Bill Curry to lead Georgia State Football
by Dave Cohen

Georgia State announced on Thursday, June 12th that Bill Curry will lead the Panthers into the world of college football, introducing him as the start-up program’s first head coach. is well known as a former coach at Georgia Tech, Alabama and Kentucky. Curry, who agreed to a five-year contract, is charged with the task of developing and directing the football program in every area in preparation for State’s first season in the fall of 2010.

You’ve been the head coach at three pretty high profile universities. After spending the last eleven years as an analyst on ESPN, did you ever think you’d return to the sideline?

Once you’re a coach, you’re always a coach. Ii’ve enjoyed the other things done, enjoyed the television business, but Ii really need to be with young people. Not only do young people need direction and leadership today but there’s some of us who need them. love coaching because it allows me to be involved with students, the student athletes and all the students. From this moment forward am a servant to the students of State University and want the students to understand that understand the sport of football, as well as the rest of our sports, are supposed to be for the students on campus. And the alumni can also support it and enjoy it. But want to everybody to understand and the student body to understand this is for you and am here to serve you. cannot wait to get onto the field. Football will be a huge success at State University

This will be a new challenge for you, building a program from the ground up.

The idea of building a team from the ground up had never occurred until A Dad Mary McEelroy shocked me by calling me and she said, “Well, we’re going to do it. We’re going to play football.” That began a process that has been wonderful and encouraging. We’re going to have a different kind of situation and a lot of challenges while we are 0-0 that will be measured and it’s important
we get started the proper way in every context. Everything is present for football to work at State. The only question is how well do we do early and how quickly do we make decisions that it move it forward at the right pace.

Being such a football rich state with programs at Georgia, Georgia Tech and Georgia Southern, how do you set it apart?

We set it apart by communicating that it’s a different kind of opportunity and if you go to or Tech you’re going to have to compete with a bunch of high school all-Americans to get playing time. But if you come over to a program like this then there’s a good chance that you will get a chance to show what you can do quickly. If you get on the field and produce, then you have years to grow and get faster and maybe you didn’t look like a bonafide player before and all of a sudden you are. In the following years you get a chance to keep on playing even through college and that’s what happens in programs like this.