New USM coach blunt about difficulty of job ahead, promises big changes. Here’s his plan
Charles Huff was publicly introduced as Southern Miss’ newest head coach on Thursday, less than a week removed from winning the Sun Belt Conference championship at Marshall in the final game of his four-year tenure guiding the Thundering Herd.
The event served as the ceremonial kickoff to an entirely new undertaking for Huff, who didn’t mince words when speaking to fans about what was required to bring the program its first conference title since 2011.
“This is going to be the toughest transition anyone connected to this university has ever gone through,” Huff said. “But it will be the most rewarding, gratifying thing when we hold that trophy in The Rock.”
Southern Miss just limped out of a dreadful 1-11 season in which it failed to win an FBS game and set the conference record for consecutive double-digit losses.
The team’s 11 wins since joining the SBC ahead of the 2022 season are tied for the fewest in the league over that span — and seven of them came in 2021.
In that same stretch, Huff’s Thundering Herd won 25 games, beat Virginia Tech and Notre Dame, won the Myrtle Beach bowl and clobbered Louisiana 31-3 in Saturday’s conference title game.
Despite the on-field disparities in recent years, Huff sees the changing landscape as plenty of reason to see beyond the results of the past.
“In today’s college football, I’m not playing with a 1-11 team,” Huff said. “I’m playing with the team I recruit.”
Program-wide shift
Huff told fans and media members change was going to be required and significant to turn around what he insists is not a “sleeping giant,” but rather one that’s already awake.
That entails shaking the roots while maintaining the school’s identity.
“I have a plan that I feel really good about,” Huff said. “It’s going to test all of our norms. Not that our norms are bad, not that our traditions are bad, not that our traditions and norms should ever go away, but in order to do what we need to do and what we want to do, we have to keep up with the times of the new college football landscape that we live in.”
Huff envisions a short-term overhaul and a long-term process. In the immediate, the names on the back of the jerseys will look very new.
There’s already over a dozen current Golden Eagles in the transfer portal and that number could grow even more.
In the long term, Huff wants to see a change in the culture that he believes had an impact on the outcomes in recent years at USM.
“I told them in the first team meeting, they’re not a bad team,” Huff said. “There were some people on film that we didn’t want to play (against) when we played them. There were people on film that we were making sure weren’t affecting the game. You don’t go 1-11 because you have a bad team. When you don’t have success it typically has to do with culture and discipline.
“Not that it was a bad culture, not that it was poor discipline, but everything matters. To the way these chairs are aligned to what we call on third down. ... There were games where they were in the game and something would happen and it would throw it off. It wasn’t that they were getting beat off the field before they could get started.”
The timeline
A complete reshaping of the Golden Eagles’ roster and personnel is in store, according to Huff, and the work to do that has already begun.
Huff said his staff will come together in a matter of days and he’s already tabbed Reed Grable as his general manager.
He also said roster additions will begin trickling in soon with a heavier reliance on the transfer portal this offseason than in years to come.
“We’ve got to flip (the roster) enough to where we feel like we’ve got the right personnel to do what we need to do,” Huff said. “Each year that’s going to be different. This year we’re probably going to be a lot heavier in the portal. We need an immediate flip.”
Huff said his typical plan is to sign the same number of high school prospects as the number of players graduating from the roster and then supplement the roster with transfers, but his first class at USM will likely deviate from that plan during the roster shuffle.
As far as the shuffle goes, the number of players Huff and his staff sign will be dictated by who on the current roster wants to stay put and who the new staff wants to retain.
The initial transfer portal window opened on Dec. 9, though Huff said his staff will be “less aggressive” in this window and spend more time on evaluating what is already on campus before hitting the second portal window hard when it opens on April 16.
Huff feels what’s already in place at USM, and the freedom he has to allocate resources, will serve as the means to “bring Southern Miss back to the top.”
“There’s a difference between resources and allocation of resources,” Huff said. “You can have $1 million, but if you spend $1 million on cleats and someone else spends $1 million on NIL, they may be running around with no shoes but they’ll be faster than you.
“What (athletic director) Jeremy (McClain) and (university president) Dr. Paul have done, the allocation of resources is in line with winning. That’s what was important to me. ... We have the freedom and willingness to allocate the resources we have to the right areas. More importantly, I think we have the bandwidth to create more resources.”
Huff has the confidence of McClain and the university, who made him the highest-paid coach in school history with a contract that is set to pay out a base salary of $950,000 per year for four years with a mutual option for a fifth year.
As the program steps into a new era under its 23rd head coach, Huff asks only for patience.
“We’re going to struggle in some aspects,” Huff said. “Obviously, we’re trying to completely flip a roster, completely flip a culture and a mentality. Struggle doesn’t mean lose, struggle doesn’t mean give up. ... It means it’s not going to happen overnight.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
