Spring football has begun at Southern Miss, and newly hired head coach Charles Huff is already making a drastic culture change.
With the addition of 41 new players after coming off a 1-11 season, the Golden Eagles' new team is far from finished. Huff will not be holding back the playbook as he attempts to install his schemes with the goal of finding which players fit and those that do not.
“We are going to go full boar, and those who can handle it will progress, and those who can’t will have to make some decisions,” Huff said on Monday. “I think football has changed a little bit. Your installs are not 45 pages anymore. There are base installs on all three phases and base fundamentals that you have got to be able to do.
“We are going to give it to them all and figure out who can retain what. To me, when you slow down, you’re holding some guys back, and when you speed up, you’re going to lose some guys. I would rather lose some guys and bring them along later than slow down the guys who can handle it.”
The reason that Huff is not finished building the roster is with the second transfer portal, there will likely be as much action as the first one. The only difference is that Huff will pull in more specific players based on their needs from spring ball. An extra layer to that process is that Huff also emphasizes building the individual player rather than the team.
“The guys that get left behind is not going to be the guys that can’t necessarily remember what to do, but it’s going to be the guys that haven’t grasped the understanding of I have to prepare every single day,” Huff said. “I think we are a little different. We take an NFL approach to this thing. This is a job. These guys should be working towards this 24 hours a day.”
PLAYERS PERSPECTIVE
Marshall transfer Josh Moten understands the importance of Huff’s philosophy that the spring is devoted to developing a player's individual habits with the expectation carrying over to the football field.
“How you do one thing is how you do everything,” said Moten, who recorded five interceptions last season. “That’s a big thing for Coach Huff. This is the point in time when we come together as a team and individually. You want to show the coaches who they can trust, me included. It's doing your job every day, being accountable, doing what you are supposed to do off the field – going to study, being right in the community, and treating everybody with respect. All those things lead up to getting that trust that we will need going into the spring and then heading into the season.”
That culture is partly why quarterback Braylon Braxton chose to follow Huff to Southern Miss.
“Something you look at every day is flip the script in 2025,” said Braxton, who accounted for over 2,200 all-purpose yards and 24 touchdowns. “It’s on the scoreboard, our locker rooms, and I’m sure it’s going to be put on a shirt pretty soon. Right now, we are trying to attack every day. We are focused on individuals right now.
“To make a strong team, you have to have strong individuals, so if everybody shows up to the team as their best self, working on your best self and fixing what you need to fix, then I feel like that gives the team the best chance to be successful.”
As for returning linebacker Chris Jones, who totaled 46 tackles last year, the most welcoming part of Huff’s culture has been the discipline.
“Last year, not to knock them, but we didn’t really have discipline on the field or off the field,” Jones said. “To see Huff come in and change that with his new staff has been different for me because I had to adjust to it, too, with not having discipline. They are so big on that. The leaders, too, make it known every day at practice.
“I’ve been seeing that out of a lot of the new guys and even players who probably weren’t leaders last year.”
GROUPS TO WATCH
The two position groups that Huff is most excited about are the wide receivers and secondary, which is mostly filled with players that were transferred from Marshall.
“I think the interesting battle this spring is going to be our wideouts versus our secondary because I feel like both of those units, and maybe I'm biased because I know 90% of the guys in those units, but I feel like both of those units, we can compete at a high level right now.
“But being that I knew 90% of the skill guys that we brought in, that battle for the first 15 days should be really interesting.”
Huff admitted that judging the defensive and offensive lines will be the hardest position to assess.
“We felt like offensively, skill-wise, that we addressed some issues and needs, and defensively, we addressed some issues and needs,” Huff said. “We knew the bigs were going to be something that was going to take some time. To me, the bigs take a little bit longer to determine ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ on because they are a different position group, their bodies are different, and their movements are different. Sometimes, the bigs don’t look great running around cones. That’s the area we want to be able to evaluate this spring and evaluate what type of investment in the bigs we need to make in the spring portal.”
Notably, place-kicking duties is another major question mark with no clear answer for early favorites. Running backs Robert Briggs, a Utah State transfer, and Matt Jones, an Ole Miss transfer, are dealing with injuries and will be limited.
Southern Miss’ spring game will be held on April 12, with the second transfer portal window set to open on April 16.
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