UAB Blazers football was officially reborn last Saturday. On April 1, the program held its first spring game since 2014 in front of nearly 8,000 fans. The green team defeated the white team, 49-7. But the score didn’t much matter. Blazers football was back from the dead, and bursting with new life in Birmingham.
Chances are you know the story of UAB’s temporary demise by now. Citing reports of rapidly increasing costs to run the program, UAB President Ray Watts announced the end of Blazers football (and the rifle and bowling teams) in December of 2014. The reports were laden with conflicts of interest, and an apparent plot to do away with the program that was months in the making.
When the methods of cancelling UAB football were called into question, it didn’t take long to dig into the data they were using. FiveThirtyEight spells out the data-driven approach to getting the team reinstated just six months after Watts announced its cancellation.
Bringing UAB football back was the right thing to do, and a great story for the school, the sport and the city of Birmingham, Alabama.
Now comes the hard part of fielding a successful football team.
UAB joined the FBS (then Division I-A) ranks in 1996 and from that year through 2014, the Blazers made just one bowl game — the 2004 Hawaii Bowl, which ended in a 59-40 loss to the home team Rainbow Warriors. The program had other successful seasons as well, however. UAB won six games in 2001 and seven in 2000 without going to bowl games either time. The Blazers went 6-6 in 2014, the final season, but were forced to decline a postseason invitation (which they certainly would’ve received).
Playing 19 years of football with just one postseason bid isn’t a great recipe for success, and neither are attendance figures under 15,000 fans per game. Struggling to draw fans in a town and state that’s nowhere near a traditional hotbed is one thing. But in Birmingham, Alabama? Even with the Crimson Tide less than an hour away, and Auburn less than two, there’s enough football fans in the state (and city) to draw more interest.
The spring game turnout shows there’s promise around the program, albeit promise fueled by the realization of what was lost. UAB football’s support reached an all-time high in its final days and in the offseason following its cancellation. It’ll need to stay that way (and grow) for awhile to give this program the support it needs.
Because the wins will not be easy to come by in the immediate future.
Stripped of its depth after the decision to cancel the program, coach Bill Clark (who stuck around through this two-year hiatus) had to spend a few offseasons with an non-traditional rebuild. There was no 2015 class. Clark’s 2016 recruiting influx was 47 players deep — good for 68th in the country according to 247Sports. Even with the obvious bump for the pure size of the class, there were well over a dozen three-star commits. It was a mix of junior college kids and true freshman. As Bill Connelly mentioned on SB Nation when previewing the Blazers’ season, it was set to create a wild imbalance in terms of roster construction for the next few years.
Connelly’s S&P+ projections give UAB 2.5 wins in year one. That sounds low. But it’s not too far from three wins and change the program averaged in its final four seasons. It’s a building block, but they’ll need more to keep winning and competing in a league (Conference USA) that makes that easier than most leagues. A band of upstart schools in larger southern cities (San Antonio, Charlotte, Miami, Houston, Norfolk, Va.) and some less-than-larger ones too (Rustin, La., Murfreesboro, Tenn., Bowling Green, Ky.); C-USA becomes the best asset the Blazers have — other than Clark, of course.
Clark, ultimately, is the glue that held this thing together and will fuel it to go further. In just one season on the job, he coached up a team that went 2-10 in 2013 and brought them all the way to 6-6. Some of the talent was already on the roster and just needed to be coached up. Others were Clark recruits who were forced to head elsewhere for 2015.
He probably could’ve gone elsewhere, too. But he’s stuck by the school and the program, even when the school and its president failed to stick by him, the players and the fans.
The coach, faced with the monumental task of building from the ground up, does have this program in better shape than it really should be at this juncture. As mentioned, the JUCO influx will mean some gymnastics when it comes to recruiting for a few years. Right now, though, his team, with players anxious to see the field now (and the talent to do so) can get off the ground in a reasonable amount of time.
“Off the ground” for 2017 could mean a 2-10 or 3-9 record, and a competent showing in conference games. After that, it’ll need to be more, however.
Once this offseason ends, UAB goes from being a feel-good story to another Group of Five school looking to get to .500 while making ends’ meet. A reasonable start could have the Blazers reaching heights they’d never imagined in a few short years. But a slow one could create some of the same concerns over budgets once again.
UAB’s back, and better equipped to compete in the long-term than before. Now we see if they can make the short-term work well enough to see those long-term goals through.