beaver, no, but you have to admit, the Bower-lovers IN Hattiesburg had been pulling the strings for a lot of the crap we've been going through.

If we could go back in time, would we take Wommack over Hall.. absolutely. But at the time, we were told and BELIEVED Hall was the reason behind Tulane's offensive rebirth,...

Hopkins: I don't see how anyone could be in favor of what that was.. an average SWAC coach moving "up"?
Monk: Again, i'll defend this one forever... I still believe if Tampa hadn't come calling, we'd have had MOnk for at least two more years and the ship would be righted.

(and it's why I say go back to what works, just find me the Oklahoma State coordinator), let him come in, get it straightened out, and then move on up the charts if he so wants to.

(10-24-2023 04:17 PM)DaSaintFan Wrote:  beaver, no, but you have to admit, the Bower-lovers IN Hattiesburg had been pulling the strings for a lot of the crap we've been going through.

If we could go back in time, would we take Wommack over Hall.. absolutely. But at the time, we were told and BELIEVED Hall was the reason behind Tulane's offensive rebirth,...

Hopkins: I don't see how anyone could be in favor of what that was.. an average SWAC coach moving "up"?
Monk: Again, i'll defend this one forever... I still believe if Tampa hadn't come calling, we'd have had MOnk for at least two more years and the ship would be righted.

(and it's why I say go back to what works, just find me the Oklahoma State coordinator), let him come in, get it straightened out, and then move on up the charts if he so wants to.

I'd rather have the Kansas OC. They've seen/been a part of a true rebuild of the worst football program in the US and have a great O.

(10-19-2023 07:33 AM)HarborPointe Wrote:  

(10-18-2023 11:52 PM)banker Wrote:  When we joined CUSA in 2005 Southern Miss is the game I loved, but not sure our WRs and RBs felt the same way. They were vicious hitters on defense, had big, fast LBers and nasty safeties.

I think the change from Bower changed their identity to more of a finesse team. A finesse team lives and dies by the QB and they just haven’t had a lot of luck there recently (like Marshall). Troy reminds me of USM from 15-20 years ago.

What’s odd is I think the same thing is happening to Alabama. They have gone from defense and running the ball believing that they need to score more to compete for championships. They have the ability to recruit great QBs, but when they miss on that one position, even with all their talent, they are not the same. Defense and running the ball never go out of style, but as Lou Holtz once said, alumni and donors like seeing the ball in the air.

In the late ‘90s-early 2000s, we were still trying to win low-scoring games while the programs around us started wiggling their hineys on offense and building around QBs. Stopping those offenses for 60 minutes was impossible. You had to put up at least a fair amount of points to have a chance, and we often couldn’t because that’s just not how we did things.

We’d won 3 CUSA championships in a row out the gate. Then we won 1 in 4 years. After 3 more years without one and the program very obviously slipping (a home loss to a winless Rice team that finished 3-9 was the breaking point), we brought in Fedora. Then we hired a career SEC defensive assistant specifically to get us back to playing football “the right way,” i.e., defense and running the ball.

The program’s been a dumpster fire since, with the only bright spot coming under the leadership of…hmmm…another Fedora-type offensive guru with a QB who’s now in the NFL. You damned right, I want to see the ball in the air, because that sh*t works. Name one G5 in the past 25 years that did something big by winning 13-10 every week.

What was Troy’s record last year? Who won the conference? Like I said, Troy is what USM was in 2005 style wise. JMU wins with great defense and a pretty conservative offense.

To think the old rules of stop the run and establish the run don’t work anymore is just not accurate.

Troy beat a ranked UTSA in a bowl 18-12

Beat south 10-6

Army 10-9

Tx State 17-14

Marshall 16-7

Finished the year 12-2

(10-25-2023 10:20 PM)banker Wrote:  

(10-19-2023 07:33 AM)HarborPointe Wrote:  

(10-18-2023 11:52 PM)banker Wrote:  When we joined CUSA in 2005 Southern Miss is the game I loved, but not sure our WRs and RBs felt the same way. They were vicious hitters on defense, had big, fast LBers and nasty safeties.

I think the change from Bower changed their identity to more of a finesse team. A finesse team lives and dies by the QB and they just haven’t had a lot of luck there recently (like Marshall). Troy reminds me of USM from 15-20 years ago.

What’s odd is I think the same thing is happening to Alabama. They have gone from defense and running the ball believing that they need to score more to compete for championships. They have the ability to recruit great QBs, but when they miss on that one position, even with all their talent, they are not the same. Defense and running the ball never go out of style, but as Lou Holtz once said, alumni and donors like seeing the ball in the air.

In the late ‘90s-early 2000s, we were still trying to win low-scoring games while the programs around us started wiggling their hineys on offense and building around QBs. Stopping those offenses for 60 minutes was impossible. You had to put up at least a fair amount of points to have a chance, and we often couldn’t because that’s just not how we did things.

