Exactly 365 days after the local paper printed a story titled “KSU Football is Crashing Fast”, Jerry Mack’s Owls will meet Jacksonville State as winners of seven straight, bowl eligible, and tied at the top of CUSA, with an eye-of-a-needle pathway to the College Football Playoff. ESPNU saw enough promise in the matchup to serve it up to a national audience at the same time as Texas-Georgia, the latest Game of the Century of the Week that doesn’t mean much.
This entire Kennesaw State football season has felt like a redemption story, righting the wrongs from the FBS debut. The Owls avenged the losses and handled every stumbling block: Mid FCS team, Sun Belt opponent at home, MTSU, Louisiana Tech, UTEP, so on and so forth. A QB controversy came and went without grinding the season to a complete halt. They’ve won pretty; they’ve won ugly. They went to the Chihuahuan Desert and still had a head football coach on Monday morning. No team left on the schedule beat the Owls last year.
Except Jacksonville State.
None of this success seemed likely when we jumped to the slightly bigger leagues last season. Our fanbase always thought it was possible, though, which is why the Welcome to FBS beatdown in KSU’s inaugural CUSA opener hit so hard. Rich Rodriguez’s Gamecocks did to the Owls, in violent fashion, what our program insisted would take 3-5 years.
“We can be as good as we want to be, as fast as we want to be,” Mack told us during his intro presser last December.
To prove that point, he and his staff engineered a remarkable turnaround only possible in the transfer portal era. They’ve built a microwaved version of Amir Abdur-Rahim’s Owls basketball revival, with a timeline that condensed four years of steady progress into one sprint up the mountain. Imagine if 1-28 and March Madness happened 12 months apart.
Mack hired coaches who were grinding away as SEC GAs, close confidants, a DC from Europe, and support staffers from every connection in his career. They’re getting contributions from freshmen who were deciding between the OVC and SWAC during the winter, and G5 rotation players who were surplus to requirements at their previous schools. A returning core of Owls have played better than ever. If you simulated this project a million times, surely we’re in the top 0.1% of how the 2025 season could’ve gone up to this point.
Think about the players involved, and the similarities to that ASUN championship team: Gabe Benyard as Terrell Burden, the undersized homegrown talent who stuck around through injury and uncertainty to carry the offense wearing #1. Amari Odom as Demond Robinson, the transfer whose personality defines the squad. Clayton Coppock is as Simeon Cottle as it gets: A rail-thin freshman from Atlanta who’s already a massive spark off the bench. Davis Bryson can be Armani Harris — caught between eras but still a major influence, despite limited playing time. Elijah Hill’s only been around for a few months, but a premium pass rushing skillset will see him climb the ladder like Chris Youngblood. JT Pennington is Alex Peterson, a player we all thought would be outrecruited by now, and he just keeps showing up to work and succeeding.
I think I could do this all day. You get the picture, though.
We’ve reached a seminal chapter in remaking that basketball season: the first Liberty matchup. For those who don’t perpetually try to relive that three-week, 7.5 game stretch of basketball nirvana, allow me to refresh your memory: AAR and the Owls surged back from a 14-point deficit to beat the Flames and gain control of the regular season race with three games to play. Winning guaranteed nothing except the driver’s seat to host the postseason. No net-cutting, no trophy celebration. A feel good story that turned into favorites when the buzzer sounded. Every Owls fan remembers the rest.
We can’t ignore the parallels to that weeknight against Liberty: The game before the game, a rivalry on the verge of becoming real and not just wishful thinking on the internet. Saturday’s winner will still need to handle business in the final two weeks, then do it all over again, either in a rematch or against Western Kentucky. Kennesaw’s facing a JSU program that’s only lost three total games in as many seasons in CUSA, not dissimilar from Liberty’s grasp on that era in the ASUN.
Both sides will understand the fleeting moment on Saturday night, combined with whatever comes next. Back in 2023, Liberty took two shots at the Owls and missed both, leaving one of the best teams in school history with only an NIT second-round appearance. Kennesaw, even with the ASUN triumph, faltered down the stretch in Greensboro and lost its coaching staff and half the rotation weeks later.
College sports are about high and low tides more than ever. Even in the ideal case scenario, the best players and coaches will leave just as soon as you got to know them. The hope is that you enjoy the highs when they do come, and use them to raise the floor of the program. We dreamed about seasons like this when the program began, and they felt further away than ever during the last fall’s low points. Saturday night’s not the finish line, far from it, but certainly one of those moments on the upswing that I’m trying to do better to appreciate this time around.
Maybe I’m reaching here: I find it a little poetic that this game takes place on the same weekend where Kennesaw State and USF will honor the memory of the architect of that basketball rebuild in the Love Wins Classic. Nobody was quicker to shout out the other coaches and programs trying to accomplish the same goals on campus. You know AAR would be watching this one, pointing out what an opportunity it was for Kennesaw State University.
The kind of night where he’d say what we all hope is true: This ain’t the same old Kennesaw, my brother. Win or lose, he’d then tell us the job’s not finished.
