The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga kicks off its Southern Conference schedule by hosting The Citadel this weekend, the start of UTC’s latest effort to win its first conference championship in football since 2015.
That’s the second-longest drought in the league behind Western Carolina — which has never won the title despite joining up five decades ago at the same time as UTC — and it will be impossible to ignore Saturday at Finley Stadium, where UTC (1-3) and the Bulldogs (1-3, 1-1 SoCon) are set for a 6 p.m. kickoff. Players from that 2015 team, as well as the 2013 and 2014 teams that also won SoCon titles, will be honored during the first half of the game, part of a reunion weekend and celebration with events that include the UTC Athletics Hall of Fame inducting its 2025 class.
If it weren’t for that stretch of success, there’s no telling where the UTC football program would be.
Not even a decade earlier, there were murmurs of the program shutting down, but then former Mocs defensive back Russ Huesman returned ahead of the 2009 season to “Restore the Glory” — declared early on as the theme of what wound up being an eight-year tenure — and did just that during a four-year run from 2013-16 that included 36 wins, playoff appearances in the final three of those seasons, and the trio of SoCon titles that pushed the program’s all-time count to seven.
The Mocs are still looking for that elusive eighth title. It’s the next check mark for seventh-year head coach Rusty Wright, another UTC alum who was a linebackers coach on Huesman’s staff and then was a Georgia State assistant in 2017-18, the two years that marked Tom Arth’s brief run as UTC’s head coach after Huesman left to take over as Richmond.
The reason the fan base has the expectations it currently has is because of that run.
“It was a lot of fun,” Wright said this week as he reflected on that four-year stretch. “The league might’ve been down a little bit, but it was no fault of our own, but it was a lot of fun going out there (and) every Saturday we go play, you’ve got better players.
“By the time we left (after the 2016 season), Wofford got better, The Citadel got better, and I don’t think those guys had as much fun, but that group that won in ’13, ’14 and ’15 was a lot of fun, because you could see the excitement in their faces when things happened and how hard they worked.”
As UTC’s head coach, Wright is 29-16 against SoCon competition, including a 26-7 loss to Furman in the second round of the 2023 playoffs, the lone postseason appearance for the Mocs since Huesman left. As for the SoCon title, they’ve been close — they lost a winner-take-all game to those same Paladins at Finley a month earlier — but haven’t been able to get over that hump.
Still, it would have been hard to envision 20 years ago that UTC would be the model of consistency in the SoCon, with no losing seasons for the Mocs since finishing 3-8 overall in 2017. That’s a far cry from the program that Wright was a part of as a player from 1992-95, a 13-31 run with three head coaches.
The 2025 Mocs, with a rebuilt roster after losing two dozen players from last year’s team to the NCAA transfer portal, have endured a challenging first month to get to this point, with road losses to Football Bowl Subdivision member Memphis and two programs ranked among the top 12 in the country (Tennessee Tech and Tarleton State) as well as a 63-0 win against Stetson, a nonscholarship FCS program, in the only home game so far.
Their remaining eight regular-season games are all against SoCon competition, a journey that offers the opportunity to go beyond being the league’s most consistent program to becoming its next champion — and joining some of those UTC teams of the past that reached the top step.
“It’s just motivation. Seeing the people who have already done it come back and get recognized, it just kind of puts a chip on our shoulder,” UTC sophomore linebacker Amanuel Dickson said. “Why can’t we do that? Why can’t we make these people proud or more proud knowing that they won championships, but it’s still continuing even after they’re gone. I feel like it puts our mind and perspective into where we want to be as a team and what we want to do.”
Wright, who was also a UTC assistant from 1996 to 2002, has been down this road plenty of times. He knows it’s never easy, whatever the final result might be.
“This group’s work ethic has been really good, might be the best we’ve had since I’ve been here,” he said of his time as head coach. “But it’s not the same — we don’t have established people. I can’t afford to lose somebody for two or three games during the middle of the stretch; it’s important.
“Unfortunately, whatever situation that’s happened to us, hadn’t been able to overcome it, but that’s the key. The whole key is being able to stay healthy, keep getting better as the season goes. Knock on wood, I think this group is starting to do that. Win or lose, we’ve got to keep getting better as it goes and see how it plays out at the end.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.