How Kennesaw State football went from 2-10 to being bowl-eligible in its second FBS season
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It was at some point over the summer, weeks before his squad would play its first game of the 2025 season, that Jerry Mack could sense the potential in his Kennesaw State football team.
The Owls were coming off a trying first season at the FBS level, having won just two games and seeing the only coach the program had ever known get replaced. After being hired by the university last December, Mack reshaped the team’s roster in waves, first after taking over the program and again after spring practices.
During a scrimmage in August, he could start to see his vision for the program taking hold. The defense was flying around the field. The offense, not to be outdone, was doing its best to match that intensity. There was a level of athleticism that wasn’t there even in the spring.
Almost three months later, the memory has stayed with him.
“I knew we had something special,” Mack said to USA TODAY Sports last week. “You never know how it’s all going to come together, but I knew it was something special.”
Now the rest of the college football world has gotten to witness what Mack saw on a suburban Atlanta field on a muggy summer day.
A promising start
Kennesaw State has been among the biggest and the most pleasant surprises at any level of college football this season. After struggling to a 2-10 finish in 2024 – with only two of those games decided by fewer than two scores – it’s already 7-3 heading into into its Saturday, Nov. 22 against Missouri State. In just their second season at the FBS level, and in their first season under a first-time FBS head coach, the Owls are bowl eligible.
“We talked to those guys about believing in a vision and believing they were going to have a chance to have success with me and this staff,” Mack said. “They trusted us. So far, it has turned out exactly like the way we all wanted it to.”
After dropping its first two games of the season to No. 2 Indiana and a bowl-eligible Wake Forest team, Kennesaw State rattled off seven consecutive wins before falling 35-26 on the road to Conference USA-leading Jacksonville State last Saturday. The loss may only end up meaning so much. With victories against Missouri State and Liberty in their final two regular-season games, the Owls would likely make the Conference USA championship game and have a shot at a 10-win season.
From humble beginnings
It’s quite the contrast from where the program was about a decade ago — if only because there wasn’t one.
After years of feasibility surveys and exploratory committees, and after two of its pitches were rejected by the state’s board of regents, Kennesaw State got the go-ahead to launch a football program in February 2013. Two years later it played its inaugural season. Almost immediately, the Owls became a force at the FCS level. They finished with a winning record in each of their first seven seasons and made four FCS playoff appearances, including two runs to the quarterfinals.
By 2022, just seven years after its first game, the school announced it was moving to Conference USA and the FBS.
“We had all the right things pointing in the direction that we could be successful and will be successful given the opportunity to move up,” Kennesaw State athletic director Milton Overton said to USA TODAY Sports.
The transition proved to be challenging. After going 3-6 in 2023 as an FCS independent, the Owls got off to a 1-9 start in 2024. The day after a double overtime loss to UTEP dropped it to 1-8, the university announced that Brian Bohannon — the decorated head coach who had led the program since Kennesaw State’s first season — had stepped down. Within hours of the announcement, Bohannon said on social media that he had not resigned but had been fired by Overton, who one year later said he didn’t have any regrets about the way the process played out.
Finding the future
With the program patriarch gone, Overton embarked on a search, one that led him to who he believed was an ideal target.
While the athletic director at Florida A&M from 2015-17, Overton was struck by the thirty-something head coach of North Carolina Central, one of the Rattlers’ Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference foes. It was Mack, who went 31-15 in four seasons with the Eagles, highlighted by nine wins and a Celebration Bowl appearance in 2016.
“Observing him early on in his career, very few coaches can win at his age,” Overton said. “That showed that he was very special.”
After the 2017 season, Mack left for Rice, where he spent three seasons as the offensive coordinator before coaching running backs for three seasons at Tennessee. From there, he had a one-year stint in the NFL with the Jacksonville Jaguars. All the while, he longed to become a head coach again.
In Kennesaw State, he saw what he described at his introductory news conference as “an opportunity of a lifetime” with a program at a large school in a major metropolitan area with an administration that was as ambitious as he was.
