Can Huff find early success for Southern Miss football?

• This season Southern Miss will be equal parts football team and lab experiment.

Sometimes, the things we hate we also love.

The NCAA Transfer Portal began in 2018, Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) payments for college players three years later.

Together they’ve dramatically changed the landscape of college football, not for the better many college coaches and voices say.

Many have called for federal intervention, and while there have been initiatives put forth by lawmakers of both stripes it was Donald Trump who acted last week, signing an executive order prohibiting third-party payments to athletes based solely on their performance while still allowing endorsement deals and fair-market value.

The recent House settlement began the process of schools paying players directly, but the Trump’s EO aims to confirm athletes as non-employees of the schools while protecting non-revenue sports – think women’s basketball and the Olympic lineup. It directs agencies such as the Department of Education, Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to come up with a regulatory and enforcement plan.

Any notable change is down the road. The here and now remains chaotic, and for Southern Miss football in 2025 that’s really good news.

“We were very intentional about rebuilding this roster, flipping the script on that,” new coach Charles Huff told the crowd at SunBelt Conference Media Days last week.

Huff himself is new, lured to Hattiesburg after leading Marshall to the SunBelt championship just a year ago. The Thundering Herd went 10-3, defeating Louisiana-Lafayette 31-3 in Lafayette in the championship game.

The script in Hattiesburg certainly needs flipping. It was dreadful in 2024, 1-11 in Will Hall’s last season.

But the script is not a true picture of the history of the program.

The Golden Eagles were once known as giant killers, the anyone anywhere guys, a lower-level Division I team that was prone to knock off Florida State, Alabama, Auburn or others in a buyout game, the trips that such programs make to power conference schools for a paycheck in lieu of a return game the next season.

Former coach Jeff Bower was plus-.500 in 18 seasons of work. He finished 119-83-1 with appearances in 11 bowl games.

Since Bower’s departure following the 2007 season, there have been flashes of success, but the Golden Eagles are 73-107 with seven losing seasons.

“When you’re a 1-11 program, it’s not just the on-field performance. It’s the discipline, it’s the accountability, the culture. It’s everything we do. It’s the ability to sustain success when you have it. We have a lot of work to do to flip the script.”

The transfer portal was designed to give players more freedom, to allow them to leave – as coaches often do – without being penalized at their next stop.

Like any new initiative with good intentions, it’s been abused, but that’s another story. The natural byproduct of players leaving is players arriving in other places, thus the idea that a quick fix at any struggling location isn’t all that hard.

The sliding scale of success

A true fix is never as easy as it seems on the surface. It requires the work that Huff describes above.

But the modern day fix starts with new bodies, no doubt.

Ohio State won a national championship last year with key contributions from a former Kansas State quarterback, an Alabama defensive back and an Ole Miss running back.

The Buckeyes weren’t starting from 1-11, but the Golden Eagles don’t need a national championship in 2025 to consider the year successful.

From program to program the fix is a sliding scale.

This season Southern Miss will be equal parts football team and lab experiment.

Filling in with transfers at key spots as become an expected part of roster rebuilding at most schools, but filling in with 70 news players? That’s what Huff says is on his roster, about 20 of them from Marshall who followed their coach to Hattiesburg. The big name in that group is quarterback Braylon Braxton, a redshirt senior who, because of the transfer portal, is on his third school. He played in 19 games at Tulsa before transferring to play for Huff at Marshall last year.

In all, the Southern Miss roster includes 17 former SEC players, nine former Big 12 players and five former ACC players, Huff said. Some of those were already on campus.

The roster is “built to win,” Huff says.

These are interesting times. Coaches still throw around words like culture and chemistry, but for every new player you bring in — someone who doesn’t know you, your staff, his new teammates or his surroundings – those moving targets get harder to hit.

Huff was available last December because he had issues with how Marshall wanted to structure a new contract, specifically his buyout, according to ESPN’s Pete Thamel.

He becomes Southern Miss’ first head coach hire who already had head coach experience at the FBS level.

Unusual even by current standards

Huff and Southern Miss is an unusual match even in these unusual times.

Maybe that’s why a team that was 1-11 last season isn’t picked last in the SunBelt West. Coaches say the Golden Eagles are the fifth-best team, ahead of Troy and Louisiana-Monroe.

Those teams beat the Golden Eagles by a combined 49 points last year.

“We are operating a plan of application, not theory. I know what it takes to win this league,” Huff said. “That does not mean you click your fingers, and all of a sudden you win this league, but as far as building and taking the right steps on a daily basis, we have the roadmap. And it works.”