One of the happiest stories from college football’s Week 3: FCS Austin Peay beating Morehead State to snap a 29-game losing streak, the longest in Division I. The Governors won at home Saturday, 69-13, in a game that officials called with 17 seconds left. Here, you can watch a horde of Peay students storming the field:
Down. go. the. goal. post #MissionPossible #BeAGovBeAChampion pic.twitter.com/5egzzA93B0
— Austin Peay Football (@AustinPeayFB) September 17, 2017
The 29-game slide spanned parts of four seasons, with Peay’s last win coming on Oct. 8, 2014, against Murray State. The school — which is in Clarksville, Tenn. — fired coach Kirby Cannon after a winless 2015. His replacement, Will Healy, finally has a win now. His team got it in style, dunking on Morehead to the tune of a 56-point margin.
The best evidence that Peay’s getting better isn’t that it finally won a game on Saturday. It’s that two weeks earlier, it gave the AAC’s Cincinnati a lot of trouble in a 26-14 loss, and that it stayed within three touchdowns of Miami (Ohio) in a 31-10 loss in Week 2. Those aren’t good FBS teams, but they’re FBS teams all the same, and Healy’s bunch didn’t get blown out. The end of this streak was probably foreseeable, and the Govs might be relevant in the Ohio Valley Conference sooner than later.
The loser in Austin Peay’s victory, other than Morehead State, is Delaware State. The Hornets have lost 14 games in a row, now the longest DI streak. The longest all-time is the 80-game streak Prairie View A&M put together in the late 1980s and ‘90s.