By: Joe Delaney

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

WOW………. Almost a million and half is how much The University of Nebraska paid Georgia Southern University to come be a sacrificial lamb of a football team in Memorial Stadium in Lincoln Nebraska.

Well, I don’t know if they have Eagles in Nebraska but I can tell you the Cornhuskers don’t want to see the birds from Statesboro again, ANY time soon.

Georgia Southern football took a giant step forward by handing the Cornhuskers a shocking home loss 45-42 earlier in the month.

How shocking? After the game Cornhusker Coach Scott Frost said “we can’t let this divide us” ………. The next morning, he was no longer the coach.  And the school paid him 15 million to leave!

While this Nebraska team might not be feared in college football the way they were in the past. They were prohibitive three touchdown favorites.

I guess everyone wants to know how many yards the Southern option attack rolled up right?  Uhhhhhhh, those days are long gone sports fans. Behind the revamped offense of Clay Helton and the play of QB Kyle Vantrease the Eagles rolled up SIX HUNRED and FORTY TWO yards against the BIG 10 school.

Vantrease, who I wrote about in the season preview was spectacular. He was 37 of 56 for 409 yards and scored the winning touchdown on an 8-yard run with 36 seconds left.

Southern had a great all-around effort on offense with Gerald Green running for 132 yards on only 10 carries and 2 scores and Jalen White added another 85 yards and 2 TDs.

Derwin Burgess led the potent Eagle receiving corp with 12 catches for 119 yards. While the Eagle defense had to fight the bigger Cornhuskers all day and gave up a lot of yards and points, they held at the end and forced a 52-yard field goal attempt that went wide left. The party was on in Statesboro and the visitor’s locker room at Memorial Stadium.

Kudos have to go out to the job Clay Helton has done in a very short period of time at Georgia Southern. That’s a BIG 10 school that the Eagles just took down ON THE ROAD.

First is not the fact that they beat Nebraska……. The deal is they were just better. Nebraska had no answer for the Eagles offense. GSU, actually led most of the game in Lincoln.

It seems that the Eagles have gotten themselves a very good head coach. Clay Helton has coached at the highest level of college football.  Many wondered how he would adjust to the smaller school, smaller budgets and small-town atmosphere of Statesboro, as opposed to the glam of Los Angeles.

Well to see him on the sidelines at the end of the game Saturday you woulda thought that this guy is all in. I did.

It’s a long season and there will be ups and downs for this Eagle team for sure. They face a tough schedule ahead. In my preview of the Eagles last month, I said that after last year’s debacle the Eagle nation needed to have some patience with this squad. I think that still holds true………. but WOW! Just WOW!