Ryan Ingram had five seasons to develop an appreciation for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football program, having faced the Mocs multiple times while playing for Wofford College, a fellow Southern Conference school in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
He enjoyed some individual success in the series (78 total yards in the 2023 game, a 23-13 UTC road win), but what the running back from Stone Mountain, Georgia, didn’t experience was team victories, because the Mocs haven’t lost to the Terriers since falling 35-34 in overtime in Spartanburg in October 2019 during Rusty Wright’s first season as UTC’s head coach.
Ingram totaled 2,020 rushing yards and 19 touchdowns during his time with the Terriers, but after graduating in February, he couldn’t return to them for his final season of NCAA eligibility. (Wofford, a private school, does not offer any graduate programs.)
However, the 24 players the Mocs lost to the NCAA transfer portal from their 2024 roster included Reggie Davis, their leading rusher last season. So there was a need for someone who could complement a UTC running back room that has youth (5-foot-10, 203-pound sophomore Journey Wyche), speed (5-9, 179-pound senior Justus Durant) and experience (5-10, 197-pound redshirt junior Solomon Locke, a former Chattanooga-area prep standout at Christian Heritage School in Dalton).
“I just felt something special here,” Ingram said after Wednesday’s practice. “The connection I had with the coaches when they were recruiting me, I felt strongly about that, and that’s why I chose where I chose. Every day we come to work, and it just proves that I made a right choice.
“It’s hard when it’s supposed to be hard, but that’s why I chose Chattanooga: I want to win.”
Ingram provided a combination of all the above, and with a 5-10, 231-pound frame, he also has the ability to go get some tough yards, a problem for UTC last season. The Mocs averaged just 3.4 yards per carry in 2024 and had games with 74, 76, 19, 58, 29 and 81 yards on the ground. It was as bad as it’s been since Tom Arth era’s two-year run as head coach, when the Mocs averaged 2.6 yards per carry and 78.1 rushing yards per game in 2017, then 3.3 and 98.4 in 2018.
Ingram and the bevy of backs, with different strengths and traits, will now have a chance to rectify that.
“It’s a guy that’s played a lot of football in this league,” Wright said. “Nothing’s really going to affect him. We’re probably asking him to do a little more in the passing game than he did over there, but I think he’s picked it up really well. I love the way he runs, I love the way he works. He’s already changed his body in like six, seven months here, and he’s going to get his fair share of totes.”
Unless the student-athlete has graduated from his or her previous institution, the SoCon doesn’t allow intraconference transfers to have immediate eligibility. Ingram graduated from Wofford in February, and UTC was able to figure out a way to get him enrolled for the second term of the spring (something Wright and UTC haven’t done in his time) so he could go through spring practices and learn the Mocs’ offensive system on the field.
“Bringing in Ryan speaks volumes of the program, because he’s competed against us for four years, and I don’t think he would be coming to a program if he felt like were in any sort inferior to what he just left,” running backs coach D.J. Knox said. “As an entire staff, we all hammered him, we loved on him because we wanted to make sure he felt welcome. Everybody got involved on that one because they knew how special of a player he was.”
The Terriers went 5-7 in 2024, the lone year in Ingram’s time in which they won more than three games in a single season. UTC has yet to have a losing season in Wright’s tenure as head coach, with the Mocs going 7-5 overall and 5-3 in SoCon play last year while falling just short of an at-large playoff berth in the Football Championship Subdivision’s 24-team bracket.
It’s almost fitting that the final regular-season game of Ingram’s career will be at his alma mater, but there’s a long road ahead of that Nov. 22 trip to Wofford and a lot of learning for this group, which is exploding with potential but lacking in collective experience. The Mocs will learn a lot in their first four games — which include three nonconference games against nationally ranked teams, starting with the Aug. 30 opener at Memphis of the Football Bowl Subdivision — and even after that, there are seven SoCon contests before they take on the Terriers.
So while Ingram has the Wofford game circled, there is a lot of football to be played between now and then, and plenty of work to be done even before kickoff at the end of the month.
“I feel like this group has just been real focused on just buying in,” he said. “We’ve got a couple of new guys, but we’ve been buying into what the coach is telling us to do and going hard — even if it’s not right, we’re still going hard and learning to finish.
“I do think we’re going to punish people this year. We’re going to punish people.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.