Russell's legacy lives on at Georgia Southern

Picture it:

CNN anchor: “Noted economist Erskine Russell says the American economy is in for a long downslide yada, yada, yada.”

But what if, early on, they begin calling him “Erk.”

Erk Russell doesn’t write fiction, he spends his life writing reality, a reality that is sometimes harder to believe than fiction.

You may not know of Erk Russell, the father of football at Georgia Southern, which is West Virginia’s opening night opponent in just two weeks now.

He’s dead now, died in a car wreck a 80, but I had the pleasure to know him from my early days in Atlanta when he was Vince Dooley’s most trusted assistant.

He ran the defense, Dooley’s “Junkyard Dawgs.”

Legend has it that back in ’74, after an uncharacteristically bad season, Russell decided to use the phrase “Junkyard Dawgs” to motivate the Bulldogs. He was pretty good with words — maybe the author in him — and he was even better with motivation, as you shall see.

Russell then went to Dooley and got permission to suggest Roger Dancz, director of the Georgia Redcoat Marching Band, when the team did anything good on the field the band play Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”, the song that contains the phrase “meaner than a junkyard dog.”

The next year the defense jelled, the name stuck.

Why, the way Russell described it in his book was this:

“By our own definition, a Junkyard Dog is a dog completely dedicated to his task, that of defending his goal line.

“Further, he is very often a reject (from the offense) or the runt of the litter. Nobody wants him, and he is hungry. We had three walk-ons, four QBs, and three running backs in our original Junkyard Dog starting cast, which averaged 208 pounds across the front. In short, a Junkyard Dog is one who must stretch and strain all of his potential just to survive. Then he can think about being good.”

Now you have to understand Erk Russell. He was different, a down home boy from Alabama who shaved his head long before it was fashionable. He was an old-time football coach out of the Bear Bryant or Shug Jordan mold, hit you hard and help you up.

That shaved head became part of his schtick, for Russell became famous for head butting his players

That they were wearing helmets didn’t matter. You knew they were having a good game by the amount of blood streaming down his forehead.

Russell also loved cigars. In his autobiography he wrote “As you read this and question my giving cigars to the team, just remember my rule “When it comes to smoking being harmful to one’s health … cigars don’t count.”

He went to Auburn and graduated with 10 varsity letters. Again, guess you call him a man of letters. He played football, baseball, basketball and tennis.

He spent 17 years at Georgia, but after 1980 lost all of his sense and left to start a football program from scratch at Georgia Southern, then a 6,000 student bedroom school in Statesboro, Ga.

To say the beginnings were modest, a club team with a three-game season.

At his first team meetings, he laid down the law to his motley crew of walk-ons, offering up the team rules:

“Do right.”

That was it.

Times were tough. The word was that they didn’t have money for game and practice pants, so they wore their practice pants for games. They got blue helmets and Russell had each player but a white stripe down the middle with tape. They didn’t have transportation to games, so they bought some out of service county school buses for $1 each.

Five years later they were national champions and finished with three 1-AA titles, including the first ever 15-0 season.

The man could coach and today there’s a statue of him at Georgia Southern and it captures him maybe better than the Lincoln Memorial captures Honest Abe.

He’s wearing a “One More Time” T-shirt on the statue.

Derek Sills, a former player from that first team who was behind getting the statue made explained to ESPN.com the story.

“At Georgia for the 1980 national championship, he had ‘One More Time’ T-shirts made because they needed to win one more time, one more game, to be national champions. He then comes to Georgia Southern,” Sills said. “At the pregame of his last game, which is the 1989 national championship, he’s got a pullover on. He brings the team together and he pulls off the pullover and he’s wearing the original ‘One More Time’ shirt.

“Now by this time, it’s ripped up and shredded and falling apart. But he brought that saying to us: ‘One More Time. We can do anything just one more time.’ And the team went crazy.

“When coach Russell died, they actually found a Maxwell Coffee can in his belongings and there was a handwritten note on the coffee can that said, ‘Shirt I wore to my last big game,’ and they opened the coffee can and it’s the ‘One More Time’ T-shirt. It’s the only sideline clothing that he kept, but he kept that. It kind of ties that whole history of where he came from and where we went to.”