Twice a week, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football coaches fix hot dogs and hamburgers for the 60 or so players going through workouts.
The coaches don’t get any.
Still, Thursday was a great day for everybody within the program.
The Mocs had three players named to the SportsNetwork.com STATS Football Championship Subdivision preseason All-America team. Junior offensive lineman Corey Levin made the first team, while senior quarterback Jacob Huesman received a second-team nod and sophomore defensive back Lucas Webb was a third-team selection.
“I think it’s great,” UTC coach Russ Huesman said. “I’m excited for any recognition they get. It’s nice when they get recognized for playing well. The selection is based off of last year, so this year they’re going to have to be as good or better to be there at the end.”
Levin was the Southern Conference’s 2014 Jacobs Blocking Award winner as the league’s top offensive lineman. Huesman finished 11th in the voting for the national Walter Payton Award, accounting for 37 touchdowns and leading the FCS by completing 68.5 percent of his passes. He threw for 2,731 yards while rushing for 1,009 in 2014.
Webb had 58 tackles and six interceptions from his free safety position.
Bama, UK games
UTC will end the 2015 regular season with a game at Florida State, and two other games against Football Bowl Subdivision teams have been set for the near future – at Alabama in 2016 and at Kentucky in 2018.
The Mocs will receive $500,000 from the Alabama game.
“The money is huge. It’s critical for our program,” Coach Huesman said. “It gives the players on campus an opportunity to go against programs they might have wanted to attend when they were growing up. It’s important for them to get that opportunity, so it’ll be cool. It’ll be cool for the fans, and the game-day atmosphere is cool.”
The 2016 Alabama game will be the third time in Huesman’s tenure for the Mocs to travel to Tuscaloosa. The next time the Mocs score against the Crimson Tide, though, will be the first: It was 45-0 in 2009 and 49-0 in 2013.
“When we go out and recruit, we can tell kids they’ll get to play these people,” Huesman said. “We appreciate the BCS schools playing us; we get way more out of it than they do.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him at twitter.com/genehenleytfp.