ATLANTA, Ga – The fifth-ranked Benedict College Tigers will look to make school history once again, as they take on the Albany State Golden Rams on Saturday afternoon at Lakewood Stadium for the 2023 SIAC Football Championship, presented by Cricket.
 
Kickoff is 1 p.m. Electronic tickets to the game are available here. No general admission tickets ($35) will be sold at the gate, although student tickets will be sold for $10 with student IDs.
 
The game will be broadcast on ESPN+ (subscription required), but will also be broadcast on a tape-delay basis on ESPNU at 11 p.m. on Sunday. Live stats will be available here.
 
Benedict won its first-ever SIAC football championship a year ago, and now aim to repeat, joining a long list of conference schools who have won back-to-back titles.
 
Dynasties are nothing new to the SIAC. Morehouse was the conference's first powerhouse, winning four championships between 1920-23. Then Tuskegee, a long-time power in the league, won 10 in a row. By the 1940s, Florida A&M was the league's dominant team, winning 13 championships in 14 years. By the mid-1990s, Albany State was the conference leader, winning five in a row from 1993-97. Then Tuskegee won three in a row, followed by four in a row by Albany State again. Tuskegee won the next three, finishing that run in 2009. Albany State, Miles and Tuskegee took turns winning championships for the next several years, until Miles won back-to-back titles in 2018-19, the last school to defend their title.
 
Coach Chennis Berry, the architect of the Tigers program which has won 23 consecutive regular-season and SIAC contests, as well as 23 out of their last 24 overall, knows it will be very difficult to win a second consecutive championship, especially against an Albany State team that is peaking at the right time.
 
"Albany State is a really, really good football team in all three phases of the game," Berry said. "We're going to have to play our best game and our guys will be ready for the challenge."
 
Berry's philosophy has not changed in two years. The Tigers concentrate on going 1-0 each day, each week.
 
"Anybody that follows us knows that we read a book called "Chop Wood, Carry Water" every training camp. That book focuses on falling in love with the process of becoming great. Everybody wants the end goal. We focus on the process and falling in love with the journey of becoming great."
 
The Golden Rams are 6-4 overall and 6-2 in the SIAC. They opened the season with back-to-back non-conference losses against a pair of the top Division II teams in the region – Wingate, which defeated Benedict in last year's NCAA playoffs; and 9-1 Valdosta State, the region's third-ranked team. The Golden Rams then won four SIAC games in a row, before back-to-back losses to Allen and Edward Waters, where they lost when EWU scored a touchdown with eight seconds remaining.
 
First-year coach Quinn Gray said the team had a "Come to Jesus" meeting after the Edward Waters loss. The Golden Rams responded with back-to-back wins over Miles and Fort Valley State to earn the bid to the championship game.
 
Going against the Tigers will be another big challenge for the Golden Rams.
 
"We're going to have to bring our A game," Gray said. "They have a tough defense, they're tops not just in the SIAC but all of Division II. For us, it's a matter of taking it one play at a time. It is a championship, but at the end of the day, it's just the next game."