New Southern Miss coach Charles Huff proud of breaking barriers, ready for added pressure
There’s a mountain to climb in Hattiesburg, but Southern Miss has tabbed a practiced barrier-breaker to do it.
Charles Huff is a first at Southern Miss, just as he was at his previous head coaching job at Marshall. He was the 30th head coach of Marshall’s 100-plus year-old football program, but the very first African-American to hold the position.
Huff is now the 23rd head coach of a nearly-just-as-old program and is once again the first African-American to hold that title. Of the 97 combined head coaches across the history of Mississippi’s three FBS schools, Huff is only the second Black coach.
It’s a fact that isn’t lost on the 41-year-old Maryland native.
“I carry that honor with me a lot,” Huff said at his introductory press conference. “I consider myself to be a person who was able to break down those barriers in hopes that some young man of the minority persuasion, whether that’s African-American, Latino, whatever it is, some young lady, can look and say ‘there’s the first something. I can be that, too.’”
Huff has the unenviable task of turning around a 1-11 team that hasn’t put two winning seasons together since before the pandemic, before the implementation of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) and before the transfer portal altered the college football landscape.
But he’s got a plan. It involves traversing a state Huff became familiar with from stops as an assistant at both Mississippi State and Alabama.
On the ground level, the added impact of Huff walking into a high school building in the most predominantly Black state in the country won’t go unnoticed.
“It’s especially huge for those kids in places like the Mississippi Delta to see (an African-American) in a position of prestige coming to those schools and introducing themselves as a head coach in Mississippi,” Pearl River Central head coach John Feaster told the Sun Herald.
Feaster has been in the same position. He was the first Black head coach at Stone and is currently both the first Black coach and first Black athletic director at PRC.
He was also the first to be named the Sun Herald’s Coach of the Year after guiding the Tomcats to their first district championship in nearly 30 years in 2022.
Importance of winning
Whether it’s fair or not, Huff’s position comes with added pressure.
It’s been nearly 15 years since the state’s first and, up until Huff, only African-American FBS head coach was asked to resign at Mississippi State.
Sylvester Croom became the SEC’s first Black head coach ahead of the 2004 season and led the Bulldogs for five years. Mississippi State won its first bowl game in eight years under Croom, but his tenure ultimately produced a 21-38 record and four losing seasons.
Feaster acknowledges that Huff’s hiring is a signal of societal progression, but results still carry weight.
“It ain’t nothing to brag about because you hate for there to still be firsts in 2024,” Feaster said. “But to see him break that barrier and be the second one in the state’s history, it does show you that time’s have changed. You also want to see him do well because after coach Croom, when was the last one even considered?”
Winning isn’t simple and it’s even more of a complex equation now than it was when Croom was in Starkville.
As of mid-December, over half of USM’s 2024 depth chart was either in the portal or had exhausted eligibility. At least 40 new scholarship players will need to be signed in the class of ‘25 to reach 85 players.
And Huff understands the importance of success in his position.
“At the end of the day, I still have to win games or I’ll become the first African-American to get fired at Southern Miss,” Huff said.
The hope for Huff is to see more barriers come down in the future. He expressed his gratitude toward the USM administration for hiring him based on his skills and experience and wants to see more leaders do the same.
“I take a lot of pride and humility in the fact that Jeremy and Dr. Paul saw passed my skin color and saw my credentials, my ability,” Huff said. “I hope there are more leaders that follow that trend. They didn’t make the decision because of my skin color, they made the decision because I was the right fit. I had the right fit, I had the makeup for what they were looking for and hopefully more and more leaders at the higher education level will start evaluating beyond the lens of the eye.”
Huff is coming off a Sun Belt Conference championship at Marshall, where he won 32 games in four seasons and produced the school’s first 10-win season since 2015.
Southern Miss will kick off the new era next August when it hosts Mississippi State. The Golden Eagles will have at least one new fan on that day.
“I’m ecstatic,” Feaster said. “I’m a (Cincinnati) Bearcat, old Conference USA rivals of Southern Miss, but I’ll definitely be rooting for him.”
