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Will Hall has ambitious goals for his Southern Miss football program, but this always had to be the first step.
In Hall’s second season as coach, the Golden Eagles are bowl eligible. They snapped a three-game losing streak to earn that elusive sixth win Saturday, topping Louisiana-Monroe 20-10 on the road.
“We play our butt off every week for our university to get them back, to get this program back where it’s supposed to be,” Hall said postgame. “And it’s a great step in Year Two to get us to a bowl game.”
Star running back Frank Gore Jr. has wondered aloud a few times this season what it would feel like to play in a bowl game after enduring the frustration of two three-win years to start his USM career. Thanks to a monster effort Saturday, he’ll get to find out.
Gore, playing as a wildcat quarterback and traditional running back, carried 24 times for 199 yards in the game, surpassing 1,000 yards on the season. After Brendan Toles blocked a fourth-quarter ULM punt, Gore delivered the finishing blow with a 33-yard touchdown rush on the very next play to put the Golden Eagles (6-6, 4-4 Sun Belt Conference) up 10 over the Warhawks (4-8, 3-5).
“Going into the game, I knew how much I needed,” Gore said. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me because I knew this is history.”
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That relieved the pressure on a USM defense that carried most of the weight on Saturday, as it had for much of the season. Austin Armstrong’s unit thrived under the pressure of the moment, keeping the Warhawks at bay and supporting an offense that missed opportunities to go up big early.
The Golden Eagles played one of their best first halves of the entire season, but that fact wasn’t reflected on the scoreboard.
Southern Miss outgained the Warhawks 273-82 in the first 30 minutes, but headed to the locker room with just a 10-7 lead to show for it.
The major cause of that discrepancy between process and outcome was a poor time management sequence late in the half. The Golden Eagles had first-and-goal on the ULM 4-yard line with about 15 seconds remaining in the half. Tight end Cole Cavallo was tackled in bounds on the 1-yard line on the next play, and quarterback Trey Lowe couldn’t get the ball spiked to stop the clock before time expired.
A dropped touchdown pass by Jason Brownlee when the game was tied early in the fourth quarter caused USM fans some more agita. Perhaps it’s against the Southern Miss creed to lock down one of the program’s major initial goals — bowl eligibility — without just a hint of self-sabotage
But, despite a few moments that will have made the doomsday theorists within the USM fanbase fear the worst, the Golden Eagles delivered. Hall, inheriting a disaster of a roster well under the NCAA’s scholarship cap, now has a real platform on which to build.
Southern Miss will now wait a week to learn its bowl fate, having doubled its win total from a season ago.
“I came in here three years ago with coach (Jay Hopson) and new then new coaches came in and I stuck with them,” linebacker Averie Habas said. “I trusted them. I believed in them. A lot of guys did. Not a lot of guys left. Here we are going bowling.”
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