Legendary Troy football coach Larry Blakeney has been elected to the College Football Hall of Fame for its 2025 class, it was announced Wednesday.

Blakeney led the Trojans to 174 victories and eight conference championships during 24 seasons before retiring in 2014. The Birmingham native also played quarterback and defensive back at Auburn in the late 1960s and was a member of the Tigers’ coaching staff under Doug Barfield and Pat Dye for 14 years (1977-90).

“Coach Blakeney’s roots are intertwined with the history and tradition of Troy football, and there is nobody more deserving to grace the halls of the College Football Hall of Fame than him,” Troy athletics director Brent Jones said.

The 77-year-old Blakeney joins a 2025 Hall of Fame class that includes fellow coaches Nick Saban (Alabama, LSU), Urban Meyer (Florida, Ohio State) and Larry Korver (Northwestern College), as well as former players Michael Vick (Virginia Tech), Michael Strahan (Texas Southern), Gregg Carr (Auburn), Haloti Ngata (Oregon) and John Henderson (Tennessee), among others. The Class of 2025 will be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame during the National Football Foundation Awards Dinner Dec. 9 in Las Vegas.

Blakeney took over the Troy program in 1991, just as it was beginning to make the transition to Division I after decades as a powerhouse at the Division II level. His Trojans won three Southland Conference championships and made the NCAA Division I-AA (now FCS) playoffs seven times in 10 years — reaching the semifinals in 1993 and 1996 — before moving up again to Division I-A (now FBS) in 2001 and joining the Sun Belt Conference in 2004.

Troy won five consecutive Sun Belt championships from 2006-2010, winning the New Orleans Bowl in the first and last of those seasons. He retired following the 2014 season after amassing a record of 178-113-1 overall and 77-39 in the Sun Belt (his 77 Sun Belt victories remain a conference record).

“I think one of the most important appointments at Troy University in athletics over the last four decades was when we selected Coach Larry Blakeney to head our football program,” Troy Chancellor Jack Hawkins said. “His record speaks for itself. He’s a great coach, but even a better man.

“It has been an honor to work with him over a long period of time, and in my estimation, there is no one more deserving of this recognition than Larry Blakeney. He is the epitome of what a coach should be.”

Blakeney was two-time conference coach of the year in both the Southland and Sun Belt, and was also twice named the American Football Coaches Association’s Regional Coach of the Year. He received the Johnny Vaught Lifetime Achievement Award from the All-American Football Foundation in 2000 and has been inducted into the Wiregrass Sports Hall of Fame (2008), the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame (2009) and the Troy Sports Hall of Fame (2012).

In 2011, the playing surface at Troy’s Veterans Memorial Stadium was renamed Larry Blakeney Field.