When Jordan Jones left Smyrna, Tennessee, in the summer of 2016 to become a true freshman walk-on football player at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, playing for the Mocs was about as good as it's ever been.
Both highly ranked and unbeaten for much of the season, UTC eventually fell in the second round of the FCS playoffs when forced to travel to undefeated and top-ranked Sam Houston State.
"Then Coach (Russ) Huesman left," Jones said. "Last year was tough."
By recent UTC standards, last season was awful under first-year coach Tom Arth. It was as if Murphy's Law had kidnapped the program. Everything that could go wrong did. There were NCAA suspensions over academic laziness. There were injuries. There were some older talents who were tired of getting injured who called it quits long before the first practice.
Then there was the defensive back Jones, who after playing in all 13 of the Mocs games as a freshman was redshirted as a sophomore.
"Everything felt different," he said. "It was hard on everybody."
But from the first day of preseason practice this past summer, Jones began to feel as he had as a freshman, when things were going great and being a part of a college football team was the best feeling in the world.
"We have more of a family atmosphere again, the way it was my first year here," Jones said Tuesday at the close of the Mocs' weekly media luncheon. "You could feel it at the very start of camp. Everybody had that hungry mindset. We'd lost something and we wanted to get it back. It's been such a blessing after last year."
Last year ended 3-8. This season already has guaranteed a winning record with three games to play, the Mocs standing 6-2 overall and 4-2 in the conference heading into Saturday afternoon's game at Furman.
Not that a winning record was all Arth hoped to achieve this season.
"You come into a season and your hope isn't that you play just the games on your schedule," he said when asked about still having a shot at the playoffs. "Your goal is to play the games that aren't on the schedule."
Arth never had known anything but stupendous success in four years at John Carroll before coming to Chattanooga. He reached the NCAA Division III playoffs three times in four seasons. Even as last season crumbled, Arth remained amazingly calm, though you might expect that from a former NFL reserve quarterback.
"Nothing in life comes easy," he said Tuesday. "You have to put your time in."
If there is a single reason for this turnaround beyond Arth's coaching chops, it's almost assuredly due to the time put in this past offseason by junior quarterback Nick Tiano.
Though the Baylor School graduate wasn't made available during the media luncheon, his considerable impact on these Mocs was widely discussed.
Said Arth: "I'd hire Nick tomorrow to coach for us. He knows the offense as well as our coaches do. We've put a lot on him. Pre-snap. Post-snap. All of it. We're pushing it about as far as we can."
Added sophomore center Noah Ramsey, the Dalton native who transferred to UTC after a freshman seasonat Louisiana-Monroe: "We all look to Nick, to how he reacts. He's always upbeat. After the pick-six last week (against VMI) he told us, 'We're OK. We've got this,' and we won."
Noted Jones: "Nick's an amazing leader. Not really a speaker. He leads by his actions."
Jones also will tell you that the defense has its own leader in lineman Derek Mahaffey.
"Derek's more vocal than Nick," Jones said. "He makes sure everybody is minding their P's and Q's."
And if they aren't?
"That's said in private," he replied with a smile.
Is it too harsh to be printed in a family paper?
"Nah," he replied. "But it's just for us, just for the team. It's a bond we have."
Almost all good teams operate that way. Almost all bad teams don't, too eager to play the blame game, too slow to pick up a teammate when he needs it. These Mocs have behaved as one all season, the stresses of starting over a year ago now clearly behind them.
"The only thing that matters to us right now is practice this afternoon," Arth said.
Echoed Jones: "We're just taking it one day at a time. If we can win every day, get better every practice, we'll be fine."
If the Mocs can win the next two weeks against Furman and Mercer, they should return to playing games that aren't on their schedule but are the ultimate reason to put in all that extra time.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com