Owls

Florida Atlantic added football only after the university itself had grown large enough to want a full athletics programme, and the sport arrived late by Division I standards, fielding its first team in 2002 out of a programme built the year before in Boca Raton. There was no inherited tradition to lean on, so the Owls built their identity through the Sun Belt Conference and then Conference USA, picking up league titles in 2007 and again in 2017 and 2019.

The 2007 season carries particular weight: a conference championship paired with a win in the New Orleans Bowl, the first bowl appearance and victory in the programme's short history. The Motor City Bowl followed in 2008, and by the time the Owls returned to that level of success in 2017 and 2019, they were winning the Boca Raton Bowl in their own city both times.

No fixture matters more locally than the Shula Bowl against Florida International, named for Don Shula and contested every year since 2002. FAU have dominated it, leading the all-time series 16–4 through 2024, which has made the rivalry lopsided in a way that still draws attention each autumn given the two campuses sit barely an hour apart.

Home games are played in green and white in front of a crowd that can run close to 30,000 at Flagler Credit Union Stadium. Among the players who came through the programme, running back Devin Singletary stands out as the name most associated with FAU's rise during that Conference USA title stretch, his production on the ground helping carry the Owls through the 2017 championship run before he moved on to the NFL.