It's so dang hard to do anything nine times in a row. 

Chris Parson is one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever put on an Austin Peay uniform – he's never gone nine straight games with over 200 yards through the air. 

Terry Taylor is the greatest scorer in the history of Austin Peay basketball – he never scored 20 points in nine straight games during his career. 

So winning nine in a row at home—spanned across two seasons, 54 weeks, 382 days (and counting)—matters. It is not insignificant. It is a program record, and it is yet another in a never-ending series of examples of how things have become and will remain genuinely and tangibly different around here in ways large and small. 

From 2009 to 2016, Austin Peay won 10 games at home. Total. It was all bad and now it's not and sorry to sound like a broken record but we're gonna take every opportunity we're presented with to beat people over the head with good notes showing how much better things are now. Those of you who survived the blight of one total win in four years deserve your flowers for sticking with us, and we'll give them to you every chance we get. 

It also starts with y'all—the people reading this, the people who take their Saturdays (and the occasional Thursday), show up at Fortera Stadium and holler their pretty little hearts out. Know what it's hard to do at home? Win games in front of disinterested (or nonexistent) fans. The energy and excitement that builds in a stadium full of people who are happy to be there and cannot wait to cheer on the product in front of them, that carries over. That bleeds into the locker room, is felt on the sidelines and raises the hair on the arms of anyone who hears the roar when Denver Harper or Kaden Williams or any of Austin Peay's big-time playmakers finds a patch of green and hits the NOS button. It is, for lack of a better phrase, cool as hell. Every time. 

Because that's the thing about home-field advantage: It doesn't happen by accident.

It's built.

It's built by players who understand that there is something different about playing in front of their people. It's built by coaches who expect to win here. It's built by a university and an athletics department that have spent years putting resources, time and energy into making Austin Peay football matter. And, perhaps most importantly, it's built by fans who decided that Fortera Stadium was going to be a place where good things happen again.

Nine times in a row now, they have.

And somewhere along the way, something else happened, too. The wins stopped feeling like a pleasant surprise.

That might be the most significant part of this whole thing.

There was a time when winning at home was something to celebrate because it happened so rarely. A good Saturday was measured by whether Austin Peay could keep a game close, whether it could make it interesting in the fourth quarter, whether there was something—anything—to take home from the afternoon.

Now, we're staring a double-digit home winning streak right in the face.

That is a pretty remarkable transformation, and it deserves to be recognized for exactly what it is.

Not because nine straight home wins suddenly makes everything perfect. It doesn't. Not because a program record is the final destination. It isn't. It matters because it is evidence. Evidence that the standard has changed. Evidence that the people who have invested in this place have changed what is possible. Evidence that Fortera Stadium has become a place where Austin Peay expects to win football games.

But nine is still nine.

And 10 is sitting right there, waiting for 4 p.m. on Saturday.

Flip a coin. The odds of it landing on heads nine times in a row is far less than one percent, and that's just random chance. Add in all the variables of nine different, unique opponents – well, eight; we did get Morehead State twice during this run – and winning nine straight games at home looks like the sort of daunting task that only a crazy person would expect to pull off. 

Well, guess what? On Saturday, the Govs look to make it 10 in a row. New Haven is coming to town, and they're bringing a familiar face in head coach Mark Powell – some of you might recall him as the defensive mastermind that helped the Govs win the 2019 Ohio Valley Conference title. The Chargers are going to play nasty, hard-hitting, in-your-face football, as befits their head coach. 

New Haven gets the first crack at stopping it. The Govs get the opportunity to keep it going. And you get the chance to be part of it.

Come be loud.

Come make it uncomfortable for the Chargers.

Come help make Fortera Stadium the kind of place nobody particularly enjoys visiting.

Because winning nine straight at home is hard.

Winning 10 straight is harder.

And if we're going to do something hard, we might as well do it together.