Eagle Rocked: Southern Miss, Conference USA, and the Dark Side of College Football Realignment
Rogelio V. Solis/AP
College Football
June 22, 2015
by Matt Hinton
Print
The worst season in the 100-year existence of Southern Mississippi football arrived without warning, as subtly as a trapdoor opening in the middle of an interstate. Before the bottom fell out in 2012, USM had been riding a historical high note: The 2011 Golden Eagles had set the school record for wins (12), claimed the Conference USA championship, and finished 20th in the final AP poll. They’d come within three points of a likely BCS bid and within nine of a perfect record while securing the program’s 18th consecutive winning season, a streak exceeded at the time by only Florida, Florida State, and Virginia Tech. No one would have confused the program that coach Larry Fedora bequeathed to his successor, Ellis Johnson, with a burgeoning powerhouse, but it was a reliable winner that had carved out a niche as one of the standard-bearers for mid-major stability.
Then the niche gave way to a crevasse. Despite typically high expectations to open 2012, Johnson’s Eagles endured a miserable, winless slog, becoming the only major college football team to ever plummet from 12 victories to 12 defeats in consecutive seasons. Johnson got the hook within days of the finale, followed by athletic director Jeff Hammond the following summer. But for a perennially overachieving program that had endured only eight losing seasons since the Great Depression, the damage has felt irrevocable. Johnson’s successor, Todd Monken, has managed a grand total of four wins in two seasons, losing the rest by an average margin of 27.35 points per game. Between Fedora’s last win, in the 2011 Hawaii Bowl, and Monken’s first, in the 2013 finale, the Eagles lost 23 consecutive games, the longest losing streak by a I-A/FBS team since the turn of the century, and one of the 10 worst skids on record.
“It was kind of a perfect storm,” says USM athletic director Bill McGillis, who arrived as Hammond’s successor in July 2013 to find a department in debt and in shock. “In terms of the people and the vibe, I think people were wounded. Southern Miss folks’ pride had been hurt, and probably people were a little bit shell-shocked.”
Even in the best of times, life for college football programs that reside outside of the sport’s major conferences can often feel like an exercise in humility, if not outright futility. Technically, all 128 teams that play FBS football are “major” outfits; in reality, only a few dozen in the Power 5 leagues really merit the distinction, and for the others, the worst of times can feel like an existential crisis. When an old-money team like Florida, Michigan, or Texas falls into a prolonged funk, the standing assumption is that it’s never more than a shrewd coaching hire and solid recruiting class or two away from turning the corner. Further down the food chain, though, a drought like the one that’s descended upon Southern Miss feels less like the inevitable cycle of rebuilding and rebounding and more like the beginning of a prolonged trip into the wilderness.
In an era of haves and have-nots, the abrupt collapse of one of the little guys could be seen as business as usual. In Southern Miss’s case, though, the decline has been compounded by the plate tectonics of conference realignment, which began to send mid-major dominoes toppling across the country at the precise moment when the Eagles tumbled into the abyss. For USM, arguably more so than for any other FBS program, the resulting landscape is a bigger worry than even the losing: On C-USA’s 20th anniversary, Southern Miss finds itself as the only original member left in a league that looks less like a viable home for an established program than an incubator for aspiring start-ups.
Win or lose, Southern Miss was never an attractive candidate in the eyes of more prestigious conferences, whose criteria for expansion had almost nothing to do with on-field tradition and everything to do with adding viable TV markets. Still, by failing to secure a seat on the last chopper out, Southern Miss stands on the other side of the realignment divide as arguably the only FBS program that occupies a lower rung in the national pecking order than it did 15 or even five years ago — not only in terms of wins and losses from one year to the next, but also where it stands in the overall caste system. If you are the company you keep, then Southern Miss is the longtime resident who’s watched helplessly as its humble but well-kept middle-class neighborhood has been morphed into a backdrop for True Detective.
Rogelio V. Solis/AP
College Football
June 22, 2015
by Matt Hinton
The worst season in the 100-year existence of Southern Mississippi football arrived without warning, as subtly as a trapdoor opening in the middle of an interstate. Before the bottom fell out in 2012, USM had been riding a historical high note: The 2011 Golden Eagles had set the school record for wins (12), claimed the Conference USA championship, and finished 20th in the final AP poll. They’d come within three points of a likely BCS bid and within nine of a perfect record while securing the program’s 18th consecutive winning season, a streak exceeded at the time by only Florida, Florida State, and Virginia Tech. No one would have confused the program that coach Larry Fedora bequeathed to his successor, Ellis Johnson, with a burgeoning powerhouse, but it was a reliable winner that had carved out a niche as one of the standard-bearers for mid-major stability.
Then the niche gave way to a crevasse. Despite typically high expectations to open 2012, Johnson’s Eagles endured a miserable, winless slog, becoming the only major college football team to ever plummet from 12 victories to 12 defeats in consecutive seasons. Johnson got the hook within days of the finale, followed by athletic director Jeff Hammond the following summer. But for a perennially overachieving program that had endured only eight losing seasons since the Great Depression, the damage has felt irrevocable. Johnson’s successor, Todd Monken, has managed a grand total of four wins in two seasons, losing the rest by an average margin of 27.35 points per game. Between Fedora’s last win, in the 2011 Hawaii Bowl, and Monken’s first, in the 2013 finale, the Eagles lost 23 consecutive games, the longest losing streak by a I-A/FBS team since the turn of the century, and one of the 10 worst skids on record.
“It was kind of a perfect storm,” says USM athletic director Bill McGillis, who arrived as Hammond’s successor in July 2013 to find a department in debt and in shock. “In terms of the people and the vibe, I think people were wounded. Southern Miss folks’ pride had been hurt, and probably people were a little bit shell-shocked.”
Even in the best of times, life for college football programs that reside outside of the sport’s major conferences can often feel like an exercise in humility, if not outright futility. Technically, all 128 teams that play FBS football are “major” outfits; in reality, only a few dozen in the Power 5 leagues really merit the distinction, and for the others, the worst of times can feel like an existential crisis. When an old-money team like Florida, Michigan, or Texas falls into a prolonged funk, the standing assumption is that it’s never more than a shrewd coaching hire and solid recruiting class or two away from turning the corner. Further down the food chain, though, a drought like the one that’s descended upon Southern Miss feels less like the inevitable cycle of rebuilding and rebounding and more like the beginning of a prolonged trip into the wilderness.
In an era of haves and have-nots, the abrupt collapse of one of the little guys could be seen as business as usual. In Southern Miss’s case, though, the decline has been compounded by the plate tectonics of conference realignment, which began to send mid-major dominoes toppling across the country at the precise moment when the Eagles tumbled into the abyss. For USM, arguably more so than for any other FBS program, the resulting landscape is a bigger worry than even the losing: On C-USA’s 20th anniversary, Southern Miss finds itself as the only original member left in a league that looks less like a viable home for an established program than an incubator for aspiring start-ups.
Win or lose, Southern Miss was never an attractive candidate in the eyes of more prestigious conferences, whose criteria for expansion had almost nothing to do with on-field tradition and everything to do with adding viable TV markets. Still, by failing to secure a seat on the last chopper out, Southern Miss stands on the other side of the realignment divide as arguably the only FBS program that occupies a lower rung in the national pecking order than it did 15 or even five years ago — not only in terms of wins and losses from one year to the next, but also where it stands in the overall caste system. If you are the company you keep, then Southern Miss is the longtime resident who’s watched helplessly as its humble but well-kept middle-class neighborhood has been morphed into a backdrop for True Detective.
