Water under the bridge: Louisiana Tech's long road to the Sun Belt
Hate, pettiness, superiority and a good old fashioned grudge are on the menu
As of July 14, 2025, Louisiana Tech is officially Sun Belt bound. The move that once seemed impossible has happened. We don’t know the exact date, but the Sun Belt will count Ruston, Louisiana as a member site along with Monroe, Louisiana for the first time ever.
For most college football fans, this news will be lost along with the, frankly, more interesting next step for the PAC-12’s rebirth by adding Texas State. But historically? This is an absolutely massive move.
Among the public schools in the state of Louisiana, there’s one clear top dog: LSU. The Tigers compete in their own world, looking for national championships and SEC dominance across every spot known to the American public.
But LSU isn’t the only public school in Louisiana - there’s actually three. Louisiana-Lafayette, which just goes by plain ole’ Louisiana now, Louisiana-Monroe and Louisiana Tech. Two of those three have been sitting on some tasty beef. Beef that kept Louisiana and ULM in a different league from Louisiana Tech. So much beef that Louisiana Tech simply didn’t play the other two.
December 2, 2012.
It’s been an unprecedented year for success in the state of Louisiana. And no, we’re not talking about the Bayou Bengals down in Baton Rouge - though they did go 10-3. But that’s besides the point. Louisiana-Monroe posted their best season as a member of the FBS, an 8-4 mark that included a shocking upset of Arkansas. Louisiana Tech had gone 9-3.
Indpendence Bowl brass decided this was the perfect time to bury a hatchet - the Shreveport, Louisiana bowl game selected the Warhawks of Monroe to take on the Bulldogs of Tech in Ruston. Except, that game didn’t happen.
It’s been confirmed by many sources from many different reporters - the Independence Bowl did, in fact, offer Louisiana Tech a spot in the game against the Warhawks. And Louisiana Tech turned it down.
“I hate it for the kids, that’s my only reaction,” Louisiana-Monroe’s then-athletic director Bobby Staub said. “It would be great for our fans and alumni, for all of North Louisiana and for our student athletes. Certainly, it would have also been advantageous from a financial perspective as well. But [Louisiana Tech] have their reasons, apparently. You'll have to ask them.”
Those reasons?
Publicly? The Bulldogs were courting other bowl bids and the time ran out, leading the Independence Bowl to nix their invite.
Privately? Louisiana-Monroe wasn’t good enough to share the field with the Bulldogs. And it’s not just their football team that wasn’t good - it was the whole institution.
In North Louisiana, there is a highway that cuts a wide swath across the state, cutting throguh Shreveport all the way to the Mississippi river, where it connects into Vicksburg. Along that route are two cities, just 37 miles apart: Ruston and Monroe.
Ruston is a small city, known for its peaches, Karl Malone, a thriving art scene and Louisiana Technical University.
Monroe is a larger city, the ninth largest in Louisiana. It’s known for some, let’s say, unslightly things, and its own college, The University of Louisiana-Monroe.
Naturally, in a place like Louisiana that prioritizes athletics, both schools came into having a football program. Initially, they started at the Division II ranks, then making the jump to Division I in the 1970s when the NCAA decided to separate schools into divisions based on budgets and grants-in-aid instead of a strange “colleges” or “universities” system.
During their time in the Southland Conference, Louisiana Tech and Northeast Louisiana - as ULM was known at the time - played yearly. The Bulldogs dominated, taking 20 of the first 25 meetings. Louisiana Tech won a Division II National Championship in 1972, while Northeast Louisiana was just a decent team.
That didn’t stop the beef from festering, though. In 1978, Louisiana Tech head coach Maxie Lambright resigned, and the Bulldogs elected to go with an outside hire - Arkansas’s Larry Beightol - instead of alum and longtime assistant Pat Collins. Irked by his alma mater’s apathy, Collins took his talents 37 miles away to Northeast Louisiana.
At the time, Collins step into a program that had lost seven consecutive games. Collins decided he was going to break that streak immediately. You see, the Bulldogs had a star linebacker by the name of Ed Jackson that was the keystone of their strong defense. Heading into the season, it looked like Jackson was ready to terrorize the Southland for his senior season. That is, until he was ruled ineligible because he had already played four college seasons - the redshirt rule then didn’t allow freshmen to play any games.
Tech fans lost it. They blamed Collins, saying he orchestrated some scheme to get their star player off the field so he could win the rivalry game and get revenge on Tech’s administration for passing him over for the head coaching job.
“The state athletic commissioner called and wanted to know what time we were headed over to Ruston so he could assign a couple of police officers to me,” Collins said later in life. “When I asked him why, he said there had been some death threats.”
