THE REDSHIRT SEASON
What happens when you build an entire year out of spring practice?
College football doesn’t really do soft launches. Teams run onto the field with live buffalo and tigers, chase old-fashioned cars, and watch eagles fly laps around the stadium. New coaches arrive on private jets and appear on billboards to taunt their closest rivals. Marquee non-conference games are hyped years in advance, and recruiting experts already told you everything about most of the players who will suit up in 2030.
Kennesaw State’s final FCS season is one of the few exceptions. Given the rare gift of upward mobility in a sport designed to maintain the status quo, the Owls got the call-up to full Conference USA membership starting next fall. As part of the two-year transition process, they are ineligible for the 2023 postseason and running out the clock on their time in FCS with a shortened, mix-and-match schedule of glorified exhibitions. The young program rolled directly from startup to success with three Big South titles and four playoff bids in the first seven seasons. Now, we’re sitting through what amounts to a redshirt year for the entire program.
Nine games of football purgatory, if you want to be dramatic.
Kennesaw’s FBS prequel comes with a strange freedom after removing the usual targets of conference titles and postseason berths. You’re free to experiment, able to focus entirely on the future in a way the program hasn’t since the practice-only season in 2014. Head coach Brian Bohannon used this window of opportunity to bring in new coordinators on both sides of the ball: Nathan Burton on defense and Chris Klenakis to overhaul the flexbone offense into a new pistol scheme. Most contributors (current and future) who will play a role in CUSA are limited to four games of action to preserve an extra year of eligibility, giving the coaching staff an extra headache of juggling a rotating cast that has included 75 players so far.
Without proper context, the results have not been too enjoyable at the halfway point. 1-4 on the year, with the only win coming against a Division II Tusculum team that hung around for a half in the opener. A month-long losing streak followed, the first time the Owls have ever dropped four consecutive games during a season. The record doesn’t come close to telling the full story, but that won’t stop the worrying about the jump to FBS.
The good news: the CUSA invitation wasn’t merit-based depending on how the scoreboard looks this fall. This isn’t a scrappy, working-class club in England trying to climb to the Premier League on nothing more than results. The case for KSU’s promotion happened far away from the field, based on enrollment numbers and Atlanta’s sprawling metro area, an endless appetite for TV inventory on fall Wednesday nights, and self-preservation from CUSA as the last domino at the end of the conference realignment chain.
None of that changes if the Owls finish 3-6 and only manage to beat the two non-DI teams left on the schedule, Lincoln and Virginia-Lynchburg. None of this should be unexpected given the weight of the drastic offensive change and week-to-week availability constraints due to redshirting. The most efficient way to overhaul the roster would have been to raid the transfer portal for de-facto free agents, a difficult task during the nine-game rebuild. Come to Kennesaw and help us rebuild for the future. We’ll send you a Frisco Bowl cowboy hat in the mail someday.
Still, it’s jarring to see some of these numbers from Kennesaw after steadily building expectations since first taking the field in 2015:
Rated 56th in FCS SP+, with both offense and defense units ranking just outside the Top 50
190th in Sagarin (includes entirety of Division I)
3rd down conversions: 116th in FCS at 23%
16.5 points per game against Division I opponents
The entire advanced box score against Tennessee Tech
The quick summary is that they are essentially a mid-tier FCS team, which somehow feels like overachieving and a letdown at the same time. The record is a little more disappointing because every loss has been a close game that could’ve (but not necessarily should’ve) swung on a missed assignment here or a wide-left field goal there. Through the first decade of KSU football’s existence, we’ve either been happy to be here or serious championship contenders, with nothing between. Now we’re stuck in the middle and still have four four more games to go before
Maybe I am a sicko, but I’m enjoying it all anyway.
Sure, it would’ve been nice to cruise to 9-0 and claim a UCF-style national title on the way out of FCS. That undefeated record was a clever way for Bohannon to keep the team motivated heading into a season without much on the line aside from “playing for the brand,” as he called it earlier in the season. College football fans are always on tilt, constantly focused on results and comparisons. Are we better than our rival? How’s our recruiting class stacking up in the 247 Composite? The Process has developed into a meme during Alabama’s reign of terror. It’s easy for Nick Saban to talk about why results don’t matter when you compete for a national championship every year, but…he does make a few good points about focusing on the path rather than the ultimate goal.
