The Hatch Attack - 10 Years Of Mediocrity
*Disclaimer: I am not going to break down every change college football has experienced and how it makes the Samford job any easier or harder. Every FCS coach must deal with similar issues and at a place like Samford you are given a leg up in terms of school reputation and geography. If you can think of one specific challenge that impairs Samford’s ability to compete within the FCS, please share your thoughts to stateofthebulldogs@gmail.com, we want to know your perspective and talk about it on the podcast.
Chris Hatcher is a national champion in college football. We should not forget that. He knows how to win, how to coach, and most importantly how to mold young men into contributors to society. No player we have talked to has spoken anything ill of him. For all intents and purposes, Chris Hatcher seems like a fantastic person. With that being said, it is less clear if he can produce a winning program at Samford and arguably more evident that he cannot.
After back-to-back-to-back losses to current conference bottom feeders in Wofford and The Citadel and a mediocre team in Tennessee Tech, I was forced to take a hard look at exactly what Hatcher has built as we wrap up his 10th season in Homewood. Ten years is a long time and at a place like Samford, a privilege. Few places on Earth have such a strong community and beautiful surroundings. Even fewer places are in such a football hotbed. If you decided to never go further than four hours outside Birmingham in either direction, you would be capable of pulling in overlooked elite talent looking for a place to shine.
A place that has developed recent NFL Pro Bowlers, has a female-to-male ratio of 100 to 1, and where the smell of ribs is never too far away. Shoot, legend has it that Bobby Bowden would drive 45 minutes to Tuscaloosa and take the kids that Coach Bryant cut to build his Samford squads. It is possible to build a winning football program in Homewood.
In his 10th season at the helm, Hatcher has built a middling program. Let’s go back to the moment he was hired. It was all about two things, winning and offense. Here was the official announcement of his hiring back in 2014. Notice anything? The release mentions his record as a head coach of 121-57 at the time. His Division 1 record as a head coach coming into Samford was 45-45. In fact, in his last season at Murray State they went 3-9. We hired a coach who went 3-9 coming into Samford.
Moving on from the interesting justification to hire him, let’s look at how our teams have stacked up against the rest of the Southern Conference in terms of wins, points scored, and points allowed. I will sprinkle in some Sagarin numbers via later, but football is a very simple game - just score more.
10 Years Of Conference Results
The most striking figure is that in ten seasons, we have exactly four with a winning record in conference play. This includes the 2022 SoCon championship team. If we miraculously beat Western Carolina and Chattanooga, we will have five, but I doubt that number is going to change this year. If you build your program around an offensive identity, then the expectation must be a top three offense in the conference each season. If not, then what’s the point of running a flashy system if the triple option is more effective at winning games?
To Coach Hatcher’s credit, our scoring offense has finished in the top three of the conference exactly seven times in ten seasons. We currently sit fourth with 21 PPG. So, kudos to him, we do score plenty to win games. A large caveat here is up until the last two seasons, a third of the conference ran the triple option (Wofford, Citadel, and VMI). This means offensive numbers are deflated overall and it is easier for a spread style offense to look even better.
However, you also have to stop the other team from scoring. In the four seasons where we had a winning record in conference play, our point differential was greater than +10 which is a two possession advantage. Every other season it has ranged from -3 points to 5.9 on average. Shockingly, we finished with the #1 scoring defense in 2017 when we only allowed 16.6 PPG.
For the most part though we usually end up fourth through sixth any given year. On its face, that seems like a good recipe for success, a perennial top three offense paired with a middle of the pack defense? That team should win you a bunch of games. Through ten seasons we know for certain that it does not, at least the way Hatcher has gone about it.
What The Sagarin Model Has To Say
These numbers and records need some context though. We know we are SoCon average. But is the SoCon average? For all the doom and gloomers, fortunately the SoCon is well within the upper third of the FCS world. There are currently 13 conferences. While that number has fluctuated a bit, since 2015, Jeff Sagarin has never ranked the SoCon worse than seventh. It usually sits in the top four (most recently the conference sits 5th in 2024). The Missouri Valley unsurprisingly is the best conference according to his model. If you have not heard of the Sagarin ratings they are essentially a ranking system that takes into account strength of schedule, who you beat, who you lost to and the margin of victory or defeat. I personally love his site and up until a couple of years ago the USA Today would publish it each week.
The Sagarin model also assigns each team an overall score. Since 2015, our highest Sagarin score has been 58.7 (2022 team). In that same time period, there have been three other teams, Wofford, Chattanooga and Furman all finish a season with a score higher than 60. Think about that, arguably the best team in school history is not as good as three other conference foes in a ten year span. For some perspective, in 2024 the average score for schools in the Missouri Valley Conference is a 58. So that 2022 team was legitimately good. In addition, we usually finish 5th in the final Sagarin rankings for the SoCon which is squarely in the middle.
Samford’s NFL Pipeline Is Drying Up
If realizing we have been nothing but average in the SoCon still has not shown you we are stuck in neutral, then let’s look at one more aspect - talent development. It goes without saying that playing in the NFL is a huge challenge, especially for programs like Samford. If the school was not located in the South, it probably would not be producing NFL talent at all. But guess what? We are in the South and talented football players are everywhere. When Hatcher took over, Samford had four players in the NFL in 2015 - Cortland Finnegan, Corey White, Nick Williams and Jaquiski Tartt. All were recruited by Pat Sullivan.
On the team Hatcher inherited, he had James Bradberry and Michael Pierce. After those two guys went pro, Hatcher has had two players play more than one NFL season and five players total make an NFL roster (not including Chris Oladukon). Hatcher inherited a team and program that developed five NFL players in a few short years that would go on to have significant careers and several of them with honors. He has produced just two that lasted for more than one season.
Is it an unfair comparison? Maybe. I am not discounting the fact Samford may have just been lucky. But we know the talent is out there, you just have to find it and develop it. We had a staff that showed it was more than capable of doing it. Once you show it can be done, fair or not, new expectations are set.
What Does Samford Football Want To Be?
The question that remains is does Samford want to be anything but average? I do not know. I cannot speak for President Beck Taylor or Athletic Director Martin Newton. I understand how much more expensive a football team is than a basketball team. Even if we made the FCS national championship game, it is peanuts in marketing value compared to March Madness.
But Samford is in Alabama and in Alabama and throughout the south, college football is a way of life. Saturdays revolve around tailgating, smoking meat, socializing with your buddies and talking smack to your conference rivals whether you are in the SEC or the SWAC. At Samford, we can do all of those things except drinking with our buddies on campus and the smack talk cannot contain curse words, but otherwise, we want to be as much a part of football culture as every other school.
When we disbanded the football program after the 1973 season, we stripped away a key element of our school’s identity, its place in the greater Alabama community, and an important avenue for local athletes to obtain a free education at a school like Samford. Unless we are planning on disbanding the football program again, we should not be settling for average. We should be consistently fighting for the top of the conference and dominating the bottom of it. My last question is this – how much longer does Hatcher deserve?
Please share your thoughts to stateofthebulldogs@gmail.com, we want to know your perspective and discuss it on the podcast.