Asking you to wipe away the last four – no, 13 – years of Southern Miss football may not seem like a reasonable request. A team as bad as the Golden Eagles can’t turn the ship around in one year, you might say.
It’s a new world. Believe it.
Twenty-six players from last season, non-graduates, have already entered the transfer portal. There won’t be much room for a reunion for any on that list with second thoughts. Starting Dec. 20 and still ongoing at press time, new head coach Charles Huff has added 39 transfers. To say that the roster is filling out nicely is an understatement.
To date, 39 new players have arrived in Hattiesburg via the transfer portal. Twenty-one came from Marshall, Huff’s previous employer.
When you see that number, it’s staggering initially. It’s reasonable to assume Huff is just building Southern Miss in the same image of Marshall in nearly every way. The staff looks very similar, and so does the roster.
You, or anyone outside of the program or even a naysayer, might say that these players have no loyalty to the university, just pawns willing to blindly follow the king on the proverbial chess board. Many might – and do, as I’ve seen online – think that this is a bad thing, bad for the sport. That attending a university just based on who holds the title of head coach is somehow an invalid idea.
Hogwash, I say to that.
Who, exactly, is the one sitting in these players’ living rooms talking to their family? It ain’t the university president, that’s for sure. Joe Paul isn’t walking through that door. It ain’t the athletics director. Jeremy McClain isn’t walking through that door. Seymour D’Campus isn’t walking through that door, either.
You know who is? Huff. The offensive coordinator. The defensive coordinator. Position coaches. The person actively trying to convince a young man to play football for his team isn’t referred to as Mr. President or Mr. Anything. Their first name is almost always “Coach.”
So why, then, is it a bad thing for these players to be loyal to the head coach instead of the university? I’ll save you the suspense – it’s not. And it’s not a new thing either. It’s just that these players are allowed to do something about it for the first time.
I agree that the transfer portal combined with NIL is an imperfect system that needs fixing. But will I ever say that players shouldn’t be allowed to follow their head coach if he or she takes a different job, no matter the sport? Absolutely, unequivocally not.
Look at it on a larger scale. Why would players such as Caleb Downs or Isaiah Bond, guys who will be playing on Sundays real soon, leave a storied program such as Alabama? Because Nick Saban retired. Kalen DeBoer, as great as he could be, isn’t Nick Saban. So they left. And that’s their right.
So all this tells me is that 21 former members of the Thundering Herd have an unwavering loyalty to their head coach. And these are no scrubs we’re talking about here. Braylon Braxton is perhaps the most high-profile addition – simply because of the position he plays – after a great year at Marshall. The quarterback earned the Sun Belt Newcomer of the Year and Sun Belt Championship Game MVP honors after one season with the program. He’ll have one year in his new program, but the upgrade felt at the position will be immense.
The quarterback position has been abysmal at Southern Miss for pretty much a decade following the final days of Nick Mullens. There’s been no stability to speak of despite talented players being rostered. Development just wasn’t happening. We have proof that development is a strength of Huff based on his track record. And that’s why McClain and Paul brought him to Hattiesburg.
Let’s just say the doubters are right and Southern Miss just becomes a vanilla version of what Marshall was under Huff. Four bowl appearances and a conference title in four years? Ask any USM fan if they’ll take something close to that right now. They wouldn’t even let you finish the question.
Over the same span Huff impressed at Marshall, Southern Miss finished 2024 an embarrassing 1-11 with two 3-9 finishes in 2021 and 2023.
This may be premature. I don’t care. Flip that record from those two seasons. That’s where I see the Golden Eagles this year. The roster is as good as it’s been since before I attended school there. They have a proven quarterback. They have a proven head coach. They have talented players from not only a 10-3 Marshall team but from SEC schools and Utah State, following offensive coordinator Blake Anderson, as well.
This year will be different. Hattiesburg will be happy on Saturdays once again.
