Flaws in the 2017 football schedule

The George-Anne - sports









Fall's football season has already become one of the most talked-about seasons in recent Georgia Southern history.











This season will be Tyson Summers’s second season, there's going to be a whole new quarterback system, there are many new coaches on both sides of the ball, an exciting recruiting class and beginning the season on the road at Auburn. Last week, the Sun Belt Conference released its schedule, and it left Eagles fans asking questions.






One of the flaws in this year’s schedule that many fans are questioning is that we are playing App State and Georgia State back to back and so early in this season. Most rivalries in college football are played the last week of the season- Georgia vs. Georgia Tech, Auburn vs. Alabama, Michigan vs. Ohio State.





All of these high profile match-ups are games that the country waits for and they always end up being great battles.





For both App State and Georgia Southern, this rivalry is consistently the highlight of the season and has been since the schools started playing annually in 1993. This is also the premier rivalry of the Sun Belt since the two teams joined the conference in 2014. If this is supposed to be considered a true rival game, why is it being played on a Thursday night three weeks before Rivalry Week?





Now, the argument can be made that they don’t play during this week because they aren’t instate rivals, much like Clemson vs FSU, Georgia vs Florida, and Oklahoma vs Texas. While these games have also become meaningful, passionate, rival games, they are played against teams outside of state borders.





This brings us to Georgia State in the game known as Modern Day Hate. All year students say “southern not state” and know that we despise the fake GSU. So much goes into this game for the ...


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