If the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga played in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the Mocs would have been a bowl-eligible team every season since 2018, including all five under head coach Rusty Wright.
But at the Football Championship Subdivision level, 6-5 isn't always enough to earn an extra game and a spot in the postseason, and it wasn't for UTC in 2021. Neither is 7-4, a win-loss mark that left the Mocs empty-handed when playoff invitations went out last year.
Has it been a failure? By no means. In fact, the Mocs' 7-4 record this year — same as last — was enough to secure one of the 14 at-large berths in the 24-team bracket for the FCS playoffs.
The only differences are one more Southern Conference win and (not coincidentally) a chance to compete Saturday, when the Mocs face Austin Peay (9-2) at 3 p.m. Eastern at Fortera Stadium in Clarksville, Tennessee. That's one of eight games in the first round of the FCS playoffs, with the eight seeded qualifiers receiving byes.
That includes No. 7 Furman (9-2), which has Saturday off before hosting the UTC-Austin Peay winner next week.
"We're thankful to get into the door, and it's really about getting in there," said UTC senior edge rusher Jay Person, who this week was named SoCon defensive player of the year for the second consecutive season. "Now that we're there, we just really want to get over this first game, then just keep going and see how far we can get."
Wright was a four-year letterman at UTC in the 1990s and was twice an assistant for the Mocs, first from 1996 to 2002 and again from 2013-16, with those final three seasons including three of the program's four playoff berths to that point. He moved on after that to work on staff at Georgia State, an FBS program, but jumped at the chance to return to his alma mater as head coach in late December 2018.
The Mocs have never had a losing season under Wright's direction — they went 6-6 in his 2019 debut and were 3-2 in the 2020 schedule that was delayed and shortened amid the coronavirus pandemic — but it wasn't until last Saturday afternoon that they could breathe a sigh of relief with their return to the playoffs for the first time since reaching the second round in 2016.
"This is why you play at our level," Wright said. "This is why you do those things to give yourself an opportunity to go compete for a championship — truly a championship — and it's something that hasn't happened a lot around here. It's a special deal when you have that opportunity."
Staff photo by Olivia Ross / The Citadel's Cooper Wallace is brought down by UTC's Montrell Henderson (91), Alex Mitchell (41), and Romeo Wykle during a SoCon game on Sept. 16 at Finley Stadium. UTC has lost its past two games, 17-14 to Furman on Nov. 4 and 66-10 at Alabama last weekend, but the Mocs have a chance to get back on track this year with Saturday's first-round playoff game at Austin Peay.While this year's record may not be that different from others in the past half-decade or so, it certainly feels different: more succesful by the measure of postseason inclusion — and earned, especially considering all the heartaches and frustrations for the teams that had fallen short and a fan base that had been yearning for a return to the playoffs.
The Mocs began this season out of the FCS polls but were ranked after four games and never looked back in that regard. They were forced to deal with an uneasy wait over the final two weeks of the regular season after a close home loss to Furman allowed the Paladins to clinch the SoCon's automatic berth, but UTC was ultimately rewarded.
"I get it, and I can't control what the perception is," Wright said of people considering prior seasons failures. "All I can control is: Are we making progress at the end of the day? Are our young guys making progress the right way to keep moving forward? Are we recruiting the right way to keep moving forward? Winning helps; that doesn't matter if you're 11-0 or 7-4, but do you know how hard it is to be 3-8 and try and go do it and go through those things?
"There's people that have it a lot worse than we do, trying to accomplish things, and it's not as easy here as people think it is. But we have coaches that work hard, we have players that work hard. We've had to change some things along the way, we've had to adjust some things along the way. But I don't gauge myself by winning and losing, I don't necessarily gauge our players in this program by winning and losing, because I have to continue to grow and move it forward somehow, some way that makes sense."
But the winning does matter — that's why the score is kept — and it's fair to question the feeling surrounding the program had they been on the outside looking in as opposed to being in.
The Mocs have been on the cusp of this moment for the past couple of seasons.
Now they're ready to embrace it.
"We're not going to make this bigger than what it is," offensive lineman Griffin McDowell said. "Ever since Western Carolina, each week has been a playoff game, so we just take it the same just like we would during the season, we'll take this playoff game just as a regular game. Obviously, what lies at stake is that we lose, we're done.
"But we've been preparing for this since midseason."
And now the moment is here.
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.