We’d won 3 CUSA championships in a row out the gate. Then we won 1 in 4 years. After 3 more years without one and the program very obviously slipping (a home loss to a winless Rice team that finished 3-9 was the breaking point), we brought in Fedora. Then we hired a career SEC defensive assistant specifically to get us back to playing football “the right way,” i.e., defense and running the ball.

The program’s been a dumpster fire since, with the only bright spot coming under the leadership of…hmmm…another Fedora-type offensive guru with a QB who’s now in the NFL. You damned right, I want to see the ball in the air, because that sh*t works. Name one G5 in the past 25 years that did something big by winning 13-10 every week.

What was Troy’s record last year? Who won the conference? Like I said, Troy is what USM was in 2005 style wise. JMU wins with great defense and a pretty conservative offense.

To think the old rules of stop the run and establish the run don’t work anymore is just not accurate.

There’s a difference between being able to win a defensive battle and being screwed if you give up more than 3 TDs. By the end of Bower’s run, if we fell behind by double digits, you could put a fork in the game because it was done. That actually became my cue to hit the road if it was a late game.

Troy won last year’s CG 46-26. They put up 30+ 3 other times vs. FBS opponents and lost that App game 32-28. They could keep up when they needed to. They weren’t just a 1-trick pony.

The conference champ is very often the team with the best defense, and Fedora didn’t get over the hump until he hired the right DC, but even Nick Saban figured out you can’t just play keep away and need to put up some points.

We got to the point where even to this day—and I mean I read this comment 2 weeks ago—people who hold Fedora simply being Bower’s replacement against him bemoan how Fedora put the best players he inherited from Bower on offense. The mentality then was literally, “Why would you give your best athletes the ball?” It’s kinda crazy to think about now.

(10-20-2023 01:59 PM)USM3000 Wrote:  

(10-20-2023 12:03 PM)SouthernMiss3613 Wrote:  

(10-19-2023 12:48 PM)USM3000 Wrote:  

(10-18-2023 05:37 PM)SouthernMiss3613 Wrote:  

(10-18-2023 01:16 PM)Bulldogtrojan Wrote:  The person that hired Will Hall is the same person that hired Chip Lindsey. Food for thought....

Will Hall looked good on paper. It just didn't work out. I hope they at least give Dan Mullen a call. At least he knows this state.

Are you serious, Clark?

Yes, Mullen was a consistent winner at State. I don't care if we hired Joe Biden. We just need to win.

Yeah, it was more of a joke about Mullen looking like Cousin Eddie. And I agree, just win, baby. Just win.

He actually went full cousin Eddie fora Halloween day presser

Here's part of Southern Miss' issue.

When Bower had it rolling, Troy (State) was D-II. So was Jacks State. UAB was just getting started. South Alabama didn't play football.

Southern Miss recruited the hell out of Southern Alabama and the Panhandle. They got just about everyone who didn't pick Alabama or Auburn

It has taken a while, but South Alabama is winning most of the battles in that area now. I'm not saying Southern Miss can't be good....I think they can. But it's going to be a lot harder than it used to be.

(10-30-2023 10:21 AM)BirdofParadise Wrote:  Here's part of Southern Miss' issue.

When Bower had it rolling, Troy (State) was D-II. So was Jacks State. UAB was just getting started. South Alabama didn't play football.

Southern Miss recruited the hell out of Southern Alabama and the Panhandle. They got just about everyone who didn't pick Alabama or Auburn

It has taken a while, but South Alabama is winning most of the battles in that area now. I'm not saying Southern Miss can't be good....I think they can. But it's going to be a lot harder than it used to be.

This is true. However, had we kept winning we'd still have gotten most of those "not quite SEC" caliber players. With no current winning tradition to set us apart, why pick USM?

Visitor here.

What happened to Southern Miss and East Carolina can be summarized in one thing:

Regional FCS schools moving up to FBS.

USM and ECU were able to recruit players who did not get offers from the SEC, ACC and Big East. If you look at both programs during the 80’s, 90’s and right before the end of the BCS, both were constantly winning OOC and bowl games against BCS teams. They were the schools to go to in the Southeast if you wanted to compete at the highest level if you were not playing in a power conference. The only regional non power competition they had were Memphis (a basketball school) and Tulane.

Then in the mid 90’s we saw the upgrade to FBS in Marshall, UCF, USF, UAB, etc and then the Sun Belt started adding new FBS teams (Troy, South Alabama, FAU, FIU, GaSt, GaSo, App State, etc). That took a toll in any advantage Southern Miss had in recruiting since suddenly recruits who did not get offers from P5 schools had regional G5 schools to choose from. Notice the last time USM was ranked was at the end of C-USA 2.0. I believe ECU was as well but I could be wrong.

