On a night when former Georgia Southern coach Paul Johnson, who won two national titles with the Eagles, was honored for his election to the College Football Hall of Fame, his old team put on a championship performance in Statesboro.
Georgia Southern dominated rival Georgia State in the first half and went on to post a 44-27 win on Thursday night at Paulson Stadium.
The win ended Southern’s three-game losing streak to Georgia State, made the Eagles (6-2, 3-1) bowl eligible and enhanced their odds to play in the Sun Belt Conference championship game. Georgia State (6-2, 3-1) saw its two-game winning streak end.
“It didn’t start out very well. We didn’t play a very good first half,” Georgia State coach Shawn Elliott said. “Credit our team for fighting and staying in that game and playing until the end. Certainly, it was a disappointing loss and it does not feel good right now. But that’s the game of life and that’s the game of football.”
Georgia Southern quarterback Davis Brin completed 22 of 35 passes for 334 yards and three touchdowns but threw one interception and lost a fumble. Running back Jalen White rushed 24 times for 116 yards and one touchdown. Khaleb Hood caught eight passes for 75 yards and a touchdown.
Georgia State quarterback Darren Grainger completed 21 of 37 passes for 157 yards and ran 11 times for 80 yards and became the school’s leader in career yardage. But Grainger threw two interceptions, one of them returned for a touchdown, and lost a fumble near the end of the game.
Georgia State’s Marcus Carroll rushed 28 times for a career-high 208 yards – the second-most in program history behind Tra Barnett’s 242 in 2019 against Troy -- and two touchdowns, his sixth game with 100-plus yards, and surpassed 1,000 yards for the season.
“It’s a blessing to get 1,000, but it’s tough when you don’t get the win,” Carroll said.
The teams swapped touchdowns in the first quarter – Southern on a 34-yard pass from Brin to Hood and Georgia State on a 13-yard run by Carroll. But the rest of the half belonged to Southern, which added a 35-yard field goal from Michael Lantz, a 2-yard touchdown run from White, a 30-yard pass from Brin to Marcus Sanders Jr., and a 34-yarder from Lantz.
The last field goal, which gave Southern a 27-7 halftime lead, came after Marc Stampley’s interception with 1:03 remaining allowed the Eagles to add to their lead.
“It’s unfortunate. We didn’t quite play like the team we’ve been in that first half,” Elliott said. “They played good defense in the first half. They did a nice job.”
Elliott said the halftime message was upbeat, despite the 20-point deficit.
“The message was we’re going to come out and score, we’re going to cut this doggone lead, we’re going to stop them and we’re going to be in this ballgame,” Elliott said. “We’ve got to do it one play at a time. We’re not going to go out and defeat this team in the second half by thinking we’re going to throw a lot of bombs. It’s going to be one play, one play, one play after another. Wasn’t a whole lot of yelling and screaming.”
After Georgia State missed a field goal to open the third quarter, Southern stretched the lead to 34-8 when Brin threw a 76-yard touchdown pass to Dalen Cobb. GSU answered with back-to-back scores – a 3-yard pass from Grainger to Cadarius Thompson and a 19-yard run by Carroll after a Brin fumble.
“The first two drives didn’t work out like we wanted,” Elliott said. “After that we started playing.”
But Southern responded with a 40-yard field goal from Lantz at the end of a 10-play drive and iced it on Marques Watson-Trent’s 50-yard pick-six of Grainger, which gave the Eagles a 44-21 lead.
“It’s all about loving on one another,” Carroll said. “Everybody wins and it’s a lot of love. Sometimes when you lose you need even more love. This isn’t easy. Coach Elliott said we had Friday and Saturday off to go out and clear our heads, put it behind us and keep going forward. It’s not the end of the world for us. We’ve got a lot more we can accomplish.”
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