Runnin' Bulldogs

Gardner–Webb's football program had no business being on a Football Championship Subdivision playoff stage until 2022 gave it one anyway, and the Runnin' Bulldogs used the trip to beat Eastern Kentucky before William & Mary ended the run. It was the kind of result that reframed how the program at Boiling Springs, North Carolina, thought about itself — a small-town team taking a scalp on the road rather than making up the numbers.

The program dates to 1970, when it started life as an NAIA independent before finding a conference home in the South Atlantic Conference in 1975. That NAIA spell produced its high point in 1992: a run to the national championship game, backed by South Atlantic Conference titles in 1987 and the championship year itself. The step up to Division I brought Big South Conference titles in 2002 and 2003, and a share of the Big South-OVC Football Association championship in 2023, after the move into the Ohio Valley Conference.

Woody Fish ran the program for over a decade through that NAIA championship era, a tenure long enough to shape what the team was before Division I football existed for it at all. Among those who came through the program and went on to the NFL, Gabe Wilkins stands out for winning Super Bowl XXXI.

Home games are played in front of 8,500 at Ernest W. Spangler Stadium, red, black and white in the stands. The rivalry with Charleston Southern, fought out as the North-South BBQ Bowl, gives the schedule its fixed point most years, alongside the East/West BBQ Bowl against Campbell. Now in the Ohio Valley Conference, the Runnin' Bulldogs are trying to turn the 2022 breakthrough and the 2023 share of the title into something closer to a habit rather than a one-off.