(Photo from SouthernMissFB on X)
- USM has the resources to be a program that competes for championships in the Sun Belt, championships like the one Charles Huff’s team just won.
Once upon a time they were giant killers.
Anyone, anywhere, anytime, they said.
That was Southern Miss football of a bygone era.
When the Golden Eagles appeared as the buyout game on the schedules of college football’s best-known teams, the great ones didn’t shudder. They stood up straight.
Southern Miss has 97 wins against major-conference schools over the last 77 years, according to research from Andy Baeuerle of The Magee News.
There was a time when college football in Mississippi was referenced as “The Big Three,” meaning Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Southern Miss.
Even then it was easy to spot the difference between SEC schools and Southern Miss, a college football independent for many years before finding a home in Conference USA and then the Sun Belt.
The Golden Eagles were included in those conversations, it’s true, because their fans bought newspapers but also because their level of play made it not so much a stretch.
Ask Archie Manning. His No. 4-ranked Ole Miss team could muster just 14 points in a 30-14 loss to Southern Miss.
They used to get it done
There were other ranked wins through the years, a victim list that included Mississippi State, Alabama, Auburn, TCU, Louisville, Florida State and others.
Now it’s been a while.
The Golden Eagles haven’t beaten an SEC team since winning 44-35 at Kentucky in 2016, Jay Hopson’s debut as coach.
They haven’t beaten a ranked opponent since a 49-28 win at No. 7 Houston in the C-USA championship game in 2011, Larry Fedora’s last season.
There are new realities in play.
Even before the transfer portal and NIL, the SEC was paying so much money to its schools that the gap had widened. Southern Miss as part of the “Big Three” was no longer justifiable.
The giant-killing days aren’t likely to return, but the program also shouldn’t be a laughingstock.
It has the resources to be a program that competes for championships in the Sun Belt, championships like the one Charles Huff’s team just won.
The Golden Eagles’ new head coach on paper looks like a dynamite hire by Athletics Director Jeremy McClain.
McClain, whose own contract extension flew a little under the radar amid the news and celebration of the coming of Huff, who was 32-20 at Marshall, 20-12 in conference games. One of those conference seasons was in C-USA; the last three in the Sun Belt.
This is McClain’s second attempt to fix Southern Miss football. He needs an explosion from a dynamite hire.
Hall looked good on the front end
I thought Will Hall would be more successful as Southern Miss coach.
I don’t know why it didn’t work out other than to say that Hall, a hard-nosed quarterback back in the day, never seemed to be able to answer the quarterback question at Southern Miss.
But at the front end, he checked a lot of boxes as a proven offensive coordinator with highly successful head coaching experience, albeit at the Division II level, and strong Mississippi ties.
Huff checks different boxes and makes a lot of sense, too.
Hopefully, this works out for the Golden Eagles, but there are no guarantees.
Nick Saban’s long, dominant run at Alabama changed the way fans and administrators think about a coaching change.
There became this feeling of “it can be done at Alabama, why not here?”
In truth, that feeling was already around, but Saban’s success gave it life, made it bigger, stronger and more prevalent.
The problem is that not just anyone can do what Saban did. He was elite at his craft with the ability to have his team prepared to deliver near-peak performance every seven days.
Charles-in-charge has come in Huffing and puffing for the Golden Eagles.
In Hall’s second season the Golden Eagles went 7-6 and won a bowl game, but the fall was fast and furious.
Huff inherits a program that has gone 4-20, 2-14 in Sun Belt play the last two years.
But, Huff, the school’s first African American football coach, points out that the program he has inherited isn’t the team he will play with. He can use one of those new realities, the transfer portal, to his advantage.
“In today’s college football, I’m not playing with a 1-11 team. I’m playing with the team that I recruit,” he said in his introductory news conference.
The search for stability
Any head coach needs that kind of confidence, and the players Huff is trying to recruit need to hear that message.
Portal guys may have half of their college football window closed already. They want to win now. They believe they can help win now.
A quick flip is quite possible. It’s been done other places.
But what Southern Miss football needs is stability. It’s been hit-and-miss since the Larry Fedora Era ended with a C-USA championship in 2011.
Hopefully Huff gets a proud program, once a giant-killing program, back on track.
Parrish Alford