The atmosphere inside Joe Aillet Stadium when Northeast Louisiana traveled to Louisiana Tech that year was hostile. Fans crafted expertly cutting and derogatory signs to let Collins know how his alma mater felt about him. With no evidence, they vilified the coach. Even more so when his squad pummeled Tech 35-0.
Except, Collins kept the secret. Tech fans were right. “I’m the one who got chewed out by Maxie Lambright for playing [Jackson] as a freshman,” said Collins. “I can still hear him, ‘I told you not to play that boy.’”
Collins would keep the pressure on the Bulldogs, going 6-2 against his alma mater at rival Northeast Louisiana.
In the 1980s, the Bulldogs and their fans realized they could go for more. They could achieve more. After all, in a nice, small town like Ruston with an engaged fan base, they had the juice to jump up. Not like those poor sods in Monroe. 1989 marked Louisiana Tech’s departure from the Southland Conference to join then-Division I-A, or the FBS ranks.
With Collins out at Northeast Louisiana, the rivalry had fully flipped over to the Bulldogs, with Tech claiming seven of the eight meetings following Collins’ departure. They had reminded little brother Northeast Louisiana of their place at the bottom of the barrel. And now it was time to leave the nest.
In 1987, the Bulldogs reneged the Southland, electing to go independent. They parlayed that to independence at the Division I-A level in 1989, leaving behind their little brother in the lower division.
In the FBS ranks, Louisiana Tech would become a solid Group of Five team, making 10 bowl games by the turn of the millennium. But you can’t keep your little brother down for long. In 1994, Northeast Louisiana joined the big leagues of Division I-A. And they sucked immediately.
The Louisiana-Monroe (they had officially changed their name) athletic department relied on “body bag” games to keep them afloat - massive paydays to get absolutely annihilated by the likes of Georgia, Auburn, LSU, Arkansas and other regional powers. Even in relatively chalk competition, the Northeast Louisiana [Redacteds] couldn’t hang. As an independent, ULM headed into Y2K with a 25-42 FBS record.
But the new millennium brought change. The Bulldogs had previously been in the Sun Belt, a primarily basketball-playing conference and still sat as a football independent. That is, until they got an invitation to the Western Athletic Conference - one that included schools like Boise State, SMU, Rice and Fresno State. It wasn’t the best conference, but one that had the opportunity to present some good football. And all the programs in it were stable. Well, as stable as a recently murdered SMU program could be.
On the other hand, the Sun Belt needed to replace their lost member, especially as they planned to pick up football as a sponsored sport. Who better than to keep the travel costs the same and add little brother ULM? Louisiana-Monroe jumped at the opportunity to find a conference home and accepted the football-only bid, as the rest of the university’s athletics just weren’t up to snuff.
Throughout the aughts, the Sun Belt was the nation’s FBS doormat. Teams transitioning up from the FCS or creating new programs went there to die. If you were to do a full nation AP Poll, I would wager the Sun Belt would routinely have teams in the very bottom spots. After all, a conference made up of New Mexico State, North Texas, Middle Tennessee, Louisiana-Monroe, Louisiana and newly-minted programs of UCF, South Alabama and Western Kentucky doesn’t inspire much confidence.
Especially as the WAC started to thrive. Boise State would go on their magical Kellen Moore-led runs with the Statue of Liberty play. Hawaii under Colt Brennan and June Jones took the nation by storm in 2008. In 2005, the conference even solidified their pecking order as the WAC poached Idaho, New Mexico State and Utah State from the Sun Belt.
During that new conference time, the two rivals elected not to play each other. 2000 serves as the last on-field matchup between Louisiana Tech and Louisiana-Monroe. And that brings us to 2012, where the Bulldogs turned down a bowl game - and the financial boost that comes with bowl participation - rather than play against the inferior Warhawks.
Now that was bad, in terms of beef-building, it was massive. And it kept getting worse.
Conference realignment is what started this story, what caused it to be written. It put the rivalry on hold. And it would throw tons more wrenches into this hate-fueled pool of toxicity.
In 2013, amidst the Big East’s implosion, the WAC quietly died as well. The conference shuttered their football arm, jettisoning all their schools. Conference USA, which was raided by the remnants of the Big East in the newly minted American conference, turned to lower conferences in the Sun Belt and WAC.
Louisiana Tech was among the ones pulled into Conference USA, along with programs like Florida Atlantic, Florida International, North Texas, Middle Tennessee and UTSA. The Sun Belt wasn’t as lucky, having to dip into the FCS depths to grab Georgia Southern, only to be raided again by Conference USA the next year.
