Trojans

South Alabama gets the billing in Troy's calendar every year the schedule allows it, a series the two sides call the Battle for the Belt. Jacksonville State, closer to home, plays for a bell rather than a belt.

Troy University fielded its first team in 1909, not long after opening as a teachers' college, and the program has since carried three different names into the record book: the Red Wave, the Bulldogs, the Teachers, before students voted for Trojans in the early 1970s. War and money interrupted it more than once — no football from 1913 to 1920, nothing in 1929, nothing through the Second World War — and the team has run without a break only since 1946.

Larry Blakeney's 178 wins across 1991 to 2014 stand well clear of anyone else who has coached the Trojans. The Sun Belt championships since have kept coming under later coaches, eight in total, the most recent in 2023, while the two Division II national titles from the 1980s and the single NAIA crown of 1968 belong to an earlier version of the club altogether.

DeMarcus Ware went from Veterans Memorial Stadium to a Pro Bowl career at outside linebacker, and Osi Umenyiora won a Super Bowl with the Giants after leaving Troy.