Huff forcing Southern Miss players to face their past

• The Golden Eagles are wearing 1-11 shirts in workouts this spring, a reminder of what was and what must never be again under the new coaching staff.

Southern Mississippi football went 1-11 in 2024. And the losses weren’t close.

Louisiana-Lafayette won in Hattiesburg by only 10 points. Every other game was decided by at least two touchdowns, most of them a lot more.

It was misery that won’t soon be forgotten. New coach Charles Huff makes sure of that now as players workout in t-shirts that advertise the embarrassment on their backs.

Southern Miss players, the ones that returned, take offense at the shirts.

“In my head I was like, ‘Wow, that’s what I did. That’s what me and my team did. I was part of that,” rising sophomore linebacker Chris Jones told Magnolia Tribune.

Marshall won at Southern Miss 37-3 en route to the Sun Belt Conference championship. Days after they won the title, their coach was introduced as the new coach at Southern Miss, bringing confirmation to a poorly kept secret.

Now, championship glory is forgotten for the 19 Marshall players who followed Huff to Hattiesburg. When players meet for weight workouts there are no special shirts for the new guys.

“They just won a championship, and here they are repping 1-11 on their backs too. We’re all a team,” Jones said,

It’s the modern-day nature of transfer football.

“I’m not playing with a 1-11 team,” Huff told the crowd at his introductory press conference. “I play with the team I recruit.”

Southern Miss leads the nation with 36 in-coming transfers. West Virginia and UNLV are the only other schools with at least 30, according to 247 Sports which has the Golden Eagles with the 53^rd-ranked class.

Lots of Eagles take flight, not all land

Twenty-four Southern Miss players entered the portal, many of them without a landing place at the moment.

Jones never considered leaving.

“I feel like USM is my home. This is what my brand is. I feel like ever since I stepped on this campus, God has had a purpose for me on the football field and in the classroom.”

Jones was a key contributor in his first season with 46 tackles, 2 ½ tackles for loss, an interception and two forced fumbles.

He and his teammates are wearing 1-11 in workouts because individual attitudes dominated the culture last year.

“We had no discipline, no structure. When you don’t have discipline or structure on a D1 football team it’s not going to work.”

As confident as Jones is in his understanding of what went wrong, he’s also confident in the future. The near future.

The Transfer Portal, for most teams desperate for better days, creates the image of a quick fix. Out with the old, in the with new.

That hope is legitimate for Southern Miss football, Jones says, because the transfers aren’t the only ingredient.

The new sheriff has instilled a new way of doing things.

“It’s a very different standard for sure. When I got back from Christmas break and came in to work, these guys from Marshall that had transferred in, and the guys from other schools, were already here working,” he said. “I’m not used to seeing that because a lot of last year I didn’t see it.”

The discipline demanded by the strength and conditioning coaches running the workouts is not the same, and Huff has made it clear that slacking will not be tolerated.

“It’s the Huff Era, man,” Jones said. “It may come off as being aggressive, but the truth is, you have to go about it the right way.”

The flood of new faces brings questions of chemistry, old teammates gone, replaced by new personalities with whom trust has not yet been established.

So far, so good on that front, says Jones, who admits he was at first nervous about the massive turnover of players and coaches alike within the program.

“These guys have come in with energy. We don’t always talk about football. We still get to have fun. They have been welcoming, and I have been welcoming to them,” he said.

Opening Day 2025: 1-11 vs. 2-10

The Golden Eagles’ first chance to change their t-shirts will be August 30, ironically, against an in-state rival also trying to distance itself from a bad season.

If Mississippi State players have their own reminder t-shirts they’ll say “2-10.”

The Golden Eagles and Bulldogs kick off on Aug. 30 in Hattiesburg, college football’s opening weekend, where they’ll match up with a combined 2024 record of 3-21 and 0-16 in their respective conferences.

Huff had a cup of coffee at Mississippi State as an assistant on Joe Moorhead’s staff in 2018.

Jones has no bold worst-to-first predictions for Southern Miss. He doesn’t know exactly what Southern Miss’ record will be, but he knows what it won’t be.

“We wear 1-11 on our backs when we work out. That was the standard, but that’s not the standard now. We’ve got to push for better, for more, and we’ll never go 1-11 here under Huff. We’re going to turn this program around for sure.”