After dropping a 24-23 heartbreaker to Arkansas State in his team’s final game of the season that eliminated his team from bowl eligibility first year Appalachian State coach Dowell Loggains turned his focus to closing out a recruiting class considered the best in Sun Belt Conference history.
Mountaineer players packed away their gear and headed home, some as far away as California. Then everything turned upside down as Notre Dame, Iowa State and Kansas State announced they were spurning the bowls.
The ensuing scramble by bowl officials looking to secure the best teams possible left the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, the Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl and the JLab Birmingham Bowl needing opponents for Wake Forest, Texas State and Georgia Southern, respectively.
With no 6-6 teams—six wins being the benchmark for being bowl eligible—available the bowl committees turned to the 5-7 teams. Eligible teams were ranked based on their APR score.
Florida State was first choice with a 990 score, same as Auburn’s. They both said no. Then came Rice and the Owls went to Lockheed Martin. After Central Florida and Kentucky declined Duke’s Mayo got Mississippi State.
Then Rutgers, Baylor, Kansas, and Temple all said no to JLab. Next up was App State followed by Marshall, Kent State and Buffalo.
“My athletic director called me on Sunday evening and asked me about playing in a bowl,” Loggins said. “I said yes. We’ll play on a Walmart parking lot!”
“I asked him where we would be playing and he told me Birmingham,” Loggins said in a press conference. “Then he said, ‘the opponent will be Georgia Southern.’”
And that’s how the Eagles and Mountaineers wound up playing a renewal of their bitter rivalry in what will be the 41st meeting. The game is set for 2 p.m. on Monday Dec. 29 in Birmingham, Ala.
Georgia Southern won the regular season matchup with a rater 25-23 win in Boone, N.C. App leads the overall series, 20-18-1. The Eagles are a 2.5-point favorite.
“It’s an awesome opportunity for our seniors to be able to go compete,” Loggains said. “I told our team (playing GS again) it’s just like the NFL: it’s a divisional game and you play a divisional team twice.”
Loggains knows of which he speaks. The offensive coordinator at South Carolina for two years before taking the App job he spent the first 17 years of his coaching career in the NFL.
While the Eagles crossed the finish line in a rush, winning three of their final four games it was quite the opposite for App who lost its season finale to Arkansas State, 30-29, when a late touchdown was taken off the board by a procedure penalty followed by an ASU touchdown with 42 seconds remaining.
The Mountaineers, once sitting at a lofty 4-2 after beating Oregon State, wound up losing four of their last five games, three of them by a combined 15 points.
The biggest question now is which App State team will show up. North Carolina Sports Network and 247Sports both show the Mountaineers with 31 players in the transfer portal. Georgia Southern shows zero.
The most prominent Mountaineers listed are quarterbacks JJ Kohl, AJ Swann and Matthew Wilson, edge rusher Thomas Davis, cornerback Elijah Mc-Cantos, defensive lineman Rondo Parker and linebacker Brayshawn Littlejohn.
In addition to dealing with the logistics of getting scattered players back on campus Loggains is also having to figure out who will be available and who won’t. He’s confident most of the players will show up and he has made it clear to players going into the portal they are still welcome.
“I told those guys absolutely yes,” Loggains said when asked if he had told the portal players they could play if they so desired. “This is the 2025 team and they’re part of it. I think you will be surprised at some of the guys who will play.
“The kids are close, the buy in is there. The care about each other, they care abut their school and they care about the block A so we’re excited about it.”
