For two months, Southern Miss was the surprise of the Sun Belt.
After climbing to 7–2 overall and 5–0 in conference play, the Golden Eagles looked poised for a championship run, needing just two wins over their final three games to punch their ticket. Instead, they closed the regular season with three straight losses to Texas State, South Alabama and Troy — each loss exposing the same issues.
The west was Southern Miss’ to lose.
And they lost it.
“We were winning early, but the same issues were there — penalties, turnovers, missed opportunities,” Southern Miss head coach Charles Huff said. “When you get to this point of the season and start playing better teams, those things get magnified.”
For the players, the emotion of seeing a championship season slip away was heavy.
“We came out strong and shocked a lot of people early,” defensive back Mathis Haygood said. “Toward the end, the details just caught up to us. Nobody was going to lay down for us, and we just came up short.”
It was a puzzling end to an otherwise tremendous regular season. For the fans who may be dissatisfied with the result, Huff felt the same but held the position that his turnaround was the reason fans felt dissatisfied.
“The reason why everyone's upset and the reason why everyone is kind of feeling like, ‘Man, you guys didn't take advantage of opportunity’ is because we created an expectation of winning, right?” Huff said. “That's a positive. We've created that expectation. The pressure that we've created is good. Now we got to learn how to manage that. Now we got to learn how to prepare for that better.”
Huff emphasized that Saturday’s result does not erase the progress made in one season.
“We were losers. We were 1–11. Now we’re winners. We’re going to a bowl game,” Huff said. “That’s not the standard — that’s the floor. Now we’ve got to take the next step.”
As he spoke, Huff’s focus turned to the seniors who helped engineer the turnaround.
“I hurt for those seniors,” he said. “Their last memory at The Rock is a loss, but hopefully their experience here is that they did something a lot of people didn’t think they could do. I told them I’m proud of them. They’re the group that really started to flip the script.”
What’s next?
Southern Miss will now turn its attention to bowl preparations, earning its first postseason berth since returning to national relevance. The bowl destination will be announced in the coming weeks.
There will be a question of how many players will play in that bowl game, but all of that is to be determined later.
“Everybody in the locker room already [is] saying that the bowl game is our championship,” Southern Miss quaterback Braylon Braxton said. “So, we’re going to prepare like it’s our championship. We’re going to play like it’s our championship and hopefully we will get the result we want.”
Saturday night, the Golden Eagles learned once again how thin the margin is between progress and championships.
For a team that climbed from the bottom of the Sun Belt to the brink of a title in one season, the ending was cruel — but the foundation is finally in place.
