No other team in the Sun Belt Conference can match Troy for what it has achieved in recent seasons.
In 2016, the Trojans became the first football team in conference history to earn a Top 25 ranking in a major national poll. The next year, Troy went to No. 25 LSU and beat the Tigers at home to snap their 49-game home non-conference winning streak. Then, came the 2018 victory at Nebraska that accounted for Troy’s fifth win since 2001 against an Autonomy Five conference school.
But, there is more to Troy than unexpected wins against bigger schools. The Troy football program dates back to 1909, and the university has won three national championships at two different levels of college football.
With college football celebrating 150 years of history this season, the Sun Belt is taking a look back at the history of the conference’s 10 football-playing schools.
Few teams have risen through the ranks of college football like Troy. The first national championship came in 1968 at the NAIA level, and through the years, the Trojans moved up to the NCAA Division II level in 1970, the NCAA Division I-AA (now Football Championship Subdivision) level in 1993 and the Football Bowl Subdivision in 2001.
Immediately, the Trojans scored their first win against an Autonomy Five school with a 2001 win against Mississippi State.
The other two national titles came at the Division II level in 1984 and 1987. Walk-on freshman kicker Ted Clem came onto the field with the clock running in the 1984 game and made a 50-yard field goal to beat North Dakota State 18-17 as time expired. It’s known around Troy simply as “The Kick.”
The 1987 team set school scoring and yardage records with 4,162 rushing yards still secured as the most in school history.
Chan Gailey coached the 1984 team and Rick Rhodes coached the 1987 title winners. The coach with the most wins in school history is Larry Blakeney, whose 178 victories over 24 seasons from 1991 to 2014 came as the school made its final two jumps from Division II to Division I-AA and then to the FBS.
In eight I-AA seasons with Blakeney, Troy reached the playoffs seven times. His teams advanced twice to the semifinal round. In the Sun Belt, his teams continued to thrive and the Trojans won five consecutive Sun Belt championships from 2006 to 2010.
“If you were building a Mt. Rushmore of Troy University, (Chancellor Jack Hawkins) would be the first one (for his 30 years at the school),” first-year Troy coach Chip Lindsey said at Sun Belt Football Media Day. “But then right after that, I think Larry Blakeney would be the next guy.
“Twenty-four years as a head coach, had some huge wins, the first Power 5 win. He’s the guy that kind of got us going. If you look through the history of the program you’ll see guys like that, that helped transition us to be where we are to this day.”
Other headline-grabbing wins for Troy came in 2004 against Missouri and 2007 against Oklahoma State. Those preceded the two against LSU and Nebraska.
Troy won a sixth Sun Belt championship in 2017 with Neal Brown as head coach. The Trojans have posted three consecutive 10-win seasons for the first time in 98 seasons of playing football.
In total, Troy has played in eight bowls and won five. The first bowl win came in 2006 with a New Orleans Bowl victory against Rice. The last three bowl wins came in the last three seasons: in Mobile against Ohio, New Orleans against North Texas and back in Mobile against Buffalo.
Twice, Troy had players go in the first round of the NFL Draft, with DeMarcus Ware going to the Dallas Cowboys, at No. 11 overall, in 2005 and Leodis McKelvin going to the Buffalo Bills at No. 11, also overall, in 2008.
Veterans Memorial Stadium has been home to Troy football since 1950. The stadium originally sat 5,000 fans. Multiple expansions, the last one in 2002, raised the seating capacity to 30,000. A more recent $24 million renovation included the construction of a facility to house the team locker room, weight room, coaches’ offices and equipment. Troy has set school season attendance records in each of the last three seasons, topping out at 24,527 per game in 2018.
“If you think about it, in that town, the whole thing is built around that university; you’re seeing more and more of our community being involved,” Lindsey said.
“Where we are in southeast Alabama, we’re a long way from Tuscaloosa, a pretty good way from Auburn. People really connect with our program and they’ve done that over the years and hopefully that will continue.”