For a while, the perception was that Conference USA was simply a better home for their schools. It wasn’t as volatile as the Sun Belt. It had a better media deal. The schools were just better off. Louisiana Tech prospered, comparatively, while ULM was hard on its times in a rough and tumble town like Monroe.
Then, everything changed. COVID hit. Schools closed. Time froze. Life stopped.
I’m sure you remember all the debates on whether or not football should be played. The Big Ten deciding it was unsafe, then declaring it was their moral duties to bring football back during these trying times. As soon as the Big Ten and SEC, which quickly followed, said they’re in and playing, the rest of the nation didn’t really have a choice. But they had to figure out schedules.
Air travel was incredibly expensive during the pandemic, and smaller budget teams like our rivals needed to find out-of-conference opponents close to home. With an empty slot on the schedule, a literal world-wide pandemic brought the two together. For the first time in 20 years, Louisiana Tech and Louisiana-Monroe signed on to play each other during the COVID-affected 2020 season.
It didn’t happen, as Louisiana-Monroe’s team was hit by the virus the week of the game. Coincidentally, it was the only game either team canceled that season.
And though COVID brought them together out of necessity, it also opened up some wounds. Especially as the new consolidation of power by the Big Ten and SEC kicked off the largest realignment bubble to date.
With rising costs, uncertain futures and more raids coming from the American, which lost members Cincinnati, Houston and UCF, the Sun Belt and Conference USA were forced to grapple with their mortality. Their conferences could go by the way of the WAC, which was then struggling to maintain membership even at the FCS ranks.
After six schools bolted from CUSA to the American, that mortality got more real. Except, instead of Conference USA poaching the Sun Belt like old times, the two went on equal footing. What if they merged? It would help everyone, right?
At least, that was the position of Louisiana - remember that third school? - athletic director Bryan Maggard. It wasn’t one shared by Louisiana Tech.
“If I were in [Louisiana’s] position, I’d be trying to figure out a way to move up to a level like Conference USA,” Louisiana Tech’s former athletic director, Tommy McClelland, told local reporters. “Congratulations on that conversation.”
Even in the face of a global pandemic, staring down the barrel of conference realignment, Louisiana Tech wasn’t stooping to their rivals’ level. After all, Conference USA was superior, right? They did the poaching, after all.
Wrong. Over just a few short years, the power structure had flipped. What was once a mess of schools in the Sun Belt became a strong, regional conference. They even surpassed Conference USA on the field, earning a larger share of the Group of Five’s College Football Playoff payouts due to their teams performing better on average in 2019.
Still, Louisiana Tech maintained their superiority over their little brother’s home. They didn’t need those fancy subsidies from the Playoff, they had better boosters. Their boosters had more money, they had more fans, and they didn’t need saving.
Then, the Sun Belt struck. The conference pulled three schools - Marshall, Old Dominion and Southern Miss - from Conference USA in 2023. The tides had turned. The power had shifted. That only became clearer when the Sun Belt inked a new media rights deal with ESPN that pays $7 million a year. By comparison, Conference USA’s only nets $5.5 million annually.
That brings us to today, where the Sun Belt has to replace a member after Texas State’s departure to the PAC-St8. And somehow, someway, after all this beef. After the superiority complexes, reporting violations, cancelled bowls, and everything else, the Sun Belt put aside the pettiness that they reciprocated. That’s right, the Sun Belt didn’t want to bring in Louisiana Tech - they wanted them to flounder in a dying conference home.
Somehow, Louisiana Tech is Sun Belt bound once again. The I-20 Rivalry is back as an annual contest. All that water is now under the bridge and one of college football’s most hate-fueled, underrated rivalries is now a conference fixture.
In late June, the WAC officially folded, merging with the Atlantic Sun to form the United Athletic Conference. Perhaps, way back in 2000, the WAC was a horcrux for Louisiana Tech and this rivalry. All it took was the WAC’s demise for the I-20 Rivalry to come back.
In 2026, when Louisiana Tech officially joins the Sun Belt, the two heated rivals will finally face off again, 26 years from their last contest. 14 years from when a bowl was canceled simply because of the matchmaking. Will it be a good football game? Certainly not, but it will be must-watch football. Simply because of the history. A history of hatred that’s been renewed for a new generation.
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Good stuff, Griffin! I can’t help but think this move is a bad, bad sign for Sonny Cumbie.
He’s already been on the ropes. And I know La Tech is kinda broke. But ya gotta think that moving to a new league, La Tech will want a new coach and fresh start.