of the kids we had,” Miles said. “We were just wanting to stay the course and continuing to get them to believe in what they were working for. We’d seen the production in spurts, just not for a whole game, and we finally got to the point where we were playing four quarters of good football. Part of the deal is finally believing you can do it. You can get enough talent in here, but the confidence factor is the hardest part.”
The confidence arrived as Georgia State rolled to victories in its final four games of the regular season to finish 6-6 and earn a its first postseason bid in the Cure Bowl.
Now, with the Panthers set to open spring practice Thursday, the goals have changed and contending for a Sun Belt Conference title is the logical next step.
“I think we’re really close,” Miles said. “We’re right there.”
Georgia State’s potential as a program has never been in question. With an undergraduate enrollment of more than 43,000 and campus location in downtown Atlanta, adding football in 2008 seemed like a natural for a growing urban school trying to increase its national profile.
But the reality of building a program from scratch under longtime college football coach Bill Curry combined with the sped-up ambition of conference realignment left Georgia State in a massive hole when Miles arrived in 2013.
The Panthers struggled in their first three years as a Football Championship Subdivision program, but because the Sun Belt had invited Georgia State to move up to FBS amid a quickly shifting landscape in 2012 — with no guarantee the opportunity would come again — the school essentially had no choice but to make the leap without the proper infrastructure or planning.
The results were disastrous for Miles’ first two seasons, as the team went 1-23 without a conference victory.
But Miles had been very intentional about how he built the roster, which had roughly 60 scholarship players when he started, and played lots of underclassmen, just as he did at Indiana State.
“You just don’t go from no football to a bowl game in six years that easy,” he said. “We played 18 true freshmen my first year at Indiana State and won zero. My second year we went 1-11 my third year and every year after that we won and those kids grew up. Here we got rid of a bunch of guys, started 19 true freshman my first year and the same thing happened. Those young guys grew up.”
Miles also brought in a junior college quarterback in Nick Arbuckle, who become a two-time all-conference player and threw for 4,368 yards last year. Replacing him is undoubtedly the biggest question mark in the program right now.
But aside from the quarterback position, Georgia State has solidified its roster in a lot of areas. The scholarship count is back up near 85 and there is no great disparity in numbers between the classes, which means Miles no longer has to rely on junior colleges to fill significant numbers of slots. And with 16 starters returning — seven on offense, nine on defense — there is now a cycle of recruiting, development and depth that can lead to sustained success.
“We’re trending upward,” Miles said. “I’ve got some all-conference players coming back. We want to get to the point where we’re redshirting guys and helping them grow and build. Our facilities are better. We just built a weight room, so we’re seeing player development. There’s a lot of building. I don’t feel we’re very far away from being a program that can compete every year.”
But the biggest building block on the horizon for Georgia State is the school’s plan to transform Turner Field, which the Atlanta Braves are vacating after this season, into the school’s own football stadium.
In December, the Atlanta Fulton County Recreation Authority chose Georgia State’s $300 million bid to redevelop Turner Field and the surrounding area, with the final sale expected to go through later this year. Assuming it happens as planned, it will give Georgia State the opportunity to build the kind of identity and atmosphere it simply couldn’t produce as a secondary tenant of the Georgia Dome.
“It’s a game-changer,” Miles said. “Our university is growing and that’ll be a window to our university.”
Though that move is still at least a few years away, there is some excitement about Georgia State coming off the bowl game that Miles hopes will translate into positive momentum off the field where the program has struggled to tap into its large local alumni base.
“There are some people who didn’t realize Georgia State was FBS,” Miles said. “If you win, they come. Now are we ever going to get 85,000 for every game? I don’t know many mid-majors that do that. Let’s be realistic. But as long as we continue to win and people take pride in the program, you’ll see more and more support, you’ll see us on par with a lot of these teams out there that are playing in the Mountain West and Conference USA and the (American) and the Sun Belt.”
PROJECTING THE TOP 25 FOR 2016
