100 Days, 100 Reasons G6 Football Matters

On December 2, 2014, UAB president Ray Watts announced the university was shutting down its football program. The Blazers had just finished 6-6 under first-year head coach Bill Clark — bowl eligible for the first time in a decade. It didn’t matter. The administration said the program was too expensive to sustain. Football was done.

What happened next is one of the greatest stories in college sports.

Students rallied. Alumni organized. Birmingham’s civic and business leaders pushed back hard. The UAB Faculty Senate passed a vote of no confidence in Watts. An independent task force was formed to challenge the financial projections used to justify the shutdown. And the community opened its wallets — $27 million raised and pledged by individuals, the business community, the City of Birmingham and student groups to bring the program back.

Bill Clark stayed. That part matters. The head coach whose program had just been eliminated didn’t leave. He remained at UAB through the two-year shutdown, continued recruiting without a team to field and waited for the program to come back. On June 1, 2015, Watts reversed the decision. Football was reinstated.

UAB sat out the 2015 and 2016 seasons — no games, but Clark kept recruiting and building. The Blazers returned to the field in 2017, went 8-4 in the regular season and earned a berth in the Bahamas Bowl in their first season back. By 2018, they won the Conference USA championship with a 27-25 victory over Middle Tennessee and beat Northern Illinois 37-13 in the Boca Raton Bowl. They finished 11-3. A program that didn’t exist four years earlier was hoisting a conference championship trophy.

The UAB story hits different for G6 fans because it’s the most extreme version of what every fan base outside the Power 4 already feels. The constant threat that someone with a spreadsheet will decide your program doesn’t generate enough revenue to justify its existence. That your school, your team, your community isn’t worth the investment.

UAB’s fans answered that question permanently. They didn’t write letters and hope for the best. They raised $27 million to bring the team back. From there, another $38 million was raised to build a new football operations center. That momentum led to the opening of the city’s new downtown Protective Stadium in 2021. Approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in investment to support UAB football — the funds to restore the program, build the operations center and open the stadium. A program the administration tried to kill — and won a conference title in its second season back from nothing.

At some schools, fans support the program. At UAB, they brought it back from the dead.

They told you it didn’t matter. Here are 100 reasons it does.