This season, Owls fans are experiencing a season that stretches The Process to its absolute limits: there’s no end result in sight for years. We’re watching the creation of an entirely new offense from Day 1, a hybrid between Bohannon’s triple option sensibilities and the pistol scheme pioneered by Chris Ault, Klenakis’ head coach at Nevada. Every week is friends and family preview night at a new restaurant. We get to see three wideout formations, and experiment in the art of pass-catching tight ends for the first time. The new dishes don’t always turn out; sometimes the Owls give up, in Bohannon’s estimation, 50 yards on botched snaps after not seeing the issue surface in practice. The critics will visit soon enough. Thankfully we’re still in the test kitchen for now.
We should still be able to appreciate curtain calls for players like Jonathan Murphy, Markeith Montgomery, and Isaac Foster, who came back for graduate seasons in the transition year. They can’t add to the trophy case or grab any more individual honors, but still decided to return, reinventing their playing styles or changing positions just to get one more season in Kennesaw.
The program-wide redshirt year also gives a fan culture a low-stakes season to find its way and continue to filter through the ambition and Power 5 cosplaying of the past decade. Not everyone sees 2023 that way. Some of the more vocal fans online - there are dozens, DOZENS - are using the chance to call for sweeping coaching changes or complain about facilities. You should mostly ignore this wing of the fan base, but to be clear: KSU does not have the cause nor the resources to buy out Bohannon’s extension - especially not while the athletic department is crowdfunding protein bars for the baseball team. Seeing some of the reactions to this year’s losses shows we’re just an unhinged call-in radio show away from really making it.
Owls fans have always had a slight insecurity trying to justify our place as newcomers in college football. Nobody grows up dreaming of Kennesaw. A lot of us ended up here on accident or as a detour. That original self-doubt can extend to sports - it’s hard to explain why you want to set a phone on the bar to watch a laggy ESPN+ stream. Who would line up work trips to grab a solo ticket for a Thursday night game against Samford? Adding to the imposter syndrome, the NCAA changed attendance requirements and upped the financial investments required for FBS just after the Owls snuck in CUSA’s basement window. If you were the type to cast doubts on whether Kennesaw deserves to be here, you might notice that the sport’s governing body just installed a few extra Ring cameras and won’t make that mistake again.
That desire to be respected is the common theme for how we got here, with early football success masking the difficulty of growing a culture in constant comparison to the dozens of established FBS powers in the region. We’re trying to build a boat while treading water next to the super yachts of Georgia and Alabama. And if the only personality trait so far is winning, what happens when you take that away?
To this point, the definitive story written on Kennesaw State football wasn’t a gamer from a playoff win or any of the opportunistic drive-by pieces written by local media outlets. It was Jason Kirk, then at SB Nation, writing about Plank’s origin during the Owls’ first playoff season in 2017. A KSU grad himself, Kirk captured something that none of the quick, haha look at that board wearing a tie posts noticed: Plank was the perfect accidental symbol for a program that was “waiting for an identity.” Six years later, we still haven’t quite discovered one.
At least we’re done trying to fast forward through the whole timeline to becoming a fully-formed program, though. You can’t flip a switch and have your own Howard’s Rock. Everything about college football is far too strange to happen without authenticity. The years of force-feeding traditions and rivalries are over after realizing that these types of regional conflicts take time - plus five overtimes and a couple hundred cigars. Somewhere in the depths of the Convocation Center, there may be an Owls staffer staring at a True Detective evidence board, still trying to figure out how to make the Mercer rivalry happen. To create real traditions, you need a backup receiver to find a piece of wood on spring break or find a few guys to screen-print KSU logos onto banana costumes. You even end up bailing on the “traditional” fight song that nobody cares about in favor of the catchiest tune of March Madness.
Nobody has any clue where this program will be in a decade. We might even be too late to college football’s gold rush in general, arriving to FBS as TV executives finish mining every last dollar before bailing once the players rightfully ask for their share. That’s what I love about this football season - we have a chance to embrace the uncertainty. We can fully separate the scoreboard from the growth in a way that won’t ever be possible again. Four straight losses in a normal year would have already broken the panic button with valid concerns. Instead, Tennessee State’s visit for homecoming on Saturday will be a sellout for the final FCS vs. FCS game in Kennesaw.
Finding that patience can be almost impossible in the results-driven world of college football, but remember: we’re heading to world where 7-5 and a trip to the Myrtle Beach Bowl is the dream. Let’s enjoy the process while we can.