Two teams are walking into the Caesars Superdome with very different résumés, but the same simple mission: win the Bayou Classic and COUNT IT ALL JOY.
For Southern and Grambling State in 2025, THIS is their championship. The SWAC title is out of reach, the Celebration Bowl is off the table, and the long, uneven grind of the season has taken its toll. But a win in New Orleans on November 29 is the one result that will live in the barbershops, group texts, and family reunions for the next 12 months.
Two seasons headed in opposite directions
On paper, Grambling is the team that looks like it “had a season,” while Southern is the team trying to forget most of it.
- Grambling State enters the Bayou Classic at 7–4 overall and 4–3 in SWAC play, sitting second in the West behind Prairie View A&M.
- Southern stumbles in at 1–10 overall and 0–7 in the SWAC, riding a nine-game losing streak into New Orleans.
The standings tell you why neither side will be packing for Atlanta: Prairie View A&M has already locked up the SWAC West with a 6–1 league record, while Southern sits alone in last place.
But rivalry games do not care about standings. And the Bayou Classic definitely does not.
Grambling: From 70–0 humiliation to knocking off Jackson State
Grambling’s 2025 story is wild enough on its own.
The Tigers opened with a 55–7 demolition of Langston in the Shreveport Kickoff Classic, lighting up the scoreboard with 474 yards of offense and 25 first downs.
A week later, they ran straight into a buzzsaw: No. 1 Ohio State in Columbus, where the Buckeyes delivered a ruthless 70–0 beatdown. Ohio State quarterback Julian Sayin opened the game with a school-record completion streak in a performance national outlets described as “record-breaking” and “almost flawless,” as the Tigers were simply out-gunned at every position.
To their credit, Grambling didn’t fold. They regrouped and stacked wins:
- An overtime victory over Kentucky State, 37–31.
- A tight home win vs East Texas A&M, 31–28.
- A gritty stretch of SWAC play that included a marquee 26–24 win over No. 12 Jackson State in Las Vegas at the HBCU Classic, and one-score victories over Alabama A&M (13–10) and Bethune-Cookman (31–23).
That Bethune-Cookman game became national news for the wrong reasons: a halftime brawl that led to nine ejections, five from Grambling and four from Bethune-Cookman. Despite the chaos, Grambling held on behind quarterback Hayden Benoit’s 220 passing yards and four touchdowns, pushing their season into the “good year” column in the win-loss book.
Still, narrow losses to Prairie View A&M, Texas Southern (21–20), and most recently Alcorn State (27–16) left Grambling short in the division race.
So for the Tigers, the Bayou Classic is the chance to stamp this as a truly “great” season. A win means 8–4, a top-two finish in the West, and another notch in a rivalry that already leans Southern’s way in the all-time series but has been tightening in the Bayou Classic era.
Southern: A season of pain looking for one last shot at redemption
If Grambling’s year has been “good with some scars,” Southern’s has been “painful with one bright spot and a lot of questions.”
The Jaguars’ season actually started with some hope. In the MEAC/SWAC Challenge in Atlanta, Southern traded big plays with North Carolina Central before fading in the second half in a 31–14 loss. Trey Holly ripped off an 80-yard touchdown run, and the Jags piled up 249 rushing yards, but they could not slow down NCCU’s ground game or answer once the Eagles pulled away.
A week later came the only real high: a 34–29 win at Mississippi Valley State, their lone victory of 2025. That road win briefly evened Southern’s record at 1–1 and seemed like the start of something better.
Instead, the bottom fell out.
- Alabama State rolled into Baton Rouge and left with a 30–7 win.
- Fresno State used Southern as its tune-up game, blasting the Jaguars 56–7 behind quarterback E.J. Warner’s four touchdown passes and over 500 yards of Bulldog offense.
- Losses piled up to Jackson State, Bethune-Cookman, Prairie View A&M, Florida A&M, Arkansas-Pine Bluff, and Alcorn State, leaving Southern at 1–9 and winless in the league.
On October 20, Southern made the move everyone saw coming: head coach Terrence Graves was fired after a 1–6 start, with longtime Alcorn State head coach Fred McNair stepping in as interim.
Even with the change, the losses continued. In their final home game at A.W. Mumford Stadium, Southern fell 35–30 to Texas Southern despite 191 passing yards and two touchdowns from quarterback Ashton Strother and 120 rushing yards from running back Barry Remo. The loss dropped the Jaguars to 1–10 overall and 0–7 in the SWAC, confirming they would go into the Bayou Classic on a nine-game losing streak and still searching for their first conference win.
For Southern, a win in New Orleans does not “salvage” the season on paper. But emotionally? In the fan base? In that locker room? It absolutely could.
Southern will be playing their TAILS OFF. They know a win over Grambling would not just “make up for a multitude of sins” from 2025; it would also extend their current Bayou Classic win streak to four straight, after victories in 2022, 2023, and 2024.
“THIS IS THEIR CHAMPIONSHIP”
That’s what makes this year’s Bayou Classic so fascinating.
- For Southern, this is a shot at erasing months of frustration in four quarters. A 2–10 record with a Bayou Classic win hits completely differently than 1–11 and a fourth straight loss to Grambling snapped.
- For Grambling, SWAC and Celebration Bowl dreams are gone, but beating Southern in the Dome to finish 8–4 lets the Tigers say, with a straight face, that they had a great season — a season of growth under Mickey Joseph, of bouncing back from 70–0, and of showing up in neutral-site classics from Dallas to Las Vegas to New Orleans.
Around the game, the energy will feel like a championship week anyway:
- The Human Jukebox and Grambling’s World Famed Tiger Marching Band turning halftime into its own kind of national stage.
- Alumni and families packing the French Quarter all weekend, talking trash and reliving wins that happened 10, 20, 30 years ago.
- Recruits watching to see which program looks more alive, even in a down year.
This is why both fan bases will COUNT IT ALL JOY if their side walks out of the Superdome on top.
In a season where the standings say these programs fell short of their big goals, the Bayou Classic becomes the one game that matters.
Win this one, and you get bragging rights, momentum into the offseason, and a year’s worth of receipts to cash every time this rivalry comes up. Lose it, and no matter what else you did in 2025, it will always feel like something is missing.
And that is exactly what makes the Bayou Classic, in a “down year” for both, feel like a championship game all its own.
