my take on a nationally-obscure sports story

Jeff Bower is out at Southern Miss. Just barely enough of a story to crack the national radar, but the only story that matters this week to a lot of folks I knew in the four years I spent in Hattiesburg covering Southern Miss.

On the face of it, Bower’s departure (termed a resignation, but definitely a forced one) is problematic. He’d been with the school for 17 years as head coach, and a few more as assistant and player. The team had winning seasons something like the past 14 seasons, as well as bowl trips in just about all of those.

Normally, this would be the sort of move I critize whole-heartedly, proof the college atmosphere has become so charged coaches aren’t allowed any breathing room and schools looking for a short-term fix often end up in long-term problems. Coaching changes are generally a crap-shoot; ask Nebraska, Notre Dame, Alabama, Texas A&M, etc., how well their last few changes have gone. And those are programs with a lot more tradition and money than Southern Miss.

There is a bit more to the story, of course. The program has more or less reached equilibrium since 2000, by which I mean Southern Miss is in the top four teams in Conference USA but not the dominant team fans believe it should be. The Eagles haven't been one of those outside-the-BCS teams who've had a major run and garnered notice, like TCU did a few years ago, or Boise State did last year, or Hawaii is doing this year. Southern Miss has had a few decent wins, but generally they get beat when they go and play their one or two SEC opponents each year. Fans don't like this sort of equilibrium. They complain about the lack of offense year in and year out. They worry because the defense hasn't been as good as its reputation. The school just built an addition to the stadium, despite the fact they never sold out the previous 33,000 seats. In the final game this season, announced attendance was 17,000. A few big-money folks have been working behind the scenes for a while agitating for a change, and as far as I can tell from the reports, they seem to have forced the school's hand.

Here’s the thing, though. Who better are you going to get? This isn’t a program most coaches, outside of Bower, are looking to make a career stop. There are positives: Southern Miss is sitting in the midst of fertile recruiting ground, although its competing with the SEC schools for the top-notch area recruits. There’s a decent national reputation and the possibility of making a run through Conference USA and making a Boise State-like splash with a possible BCS ranking. There’s a three-year old new lockerroom and weight room complex, as well as a brand-new addition to the stadium.
What there isn’t, though, is money or a fan base. The 15,000 people who follow the team like to believe they are as rabid as any SEC fan base, and they are convinced there are tens of thousands more who will join them as soon as the team turns some sort of corner. Outside of the impossible, getting an invite to a BCS conference, I'm not sure there's any corner to turn. More people would show up if the team was undefeated late in the year and knocked off a big-name team somewhere along the line, but as soon as the team lost again, most of those would go back to watching Ole Miss, Miss. State or another SEC team on TV.

And if they do luck out and get a coach who can bring them some sort of wild success, they'll be going through this search again as soon as that coach gets hired away by a bigger program. Once you're in the cycle, it's not easy to keep it going - see above and the crap-shoot nature of new coaches.

The basketball team managed to luck out and pick up a big-name coach with some black marks in Larry Eustachy a few years ago. He's helped the team out and picked up some recruits, but the fan base has come along slowly. And I don't see why he'd stay if he wins and shows his personal life is redeemed. Even if he doesn't, basketball is a different beast - if Southern Miss somehow became No. 2 in the conference behind Memphis and earned NCAA tournament bids regularly, he would be lauded as the best thing to ever happen to program.

If a football coach wins the conference and gets to the Liberty Bowl, the fans will see it as a failure because it's not a BCS bowl.

I just don't see this as being a positive for the school. An inevitability, maybe, if enough money was threatened to disappear from the donation pool. But I don't think the fans who have been calling for a new coach for at least the past five years are going to feel any better after the new guy has been there for a few seasons.