The Best Story in College Football

Building a successful football program doesn’t happen overnight, especially when you take a team with the longest losing streak in the nation. But even if no one else believed in Austin Peay’s program, Will Healy saw potential: he just needed the right people to help him engineer a top-to-bottom overhaul. After he was hired in December 2015, Healy spent the next 24 months making a series of smart hires, engaging in heated recruiting battles and conducting unprecedented on-field success. In short, he helped draft what many sports journalists called the best story in college football.

“The Austin Peay Governors might be Division 1 football’s best story in 2017,” Alex Kirshner, national sports reporter with SB Nation, wrote last November.

This story begins on a snowy January afternoon in 2016. A winter storm virtually shut down the city of Clarksville at the same time a group of 15 potential football recruits were visiting campus. Healy and his staff used the opportunity to create a bonding experience, with snowball fights and sled races. After that trip, 12 players committed to Austin Peay, giving the program a Top 10 Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) recruiting class.

Six months later, the team signed Jeremiah Oatsvall, who would go on to be APSU’s first player to be named OVC Freshman of the Year. Momentum continued to build for the program despite another winless season that fall, and in February 2017, APSU signed the No. 1 recruiting class in the FCS.

Everything came together on a warm September evening during the Governors first home game of the 2017 season. In front of a Fortera Stadium record 8,152 fans, the team routed Morehead State 69-13, ending a three-year losing streak.

“I’ve been here for four years, and this is the greatest feeling its ever been,” Max Ewoldt, an offensive lineman, said while watching fans tear down the goal posts.

That feeling only grew during the next few months with wins over Murray State, University of Tennessee at Martin, Tennessee State and Southeast Missouri State. On Nov. 4, the Governors defeated Tennessee Tech, earning the team’s first Sgt. York Trophy.

"I think if you look at where we were last year and then tell me that we would win the Sgt. York Trophy just one season later, I would have called you crazy," Healy told Governors Sports Network play-by-play announcer Brian Rives after the game. "You can't tell these kids that. Those kids believed we would be here."

APSU finished the season a few weeks later with a 28-13 win over Eastern Illinois, giving the Governors eight regular season wins to tie the program record for victories set in 1977. The team finished 25th in a 24-team field for FCS Playoffs, narrowly missing the program's first playoff birth. But in

the weeks that followed, sports writers and fans lauded the program with Healy receiving the Roy Kidd OVC Coach of the Year and the

Eddie Robinson Award, making him the FCS national coach of the year.

"This award is a testament of Coach Healy's ability to lead a group of individuals, to make them believe in a vision—a dream at the time—and then put in countless hours of work, dedication, perseverance and love for each other to make that vision a reality,” Ryan Ivey, APSU athletics director, said.

Now the team is ready to build off this momentum with another big season. That season starts Sept. 1 with the team taking on last year’s national champion contenders the Georgia Bulldogs.