Rusty Wright has shaped the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football program in his image.
In six seasons as head coach at his alma mater, the Mocs have done things the way the former tight end and UTC assistant wants them done, and the results have largely been good.
Wright’s tenure has shown the Mocs to not only be one of the best teams in the Southern Conference but consistently among the top 25 teams in the Football Championship Subdivision; in last week’s rankings, they were No. 19 in the Stats Perform FCS Top 25 and tied for 25th in the coaches poll. In the same span, they have won no fewer than six games in every full season (the 2020 schedule was both delayed and truncated amid the coronavirus pandemic, and UTC ultimately opted out with games to play).
Graduation rates are high, the program has a reputation for developing great young men, and the police blotter isn’t filled with UTC players.
Wright, his staff and his players have approached practices the same way, games the same way. They’ve mostly played games the same way, running most of the same plays, playing mostly the same defense and — with an emphasis on preparing the right way to make Saturdays smoother — relying on players to make plays and not mistakes. And if Wright’s team has fewer mistakes than the opponent and makes a few plays along the way, the Mocs usually win, evidence that his even-keeled approach leads to success more often than not.
However, the “next day, next game” mentality the Mocs use is not always the same way opponents treat the game. Somewhere along the way, a number of teams — mostly within the nine-team SoCon, where seven programs have won at least a share of the league title since UTC’s most recent championship in 2015 — have taken a certain level of pride and reveled in beating the Mocs.
Against UTC, they have raised their level of play compared to the rest of their season, and the Mocs have too often been unable to counter that, leading to losses, with some of them notable upsets and many of those games in November. In the 11th month of the year — and the final month of college football’s regular season — the Mocs have not shown that same consistency, with their November record under Wright just 6-10.
It was 2-2 in 2019, 1-2 in 2021, 2022 and 2023 — though it’s worth noting that one of the losses last year was to Football Bowl Subdivision power Alabama, and the victory was in the playoffs — and 1-2 this month with at least this week’s regular-season finale at United Athletic Conference member Austin Peay to go. The latest such loss came Saturday at Finley Stadium, where the Mocs wrapped up their SoCon schedule with a 36-13 loss to Samford, which ties for the largest margin of defeat against an FCS opponent under Wright (James Madison, ranked second in the country at the time, defeated the Mocs 37-14 in 2019).
And while it’s true that Wright routinely calls Samford, as a program, “one of the most talented groups in the league” and the Bulldogs are the only team that has beaten SoCon champ Mercer in conference play this season, it’s also true they entered Finley with just three victories overall this year.
The Bulldogs clearly enjoyed their fourth win, taking pictures on the field and hurling expletives along the lines of “We don’t like Chatt” while running towards the visitors’ locker room after ruining the Mocs’ senior day.
“I’m tripping about the seniors,” redshirt junior receiver Sam Phillips said. “That’s their last home game, and if I was a senior and I lost my last home game, I wouldn’t like it either. I’m not tripping about how I played, or if I missed the ball on a play. I know that’s a big deal, but I’m just focusing on the seniors like Reuben (Lowery) — he busts his tail for us to go win, and we don’t win for him.”
While the loss to Samford was a case of being outplayed from start to finish, the prevailing theme is that when some of these big games have really mattered, the opponents have been able to make one more play than UTC in the end.
In 2022, it was Western Carolina, a 5-5 team at the time. With the final score 32-29, it wasn’t a lopsided loss — the Mocs led by five with a minute to go — so it wasn’t as though UTC didn’t play well. It’s that the Catamounts played better in the end, when it mattered the most.
Same with Mercer in 2021, a game where the Mocs couldn’t make a kick and lost 10-6. Last season, in a de facto SoCon championship game, Furman won 17-14 with a backup quarterback while UTC’s starting quarterback, Chase Artopoeus, was dealing with a shoulder injury suffered in the first quarter that affected his ability to throw.
The Mocs (6-5, 5-3) won’t fall below .500 this year, and they could secure their third consecutive seven-win regular season with a victory in Saturday’s 2 p.m. Eastern matchup at Austin Peay (4-7) in Clarksville, Tennessee. It’s also not inconceivable that the Mocs, a year after winning a first-round playoff game in Clarksville, in their return there could secure the program’s second straight appearance in the 24-team FCS playoffs after missing each season from 2017-22.
Maybe the Govs make more mistakes than the Mocs and that’s enough.
Or maybe, just maybe, the Mocs are hot from the start and just go win a game that matters.
“We’ve got one guaranteed week left, and we’ve got to go get it figured out,” Wright said. “It’s a good group of young men, it’s a good group of coaches. We’re going to show back up to work just like we do every Sunday and Monday and figure out a way to fight and see if we can go win a football game, and that’s all you can do in this game.
“That’s the bad part about this game, is I’ve got to wait until next Saturday to go play again. I’m not a basketball coach or a baseball coach where I can go every other night or once every two nights; I’ve got to wait until next Saturday to try and get this out of my mouth, and we’re only as good as our last one — or bad.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.