How Charles Huff’s right-hand man has quickly reshaped Southern Miss football
Matt Dudek became college football’s first General Manager in 2016 when he joined Arizona’s staff under Rich Rodriguez. Eight years later, Rodriguez waited a month until hiring a GM at his new post in West Virginia this offseason.
That proved costly to the 61-year-old’s time, according to The Athletic, and bogged Rodriguez down with the work of an NFL front office in a college football world very different from the one that existed a decade ago.
A week before Rodriguez returned for his second stint at West Virginia, Charles Huff left the same state, won a Sun Belt title in Lafayette, Louisiana, as Marshall’s head coach and then got on a plane bound for Hattiesburg the next day.
He landed as the new coach at Southern Miss and stepped off the jet with one staffer: Reed Grable.
The first transfer portal window was opening in just hours and time was of the essence. Huff was open about overhauling a roster that had just posted a 1-11 season and every hour spent on welcome tours and staff-building was an hour taken away from roster construction.
Huff also had a significant NIL collective to work with that offered more resources than Tudor’s Biscuit World could, adding a new wrinkle in the collegiate talent acquisition game that has turned the sport’s offseason into a wide-open free agency period.
Huff’s recognition of that layer of complexity woven thickly through the typical evaluation-and-pitch process of recruiting is what resulted in making his first move at USM bringing his director of player personnel from Marshall and tagging him General Manager.
“To have one person, Reed, doing a really good job of sticking to our parameters and also making sure we are good stewards of the money that we have,” Huff said at Sun Belt media days, “Because you can pay the wrong players or you can pay a player too much or too little.”
Grable’s job description is a good place to start to pinpoint the difference between a director of recruiting and/or personnel and a modern college football GM.
In the old days, Grable would be planning road trips for coaches and making sure the snacks were out for visiting prospects.
Now he’s the top of the evaluation chain by setting the parameters for each coach to search and recruit within. He’s the program treasurer, budgeting what can and can’t be spent on a given prospective athlete. Grable is even involved with player development and financial literacy for players.
He keeps tabs on the competitive environment on the trail and locks in on what other schools within the conference are paying to put together their rosters. Grable is the right-hand-man who relays athlete character to Huff — a known and outspoken disciplinarian — through evaluation of report cards, transcripts and word-of-mouth behavior outside the building.
No stone is left unturned and no dollar not counted.
“I think it’s a challenge,” Grable said. “But Huff and I work together on the money piece. ... He and I are constantly evaluating our players. You have to be able to do well in the classroom or in the community and also be a good football player. You could be one of our best players, but not showing up to class or you’re disrespecting people in Hattiesburg, your value goes down.”
How Southern Miss was put back together
A decade ago you would have to let the next man up “get his guys in” as he waded through proverbial Year Zero, a dying term in the lexicon of modern amateur sports.
It’s a rebuild and Grable acknowledged that much, but there’s nothing Year Zero about it.
“We’re trying to win now.”
The first big recruiting weekend days after Huff’s arrival was the most exciting thing to happen on The Rock’s turf all year. Cars, lights and music back-dropped a photoshoot involving numerous visitors from the transfer portal. The top service for up-to-the-minute details was Instagram Reels.
But it was the quiet week leading up to it that was far more important. Huff requires a full picture evaluation before the green light is given on a prospective athlete. But it’s almost mid-December and the portal moves quickly.
“First, we wanted to bring in guys that either we had a relationship with, or someone on the staff had a relationship with,” Grable said. “That’s why we brought in so many guys from Marshall, guys from Utah State with coach Blake Anderson, even a couple O-linemen from Eastern Michigan that came with our O-line coach.
“So we wanted to kind of establish the roster with guys we knew. Guys who knew our program and we knew them. We knew their character, because that’s a big piece of flipping the team from the transfer portal.”
It was the quickest way to check off several boxes without blindly fishing through the pool of available talent. It secured their quarterback and most of what is likely the entire starting defensive backfield.
Grable likens their process to that of an NFL scout’s where the on-field ability of a player takes up a much smaller piece of the evaluation pie.
By making the early batch of additions a familiar one, the staff saved time on background checks and used that toward the few players from the first portal window they did grab who didn’t have any prior affiliation.
Notably, they didn’t ask anybody leftover from the previous roster to leave. Many did. What did remain went through the winter and spring filtration system.
Another chunk of the roster needed to be backfilled after spring camp and 30 players were added in the second window, a group that Grable said served to “polish the roster we had already built and put us in position to win some games in August and fall.”
The future ahead for Southern Miss and the General Manager
Southern Miss and Georgia Southern were the league’s only two schools with a General Manager on staff just two years ago.
There are now 10 GMs peering into each other’s pocket books around the league. Grable was the first of eight hires that occurred this offseason alone.
The longevity of the position is still up in the air largely due to the title holder’s value and the unpredictable fluidity of staffing.
The longest tenured GM in the SBC is Troy’s Drew Casa, who has been on the job for all of 19 months.
Grable is eight months in and has already overseen the addition of more than 80 players, the loss of around 85 others and a lot of trips to The Midtowner.
“We go to Crescent City, we go to The Midtowner, Blu Jazz, Bourbon on Front,” Grable said of where they take their visitors. “It’s cool because I’m learning all these new spots, building relationships with people around town, managers and owners of these restaurants, so I’m trying the food as our recruits are trying it.”
Grable has an idea of how many high school prospects USM will take in the 2026 class based largely on the tried-and-true method of replacing outgoing transfers with portal entrants and exiting seniors with high schoolers.
There’s also a top secret algorithm he’s devised to help with the process, knowing there will be unplanned roster changes at the end of the year.
Along with the sealed-system, there’s a footprint that provides a much wider talent pool than the Marshall transplanted staff is used to that they are eager to tap into.
To counter the slim pickings of the tri-state area at Marshall, Huff and staff built heavy in-roads in Florida and Georgia. Grable said they’ll maintain their FL-GA pipeline, but they’ve got a new Deep South pool they’re diving into with help from the Prince of Mississippi.
“That guy knows everybody everywhere in the state of Mississippi,” Grable said of Barney Farrar, the program’s Director of Player Development/Recruiting Strategy.
Farrar is on his second stint with USM, having served from 2008 to 2011, when he was tabbed as one of the top recruiters in the country by Rivals.com. Farrar has been on staffs at Ole Miss, Jones College and Holmes Community College.
“The guy can dial up any high school coach in Mississippi and get him on the phone,” Grable said of what brought him to tag Farrar as staff royalty.
Having a quick in through a familiar face is a necessary advantage in a world where high school coaches are becoming more and more agitated with the portal antics of college coaches. Huff and staff hope to criss-cross the state in the coming classes to alleviate those concerns, establish relationships and supplement the high school-based foundation of the roster.
That foundation will look a little less Mississippi than in recent years, but Huff is adamant the state will come first in their search for high school talent.
“I think we have to start with Mississippi and I think we have a little bit of an advantage,” Huff said. “Because one, this university has a name in this state. It’s not a fly-by operation. Two, there’s really good talent in the state that loves to stay home.”
The future is convoluted. It’s changing on a near-daily basis. The constant evolution is the driving force behind the explosion of the GM position.
Every GM has a different role. Andrew Luck hired Stanford’s new head coach. While unconfirmed, it is unlikely Grable will have the power to remove Huff, as Luck removed Troy Taylor.
What is within Grable’s role is the responsibility of establishing presence and flexible continuity. There must always be a plan. Grable has one and has a straightforward measure for his own success.
“I just want to win a championship, man. I’m here for the guys and I just want to win football games.”
