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To honor Throwback Thursday I am going to ask who should have played (or recruited) by UAB if the program was around back in the days?

Bo Jackson


Dieter Brock


Tony Nathan

Bobby Bowden would have coached them up with victories at Florida, Nebraska, Ohio St and many others!

Best case: UAB as a major urban university experiences success similar to Houston and peels off just enough prep stars in Alabama to be a borderline top 20 team (not quite Houston level due to being independent with no path to a bowl like the Cotton or home games against schools like Texas or Texas A&M). But Alabama also doesn’t experience its late 1970s dominance. Bear Bryant heads off to be the first coach of the Bucs in 1976 and is succeeded by Ken Donahue. UAB would be led at this time by some guy named Howard Schellenberger.

Worst case: UAB football looks a lot like Louisville, Cincinnati and Memphis during that era, rolling around .500 most years with attendance similar to today. The bigger impact would have been basketball where UAB would have been a founding member of the Metro Conference in 1975 playing those schools and others like Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Florida State. UAB would have championed the formation of a metro super conference in 1990 but that would fail. What this would mean is that UAB football would become a founding member of Conference USA at the same time it did in real life, with similar results.