Comeback trail Blazers
Bill Clark resurrected his UAB football squad.
‘We weren’t just selling them hope, we were selling them a promise.’
UAB coach Bill Clark on recruiting players back to his football program
Less than four years ago, Bill Clark was the football coach at the University of Alabama-Birmingham when his program was killed.
Now, he’s the coach of a UAB team that is 6-1 overall and 4-0 in Conference USA after a homecoming game Saturday against North Texas (6-2, 2-2), which ended with a second-half comeback for a 29-21 Blazers victory.
“It is an amazing story,” Clark said. UAB Athletic Director “Mark Ingram and I sit around casting the movie late at night. Of course, Brad Pitt will play me. Ingram wants George Clooney to play him.”
The movie might open on Dec. 2, 2014, when the school, controlled financially by the University of Alabama board of trustees, announced it was giving up football because costs had gotten out of control. “I can’t put into words how it felt,” Clark said.
At the time, Clark was less than 11 months into a job he had a lot of doubts about taking in the first place. He had been happy and successful as coach at his alma mater, FCS contender Jacksonville State. UAB, meanwhile, hadn’t had a winning season since 2004, when it made what was then the only bowl appearance in program history, and there were serious financial issues and seriously outdated facilities.
“I wasn’t sure about how committed they were,” Clark said. “That’s why I was hesitant even though it was an FBS job. I’m from Alabama, so I knew the school . ... Still, I wasn’t sure how serious they were about making the commitment to get better. But the people I was talking to convinced me it was just a place that needed a rebuild. I thought, ‘Okay, this is a real challenge, but it’s something I can do.’”
He led the Blazers to a 6-6 regular season in 2014 — a remarkable turnaround to bowl eligibility from 3-9 and 2-10 the previous two seasons — when the program was declared dead by university President Ray Watts.
“We’d just had the second-biggest turnaround in the country,” Clark, 50, recalled. “My dad was a high school coach and he’d always told me, ‘Do your job, work hard and good things will happen.’ That’s what I’ve always told my players. Then, they said we were done. Period. Over. I lost my mom in college so I know what the death of a loved one feels like. This wasn’t like that, but it was close.”
There was instant outcry from alumni, students and locals in Birmingham. Clark was touched by the outpouring, but didn’t think much of it at the time. “People were upset,” he said. “But it didn’t seem as if there was much to be done about it.
“My first thought was I had to find my players places to play and my coaches jobs. That took up a lot of my time the first few months.”
The first time it crossed Clark’s mind that the UAB football story might not be over was when he went to the annual coaches’ convention in Dallas in January 2015. He sat down to talk to Britton Banowsky, who was then commissioner of Conference USA. Banowsky had heard about fundraising efforts to revive the program. “He said to me, ‘Bill, we need UAB football to come back,’ ” Clark remembered. “It’s important for the conference.”
That was nice to hear, but conference rules dictated that if UAB didn’t have a football program on July 1, it would be expelled. That made for a tight deadline.
“The alumni were unbelievable,” Clark said. “But after a while it became not just a UAB thing but a Birmingham thing. More people in Birmingham work at UAB than anyplace else. We’re important to the city. When the business community got involved, that was what put us over the top.”
On June 1, almost exactly six months after he declared UAB football dead, Watts announced its resurrection. More than $27 million had been raised during those six months and that was good enough to convince the Alabama Board of Trustees to reconsider its position.
Clark never left Birmingham. He was signed to a new five-year contract. Then, he began to rebuild from scratch. He had two years to do it — the first game would be in September 2017. There were no players and a few graduate assistant coaches who were still around.
Clark had three models to work with: South Alabama, where he had been an assistant coach when that program began as a start-up in 2009; SMU, where football returned in for the 1989 season after a two-year death penalty from the NCAA; and Marshall, which rebuilt almost from scratch after a tragic plane crash in 1970.
“I knew SMU had tried to restart recruiting high school players and they’d gotten crushed,” going 3-19 the first two seasons, Clark said. “I had the South Alabama firsthand experience but we’d built for several years before becoming FBS and (at UAB) we were going back into FBS right away. Still, that was helpful. But so was Marshall.”
Through a mutual friend, Clark spoke to Jack Lengyel, the coach who rebuilt Marshall after the crash and was played by Matthew McConaughey in the 2006 movie “We Are Marshall.”
“What I got from Jack and his Marshall experience was that the one thing we had to sell in recruiting was playing time,” Clark said. “We needed to go after older kids, mostly junior college kids. What we told them was, ‘We aren’t hoping you play, you have to play.’ We weren’t just selling them hope, we were selling them a promise.”
Thirteen players who had been at UAB when the program was shuttered returned. The NCAA allowed them to transfer without sitting out a year and allowed UAB to recruit two classes in one year. A desperately needed practice facility was built, as was an indoor pavilion. A new 45,000-seat stadium is due to open in Birmingham in 2021. UAB football returned last September and the Blazers went 8-5, earning a bid to the Bahamas Bowl.
Clark was mentioned in the same sentence with the usual Power Five suspects for national coach of the year. Now, they’re hoping for bigger things down the road.
“I can’t believe the place we’re in today compared to where we were back in December of 2014,” Clark said. A few more victories this fall and Pitt’s phone may start ringing. Clooney’s, too.