Governors

Austin Peay enters this season as part of the United Athletic Conference, the joint arrangement with the ASUN that has kept the Governors in the FCS Playoff conversation two years running — they reached the bracket in 2023 having done the same in 2019. The programme has stacked its championships in that stretch: the ASUN title in 2022, then the UAC in its first year of existence, a run that follows the OVC crown of 2019 and, further back, the conference's very first one in 1948 under its old name, the Volunteer State Athletic Conference.

The team traces to 1930 and carries the name of Austin Peay, who ran the university through the first half of the 1940s before becoming governor of Tennessee. Fortera Stadium has held the games since 1946, when it opened for 5,500; a 2014 renovation brought it to its current 10,000, and the ground drew its biggest crowd, 12,201, in 2018, the year before the Governors' OVC breakthrough.

Three straight years of the Sgt. None of that in-state run means as much locally as the Battle of the Border, the meeting with Murray State that has gone on for more than seventy years and still sets the tone for the rest of the schedule.