After 16 years of scraping the bottom of Division I-AA, Savannah State has picked the worst possible time to make the move to Division II. Next season could be a historic one for the Tigers.

Second-year head coach Erik Raeburn has orchestrated perhaps the best rebuilding job in college football that no one talks about — and in two seasons, the Tigers have produced more wins than they earned through the 2010-2015 seasons combined. Now the stage is set for their first potential winning season as an FCS member.

Had it not been for a couple of significant injuries and a play or two down the stretch that didn’t go their way, it might have happened this season.

Senior starting linebacker and last season’s leading tackler Mulik Simmons suffered a season-ending injury in preseason camp, then in the Tigers’ second game they lost starting quarterback TJ Bell to a broken foot.

Starting running back Uriah Oliver also missed a significant amount of games because of a lingering shoulder injury.

With freshman D’Vonn Gibbons filling in for Bell and Raeburn turning to a stable of freshmen at running back, the Tigers started 0-7 but found their groove late in the season, winning three of their past four game to match last season’s win total.

"I think some of those early games, the MEAC games that we lost, certainly the guys feel like if we were playing those games right now, we’d have a better opportunity," Raeburn said before SSU’s 34-10 season finale victory over South Carolina State. "It feels like we let some opportunities slip through our fingers this year.

"It’s certainly a challenge to lose your starting quarterback and your leading tackler, and he’s also the guy who makes all the checks and gets everybody lined up. You lose two guys like that, it’s not easy. You lose their talent on the field, but you also lose their mental leadership and those type of things. We threw a freshman in at both those positions, and now we can’t put as much on those guys as what we asked of the guys who had more experience."

Like any good coach, Raeburn had the Tigers playing their best at the end of the season, and many members of his talented 2017 recruiting class earned playing time to fill the void left by injuries.

"When I say played, I don’t mean they go in for one snap," Raeburn said. "They have played significant snaps. We are redshirting three of our true freshman."

All five starters on the offensive line return next season, as does a young receiving corps, and Oliver should lead a deep and talented pool of running backs. Raeburn will have two good quarterbacks to choose from, and he’s even working on getting a medical redshirt granted for Simmons.

"There’s just no substitute for experience," Raeburn said. "TJ was so much better this camp, we felt like we could do so much more on offense because he felt so much more comfortable with our system. If all our players were to have that much growth between their freshmen and sophomore years that he did, it would make a drastic difference in our program."

Make no mistake, assuming the injury bug doesn’t strike again next season, the Tigers will have all the pieces to compete for a MEAC title, and the players know they’re down to their last chance to prove they can do it.

Next year’s squad could well be the best team the program has ever produced — or will ever produce. Recruiting will take a significant hit once Savannah State becomes just another Division II school in Georgia. The Tigers will move into the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, the league SSU competed in from 1968-2000, in 2019. Four of the five members of the SIAC East Division are based in the Peach State.

Because of what Raeburn has done, we can no longer say SSU’s move down is about its inability to compete — at least in football. This is now solely about money. I’ve seen the numbers, and they are alarming enough to warrant this decision, but at most instiutions, money usually follows winning.

Since their application to begin the official transition to Division II won’t be submitted until Feb. 1, university president Cheryl Dozier and athletic director Sterling Steward should consider putting it on hold.

They need to wait and see what FCS Savannah State football might look like with a winning product on the field.