Will USM get it fixed? They will. They have too much tradition to not let it happen but more than likely it’ll come from a mercenary like Larry Fedora who’s looking for a gig at a P5 school and it’s using USM as a stepping stone (which is not unique to USM, all G5s are in the same boat).

East Carolina’s situation is worse. They went from being a Big East invite away from elevating their program to sharing the same conference with a bunch of schools they thought were beneath them. If I was an ECU fan, I’d hate the preferential treatment USF got in the Big East and UCF in the Big XII. That was supposed to be ECU. But unlike USF, UCF did deserve their invite to the Big XII. They were not just a school being located at the right place at the right time.

That’s how I see it as a fan of a school that was in the same conference with USM and ECU.

(10-30-2023 10:47 AM)Luckyshot Wrote:  

(10-30-2023 10:21 AM)BirdofParadise Wrote:  Here's part of Southern Miss' issue.

When Bower had it rolling, Troy (State) was D-II. So was Jacks State. UAB was just getting started. South Alabama didn't play football.

Southern Miss recruited the hell out of Southern Alabama and the Panhandle. They got just about everyone who didn't pick Alabama or Auburn

It has taken a while, but South Alabama is winning most of the battles in that area now. I'm not saying Southern Miss can't be good....I think they can. But it's going to be a lot harder than it used to be.

This is true. However, had we kept winning we'd still have gotten most of those "not quite SEC" caliber players. With no current winning tradition to set us apart, why pick USM?

Yep. We had the high ground and failed to maintain it. “Why?” is a chicken-and-egg question between on-field results and off-field lack of vision. That ‘97 Liberty Bowl win should’ve been the first stage of a rocket sending us to greater heights, but we had uninspired admins who were penny wise but pound foolish and a program that got too comfortable losing key games and finishing in 2nd & 3rd place. As Fairway once put it, other schools used CUSA as a trampoline but we saw it as a hammock.

I recall one recruit we lost to Louisville in the early-to-mid ‘00s who said he went up there and their coaches were talking about their aspirations of becoming a national power while all ours talked about were winning seasons. Not surprisingly, he found the former pitch more attractive.

But again, that’s all water long since under the bridge. It’s a nice history lesson as to how we ended up in the current Sun Belt instead of graduating on to something bigger, but it doesn’t have a damned thing to do with why we’re winless in the Sun Belt now that we’re here. A regional conference of true peer institutions should be a boon for us. Go back even farther in history, and this is the type of environment in which we originally became a behemoth of a program in the first place.

(10-31-2023 12:47 AM)HarborPointe Wrote:  

(10-30-2023 10:47 AM)Luckyshot Wrote:  

(10-30-2023 10:21 AM)BirdofParadise Wrote:  Here's part of Southern Miss' issue.

When Bower had it rolling, Troy (State) was D-II. So was Jacks State. UAB was just getting started. South Alabama didn't play football.

Southern Miss recruited the hell out of Southern Alabama and the Panhandle. They got just about everyone who didn't pick Alabama or Auburn

It has taken a while, but South Alabama is winning most of the battles in that area now. I'm not saying Southern Miss can't be good....I think they can. But it's going to be a lot harder than it used to be.

This is true. However, had we kept winning we'd still have gotten most of those "not quite SEC" caliber players. With no current winning tradition to set us apart, why pick USM?

Yep. We had the high ground and failed to maintain it. “Why?” is a chicken-and-egg question between on-field results and off-field lack of vision. That ‘97 Liberty Bowl win should’ve been the first stage of a rocket sending us to greater heights, but we had uninspired admins who were penny wise but pound foolish and a program that got too comfortable losing key games and finishing in 2nd & 3rd place. As Fairway once put it, other schools used CUSA as a trampoline but we saw it as a hammock.

I recall one recruit we lost to Louisville in the early-to-mid ‘00s who said he went up there and their coaches were talking about their aspirations of becoming a national power while all ours talked about were winning seasons. Not surprisingly, he found the former pitch more attractive.

But again, that’s all water long since under the bridge. It’s a nice history lesson as to how we ended up in the current Sun Belt instead of graduating on to something bigger, but it doesn’t have a damned thing to do with why we’re winless in the Sun Belt now that we’re here. A regional conference of true peer institutions should be a boon for us. Go back even farther in history, and this is the type of environment in which we originally became a behemoth of a program in the first place.

One of the things about Georgia Southern throughout our history as a program has been the willingness to fire under performing coaches pretty quickly (often mid-season). Southern Miss even today has great name recognition and I feel like you guys have a platform (SBC) to springboard yourselves to new heights. Really almost every program in the Sun Belt can do this but you have to have the administration and AD committed to rising to the top. I'm personally really happy Southern Miss, Marshall, ODU and JMU joined us for this ride and I wish everyone the best (except APP). I know some of our fellow posters think it's small time to root for other schools in the conference to do well but if we are all improving and pushing each other to the top then we will dominate the G5 for decades to come.