Golden Rams

Albany, Georgia, sits in the state's southwest corner, and for well over a century the football team at Albany State University has carried the town's name into games most of the country never watches. The Golden Rams took shape in 1903, when the school was still known as the Albany Bible and Manual Training Institute, and the program has outlasted that name by more than a hundred years.

The Golden Rams have made their mark in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, a league built around historically Black colleges, where they have taken the championship seventeen times. That record carried them further: Albany State has been recognised as Black College National Champion three times, in 2003, 2004 and 2010, a stretch that marked the program's strongest run.

Home games are played in royal blue and gold at the Albany State University Coliseum, a venue that holds 10,000 — modest by the standards of major college football, but enough to make a full house in Albany feel like an event.

What the Golden Rams have not done is break through at the highest tier of college football; their championships belong to Division II and the SIAC, not to the bowl subdivisions that draw national television.