“All those things just told me that this place was a sitting gold mine, a hidden gem,” Mack said. “I just wanted to make sure I was on the front end or something. There are very few times in your career that you get a chance to be on the front end of something that has so much upside.”
A dramatic change…
Mack overhauled the Owls’ roster, bringing in nearly 60 newcomers while leaning heavily on relationships he and members of his staff had with players from previous coaching stops. Mack had experience coaching and recruiting at virtually every level of the sport and, after a year with the Jaguars, had an NFL pedigree to sell to young players eager to one day go pro.
The changes didn’t end there. The first time Mack met many of his players, he had them write on index cards what they would change about the program and used the answers to inform some of the first steps he took as coach.
“He kind of put it in our minds that he was a guy that was going to be around for us, that was going to get us what we needed to succeed,” Kennesaw State linebacker Baron Hopson, who stayed with the program through the coaching change, said to USA TODAY Sports. “Looking back at it, it looks like it’s all working out.”
He set up a strength and conditioning program informed by his stop in the NFL. He worked to address some of the concerns he read on those index cards, which Hopson said commonly included things like athlete nutrition and recovery.
When it came to building his first roster, Mack took what he described as an “inside-out” approach, prioritizing offensive and defensive lines teeming with “big men that could move.” He looked for players with a chip on their shoulder. In many ways, that team reflected its coach, who helped paint the field while a Division II assistant, spent the vast majority of his career outside of the power conferences and, like many successful HBCU coaches, was routinely overcooked by FBS schools with vacancies.
“The guys who were returning, they didn’t have a lot of success the previous year,” Mack said. “We got in the portal, looked at transfers and we took some guys that weren’t necessarily highly recruited or highly touted from the previous spots they came from. Those guys wanted to prove a point they could be successful and they could help a team win.”
…And a dramatic turnaround
That approach has quickly delivered results, exceeding even the most optimistic preseason expectations.
Before the loss to Jacksonville State, the Owls’ seven-game win streak was the longest among Group of Six programs. Their defense has improved considerably, allowing 22.5 points per game after giving up 31.2 last season. True to Mack’s vision, they’ve excelled in the trenches, tied for 16th among 136 FBS teams in sacks allowed per game and tied for 26th in sacks per game. Hopson’s 96 tackles are tied for the 17th-most among all FBS players. Five players have rushed for at least 150 rushing yards and two touchdowns in a game this season, tied with Navy and Air Force for the most in the FBS. Gabriel Benyard’s 668 receiving yards this season have set a single-season program record.
On Oct. 28, and in front of a sold-out home crowd on a rainy night, Kennesaw State beat UTEP 33-20 to secure bowl eligibility.
“That means so much for a young program,” Mack said. “There are programs that have been around for years and years, for decades and decades, and they only have a single-digit number of bowl opportunities in the history of the program. You can’t take these things lightly. You’ve got to celebrate those types of moments.”
Others have taken notice. Three of the four sellouts at the school’s 11,040-seat stadium have come this season. Players like Hopson regularly get stopped on campus by students wanting to talk with them about the team.
“A year ago, I’ll tell you, that wouldn’t have happened,” Hopson said.
What lies ahead
The excitement around the Owls isn’t limited to the present.
Kennesaw State’s climb in the college football world has been made possible by a series of factors that some believe could help the program reach even greater heights. The school itself is enormous, with an undergraduate enrollment this fall of 46,069, a 7.5% increase from last year. It’s located just outside Atlanta, the largest city in the football-mad, talent-rich state of Georgia.
The term “sleeping giant” was regularly used when describing Kennesaw State, with Mack seeing similarities between the Owls and UCF, which jumped from Conference USA to the Big 12 in just 11 years.
If Kennesaw State’s brief football history has proven anything, it’s that it would be unwise to bet against it.
“With all those other things on the outside going on for us, there’s a chance we could become in 10 years or so a Power Four style of program,” Mack said. “It just takes one step at a time and a commitment level from the administration and the athletic department. If that continues doing what it’s supposed to do like it’s doing now, there’s no telling how big this thing can get.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Kennesaw State became one of college football’s most improved teams
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