One reason for Arkansas State to feel secure about its place in the college football landscape comes from how filled the stands are for its home games. For as long as the Red Wolves continue to produce winning seasons, there shouldn’t be much drop off for one of the top attendance draws in the Sun Belt Conference.
The eight top-attended seasons in program history have all come in the last eight seasons. During that time, the Red Wolves have won five conference championships and played in eight consecutive bowl games, something no other Group of Five school can claim.
Arkansas State began playing at its current stadium when it opened in 1974. The school has since expanded the stadium to nearly twice its original size so it can hold more than 30,000 spectators.
“It’s a foundation,” sixth-year Arkansas State head coach Blake Anderson said at Sun Belt Football Media Day in New Orleans. “But we feel like there’s something better yet to come.”
With college football celebrating 150 years of history this season, the Sun Belt Conference is looking back at the history of the league’s 10 football-playing schools.
Arkansas State has a program that dates back to 1911, but the recent success for the program has been unprecedented. Before the current streak of winning seasons, the longest streak of winning seasons in school history came more than 100 years ago, from 1912 to 1917.
Arkansas State first joined a conference in 1964 as part of the Southland Conference and soon after won a pair of Pecan Bowl titles, which at the time accounted for a regional championship for what would become the NCAA Division II and III levels of college football. After defeating Central Missouri 38-21 to cap an 11-0 season in 1970, Arkansas State was crowned as the then College Division national champion.
Later, while playing in the Football Championship Subdivision, Arkansas State reached the playoffs in four consecutive seasons with Larry Lacewell as head coach, once finishing as national runner-up in 1986 after a loss to champion, and future conference colleague, Georgia Southern.
A move up to the Football Bowl Subdivision came in 1992. Arkansas State joined the Sun Belt in 2001, the first season the league began sponsoring football. From there, the school posted no winning seasons until a 10-3 mark with Hugh Freeze as coach in 2011. Thus began a stretch of four winning seasons with four different head coaches, including Freeze, Gus Malzahn and Bryan Harsin, who went on to coach at other FBS programs.
Anderson, hired before the 2014 season, continued the streak of winning seasons.
“Our community support is what’s held it together,” Anderson said. “If you go through five head coaches in a five-year period and the program doesn’t take a nosedive, obviously there’s support coming. And the community has done a phenomenal job.”
Through six games into the 2019 season, Arkansas State won 70 games over the last eight-plus seasons, a span that includes a 52-13 record in Sun Belt games. That stretch also includes three bowl wins, the most recent being a 2016 Cure Bowl victory in Orlando, Florida, against UCF.
The five Sun Belt titles came in a span of six seasons, with three titles from 2011 to 13 and another two in 2015-16. Arkansas State is the only Sun Belt team to twice post 8-0 records in league play, in 2011 and 2015.
Arkansas State is also the only school to have played in all five of the Sun Belt’s guaranteed bowl games.
“We’re fortunate that we have our own (geographical) footprint,” Anderson said in reference to the consistent attendance at A-State games in Jonesboro. We’re not beating our heads against a lot of other programs within our footprint. We don’t have an NFL program right there in our backyard either, so we truly have our own fan base, our own following.”