30 Years of Hardship Leads Louisiana-Monroe into A Big Week 6 Matchup
The ULM Warhawks have been to just one bowl game in program history. A Week 6 matchup with James Madison would go a long way to their second (and perhaps even Sun Belt Conference title contention).
Among the more intriguing matchups on the Week 6 college football slate, undefeated James Madison opens its Sun Belt Conference season with a road contest that would have been easy to pencil in as a W for the Dukes before the season.
JMU visits Louisiana-Monroe, off to a 3-1 start for the first time since 2014 and looking to score an upset over a Dukes side that looks like it may be the class of the Sun Belt.
Louisiana-Monroe hasn’t exactly posed much of a threat to conference title hopefuls in the program’s 30 years since moving up from Div. I-AA. A case can be made that the only FBS program more built for FCS competition than ULM is UMass.
Now, this is a sentiment excluding recent subdivision-jumpers Jacksonville State, Kennesaw State and Sam Houston. But with Jacksonville State having reached the 2023 Orleans Bowl, the Gamecocks have played in as many bowl games since moving up in one year of FBS membership as ULM has in 30.
What’s more, Jacksonville State’s nine wins a season ago eclipsed the Warhawks’ high watermark of eight when then reached the 2012 Independence Bowl. For ULM’s last nine-win campaign, one must go back to 1993 when the Warhawks were still in Div. I-AA and they were referred to as neither “Louisiana-Monroe” nor the “Warhawks.”
The Northeast Louisiana Indians moved up the next season and debuted with games against preseason No. 8 Colorado — played three weeks before Kordell Stewart’s unforgettable Hail Mary heave toppled Michigan — and No. 12 Auburn, which was coming off an unseen and undefeated season1.
In an interseting coincidence, head coach of that Auburn team — Terry Bowden — took over at Louisiana-Monroe in 2021. Bowden replaced Matt Viator, whose 0-10 team in 2020 reached an unprecedented low for a program without many highs in modern history.
Another eye-browing raising coincidence of the future ULM’s matchup with Auburn in 1994 is detailed in the Associated Press feature on Northeast Louisiana’s jump.
Boasts of ULM being the “best football team in the state” seem especially ludicrous in present-day context. But it’s worth noting that in 1994, LSU was in Year 6 of a 13-year SEC championship drought that didn’t end until Nick Saban came to Baton Rouge.
Before his arrival, Dale Brown was the most recognized coach at LSU. Brown, a thrilling Final Four run and the presence of superstars like Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Shaquille O’Neal made LSU more of the Basketball School in this era.
Tulane was a few years away from another member of the Bowden family, Tommy, overseeing an undefeated Green Wave that revolutionized college football offenses under coordinator Rich Rodriguez.
Louisiana Tech had a few winning teams shortly after making the same move as Northeast Louisiana, from the Div. I-AA Southland Conference to Div. I-A independence. Maybe the Bulldogs could challenge ULM’s claim. But ULM could make the claim at that time and not be laughed out of the room thanks to a decade that culminated in a 1987 national championship.
But beginning with those losses of 48-13 at Colorado, 44-12 at Auburn, and 70-6 at Georgia in Week 3, ULM began the march from best team in the state to most consistently unsuccessful program in the subdivision.
Sure, there have been highlights in the last 30 years — fleeting moments when linebacker Damon Poage’s declaration to the AP that “we could play with the big guys” proved true.
Further coincidences still, two coaching luminaries already mentioned in this newsletter — Nick Saban and Rich Rodriguez — played central roles in two of the most high-profile games in ULM FBS history.
Saban’s first Alabama team was a long way from the juggernaut he’d have in Tuscaloosa just a year later. But ULM’s 21-14 defeat of the Crimson Tide in 2007 is still remembered today, and rightly so, as one of the most monumental upsets of the 21st Century.
The eight-win team of 2012 opened its landmark season with what may have been the most entertaining, three-game stretch of any program in the nation. The Warhawks played a good Baylor team to a 47-42 final one week after taking Auburn to overtime. And while those were losses, a 34-31 overtime decision against Arkansas gave ULM its first and still only win over a top 10-ranked opponent in program history.
Yes, this was the post-Bobby Petrino motorcycle accident Arkansas team that imploded under interim coach John L. Smith. But the Razorbacks were No. 8 when they faced ULM, and there’s no erasing that bit of history.
ULM’s most recent signature win came in Bowden’s first season with the Warhawks. With Rich Rod as ULM’s offensive coordinator, the Warhawks bombarded a Hugh Freeze-coached Liberty team with four third-quarter touchdowns on the way to a 31-28 win.
The Zac Alley-coordinated defense forced Malik Willis, generating buzz as a potential first-round NFL draft pick, into three interceptions and a 135-yard passing performance.
Had timing and circumstances worked out differently, Rodriguez strikes me as the perfect head coach to turn a program like ULM into a consistent winner of seven or eight games with Sun Belt title contention sprinkled in every few seasons — particularly with an energetic and innovative defensive coordinator like Alley on his staff.
