Joey Jones is frequently asked what it was like to help start the South Alabama Jaguars football program from thin air. How this tiny university, enrollment right around 17,000, located in Mobile, Alabama, in the shadow of 14 other college football programs in the state, was able to get a football program off the ground in 2009, and more, how it has been able to qualify for two bowl games in just five seasons of Division I FBS eligibility?
What, coach Jones, was Step 1?
“The thing I tell everybody is that the toughest thing is everything happens at once,” Jones said. “It’s not that recruiting the first class is hard, that hiring coaches is hard, that hiring a secretary is hard … or doing a schedule, coming up with a brand logo — it all came together at one time.
“There were a lot of hours put into those early days, sitting on the steps outside the basketball arena with a cellphone and a notepad.”
From a cellphone and notepad to Friday’s appearance in the Nova Home Loans Arizona Bowl, against a solid 9-3 Air Force Falcons squad.
Not bad.
“As a coach, you always wish you win every game, but when you back off and look at the big picture, it’s like, ‘Wow, we’ve done some really good things,’ and it’s been pretty exciting,” Jones said. “All the players we have who come back to the games, they’re on the sidelines, cheering for us, coming up and hugging me. That right there makes a lot of it worthwhile. You see guys who’ve really fallen in love with South Alabama and the program.
“To see that has been really something I’ll never forget.”
• • •
Jones remembers it vividly.
He was on the internet one day in early 2008, and a friend of a friend had posted something about South Alabama starting a program, and …
“Chills went up and down my spine,” Jones said. “I knew it’s where I wanted to be. One of those moments in time when I just knew what I wanted to do.”
He pitched himself as a home-town boy — Jones was born and raised in Mobile, starred at Murphy High and played for Bear Bryant at Alabama before a stint in the NFL with the Atlanta Falcons — after more than a decade of successful high school coaching all over the state, and most recently, his role in re-starting the football program at Birmingham Southern, where he was just a year into the gig.
But home is home, and Mobile is home.
Jones’ pitch to South Alabama higher-ups was simple: Give the football program the proper resources, and it will deliver results, enrollment and otherwise.
The response he got was startling, and relieving.
“The CFO, Steve Simmons said, if we’re in for a penny, we’re in for a pound, that we needed to get this done and done right,” Jones said. “The idea I gave the admin was we can’t piecemeal the program. We have to jump-start it. We can’t build a makeshift fieldhouse, can’t cut back on coaches’ salaries. What I presented to our administration was, and I don’t want to use the word failure, but the lack of success at other schools.”
Jones pointed to programs who’d tried to start football teams and folded, or worse, who languished in losses for years upon years.
These programs dot the Southeast, places with directional titles in their name, or maybe an A&M here or there.
Jones wanted his squad to be competitive, and in a hurry.
And they have been: The Jaguars played in a bowl game faster than any program in FBS history — “I know to the places that have the LSUs and Alabamas that it may not have been a big deal, but to everyone here in Mobile, it was a big deal” — and they’ll likely have the first draft pick in program history, tight end Gerald Everett, selected in 2017.
Soon enough, just a bowl berth won’t be enough.
There will be higher aspirations. Jones looks forward to those days, even if he’s enjoying seeing the fruits of his labor in the process.
“It takes time to build a tradition,” he said. “We had a group of kids who are now 13 to 14, and they started coming to games when they were 5 and 6, and they love South Alabama. I have a good friend who is about as big a Bama fan as you can get, and the last couple years, they’ve gone to our games. The son wants to come here.”
• • •
How many among us are lucky enough to be trailblazers, to truly put one’s stamp on something?
That’s been Jones’ biggest and best pitch to recruits, and the message has hit home for those who don’t want to be just another cog in the system.
“That has certainly been the big thing we sell here,” Jones said. “Say you can be on the first team at South Alabama able to play a game. Move forward, the first team to play in (Division I). First to win, first to take us to a bowl, this year the challenge is to win a bowl game. It’s a lot of firsts you sell.”
Roman Buchanan bought it.
The linebacker/safety was not swayed by the glitz and glamour of established programs, of lengthy alumni Rolodexes, of ready-made connections with boosters who go back four, five, six, eight, 10 decades.
“That was probably the biggest reason I came here,” Buchanan said. “As a man, I didn’t want to go somewhere where hundreds of guys before me had went. I wanted to be a trailblazer. That was the majority of the reason I came here — when this thing first started, you had to take a shot.”
Above all, Buchanan appreciates the opportunity to establish an identity for a program too young to have one.
“You can define what you want this to be,” he said. “Be relentless and don’t back down from it. This year right here is a crazy one.”
In just their fifth year of Division I-FBS play — the Jaguars played their first three seasons at lower levels — South Alabama beat San Diego State and Mississippi State. Buchanan believes wins like that are proof that the Jaguars, despite a decades-late start on some of their opponents, have a chance to catch up in a hurry.
“There are big institutions that have been around forever, have indoor facilities, their own dining facilities,” Buchanan said, “but if it’s something you believe in, that you want, you have to pave the way for the next group to have it.”