And Alley has indeed proving to be a rising star. After helping Jacksonville State to its 9-4 finish last season in the program’s FBS debut — a breakout that once again demonstrated Rich Rod’s ability to maximize the potential at unlikely spots — Brent Venables hired Alley at Oklahoma.
Any of the non-autonomy conference programs is going to struggle to keep promising young coaches like Alley for long. ULM’s Week 6 opponent James Madison experienced this inevitability after a Top 25 finish to 2023, losing Curt Cignetti to perennial Big Ten bottom-feeder Indiana.
But JMU continued the circle of college football coaching life with its hire of impressive FCS upstart Bob Chesney. Chesney led some outstanding teams at Holy Cross and, since a quizzical 13-6 win over Gardner-Webb in Week 2, the coach has things similarly rolling at James Madison.
The Dukes are undefeated going into ULM and have put up point totals the last two weeks that would impress JMU’s March Madness-qualifying basketball team. Their 133 combined points vs. North Carolina — someone tell Hubert Davis to get these dadgum Tar Heels to play some defense! — and Ball State clear ULM’s four-game total of 78 with five touchdowns to spare.
The contrast in how James Madison has reached this point with ULM’s road to its best start in a decade couldn’t be more stark. That includes how each program got its first-year head coach.
Returning to the not uncommon opinion ULM would be better served in FCS, the program’s budget is the lowest in FBS. New head coach Bryant Vincent receives in the neighborhood of an estimated $370,000, which is about one-eighth the salary LSU defensive coordinator Blake Baker commands.
But while Vincent wasn’t a hire with as much excitement as Chesney, a rumored target for power-conference program Boston College at one point last offseason, Vincent may be the ideal fit for ULM.
He played a part in the development of South Alabama from its infancy early in the 2010s, and was the offensive coordinator at UAB when it had its shocking breakout in 2014, just being the Blazers were forced into hiatus.
His return to UAB alongside Bill Clark, whose tenure deserves its own individual exhibit in the College Football Hall of Fame, resulted in Vincent heading up the Blazers for a season. Clark stepped down due to an ailing back, and Vincent joined his former colleague and Watson Brown as the only coaches in UAB to oversee bowl-qualifying teams.
That Vincent continued UAB’s streak of postseasons to six, all reached since the program returned from being effectively shut down for years, deserved more credit than the proverbial gold watch he was given instead.
UAB hiring Trent Diler was a decision that felt in the same mold as Jackson State (and later Colorado) bringing in Deion Sanders or Presbyterian tabbing The Coach Who Never Punts, Kevin Kelley: A move made in the hope that celebrity and some initial national headline-grabbing could be leveraged into success.
I certainly had my qualms with Presbyterian hiring Kelley, as expressed in the above commentary. And while Jackson State’s hire of Sanders paid short-term dividends — and Colorado has looked more competent at times in its second season under the Pro Football Hall of Famer than it did in Year 1 — no amount of attentions or wins will convince me bringing in Sanders was ethical; not with the lack of contrition of accountability there’s ever been shown over Prime Prep.
But in both instances, Presbyterian is a non-scholarship program with an undistinguished history. Jackson State is a SWAC program with limited resources and minimal success over the modern era. Colorado has been at the nadir of power-conference football for almost 20 years.
UAB abandoning a lineage of success to go for the attention-seeking celebrity hire was especially confounding. And that the Bryant Vincent-coached ULM Warhawks faced Dilfer’s Blazers in Week 2, delivering a 32-6 beatdown, confirmed just how preposterous a decision it was.
Holding UAB to 259 yards of offense, getting to Blazers quarterback Jacob Zeno for five sacks and keeping them out of the end zone, this was the masterpiece in what’s been an all-around impressive first month for the Warhawks defense.
ULM is holding opponents to 9.7 points per game in its three wins. As noted, its a diametric opposite to JMU’s high-scoring offense — though, as the Gardner-Webb score suggests, the potential key to the Warhawks scoring an upset in the vein of those Alabama and Liberty wins.
Initial standouts on the ULM defense include linebacker Billy Pullen, a JUCO transfer who accounted for two of the sacks against UAB and forced the fumble vs. the Blazers. Wydett Williams Jr., a transfer defensive back from Div. II Delta State, made one of his two interceptions this season against then-No. 1-ranked Texas.
Kevontay Wells made a pair of tackles for loss and Carls Fauntroy and Glass Jr. each made nine tackles last week as the Warhawks held two-time defending Sun Belt champion Troy without a touchdown in a 13-9 win.
James Madison ups the degree of difficulty for ULM. But really, nothing’s ever been easy for this program in 30 years, so what’s another week as a decided underdog?
Please check out the linked piece on Auburn’s 1993 season I produced last fall for Awful Announcing if you’ve never read it. It’s one of my favorite stories I have written recently on a team who captured my imagination the first college season I followed as a kid. https://awfulannouncing.com/college-football/remembering-auburns-undefeated-unseen-1993-season.html