Setting the standard

On Saturday, members of the 2000 UAB football team will be recognized at Protective Stadium during the Samford game and then gather that night for a formal reunion banquet — 26 years after a season that went 7-4 and ended without a bowl game.

At most schools, 7-4 without a postseason doesn't get a reunion. At programs with a century of tradition, it barely gets remembered.

But 7-4 at UAB in 2000 was something else. It was the first winning season at the Division I-A level for a program that had played its first NCAA game only nine years earlier — one that had faced doubts at best and subterfuge at worst from the day it was conceived. In less than a decade, UAB achieved things many never imagined possible and some actively tried to stop.

To understand why that team is coming back to celebrate, you have to understand how far they came and how fast they got there.

Doubts at best, subterfuge at worst

In January 1989, the Tuscaloosa News published an op-ed about the idea of UAB fielding a team. Associate editor Tommy Stevenson's assessment was direct.

"It's not going to happen until or unless a majority of the 15 members of the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees wants it," Stevenson wrote. "And they don't. Period."

If by some miracle UAB did field a team, the result would be predictable: "Second-rate players, second-rate uniforms, second-rate facilities to produce what? A second-rate football team, of course."

Bill Curry at Alabama — the most powerful man in the state's most powerful industry — publicly opposed the idea, saying the Crimson Tide would never play UAB. In 1994, seven of nine Birmingham high school football coaches surveyed by the Birmingham News disapproved of city funds going to UAB athletics. Phillips High School coach Nathaniel Kelly called it "just a slap in the face" — "To give that money to UAB when the high schools are deteriorating at a rapid rate is sad."

This was the environment the program faced, and it got the most inauspicious beginnings imaginable.

In 1989, a group of students started a football club with the support of athletic director Gene Bartow, who believed UAB would need Division I-A football to be a player in the coming TV-driven age of conference expansion and realignment. Former Auburn and NFL assistant coach Jim Hilyer, then a faculty member at the university, coached it. They had hand-me-down uniforms and taped ankles with bartered tape in the back of a truck, but football had come to UAB. Sort of.

By 1991, the school moved to NCAA Division III on its way to I-A at unprecedented speed by 1996 — but still without a conference. Even that required a fight. Louisville opposed CUSA's expansion, and the conference moved to expel the Cardinals before a settlement restructured the league's voting rules and cleared the path. In November 1996, UAB (a charter member of the conference in all other sports) was admitted for football starting in 1999.

"I wanted so much for this to happen," Bartow said on the day of the announcement. "I was concerned that it might be five years away. So it's an emotional day for me, because we needed this to happen."

By 1999, the Blazers were competing in Conference USA — a league that included Louisville, Cincinnati, Memphis, Houston, East Carolina, Tulane, Southern Miss and Army. The school had gone from buying its first football to playing in one of the country's strongest mid-major conferences in less than a decade, and no program in the modern era at that time had covered that distance that fast.

Building the machine

Watson Brown arrived in 1995 after stints as head coach at Austin Peay, Rice, Cincinnati and Vanderbilt and two years as offensive coordinator at Oklahoma. By midseason 2000, UAB was 6-2 and the plan was working.

"The reason UAB has a good shot at being a top-25 team year in and year out is because of its recruiting base," Brown said. "The state of Alabama is fantastic. Football in this state is so important. Kids grow up wanting to be football players."

Brown built the program on four pillars. He recruited the Alabama kids that Alabama and Auburn couldn't take. He scheduled games at Nebraska, Tennessee, Virginia Tech and Auburn to show recruits that UAB was serious about playing major college football. He kept his coaching staff together — eight of his 10 assistants had been with the program since the 1996 move to Division I-A. And he hired Bill Clay, a 30-year coaching veteran, to build a defense-first identity.

"In my early years I thought I was a guru who could outscore everybody," Brown said. "I learned the hard way that don't work."

Clay made it work. By 2000, the UAB defense ranked 11th nationally in fewest yards allowed. Not a single rusher gained 100 yards against the Blazers all season. The front four — Brown called them "the Steel Shield," a nod to Birmingham's industrial heritage — had been starting together for three years.

Ray Melick of the Birmingham Post-Herald described the recruiting philosophy as "one step up" — recruit athletes one position closer to the line of scrimmage than their natural position and let speed and coaching close the gap. The results were Bryan Thomas, a 6-4, 255-pound defensive end from Minor High School who ran a 4.60 forty, and Eddie Freeman, a 6-4, 300-pound defensive tackle from Mobile who ran a 4.69. Both were partial qualifiers — bigger schools wanted them but were afraid to take the academic risk. Both made UAB's Academic Honor Roll. Thomas became a first-round NFL draft pick with the New York Jets in 2002. Freeman went in the second round to the Kansas City Chiefs.

From partial qualifiers to NFL draft picks. They were hardly alone. Brown and staff found and developed real talent, and by 2000, there was also a chip-on-the-shoulder edge to the Blazers.

Everybody has doubts. So? Who cares?

Before the 2000 season, College Football News predicted UAB would go 3-8 overall and 0-7 in Conference USA. The Sporting News ranked them 100th nationally. Quarterback Daniel Dixon's response was six words: "Everybody has doubts. So? Who cares?"

UAB went 7-4.

The Blazers beat East Carolina on the road as a 14-point underdog to clinch the program's first winning season at the I-A level.

But the biggest moment came on Sept. 23, 2000. UAB went to Tiger Stadium — 85,339 fans, LSU's homecoming, Nick Saban's first season as head coach — and won 13-10 on Rhett Gallego's 32-yard field goal as time expired.

The Baton Rouge Advocate had called UAB a "Rent-A-Win team" before the game. The phrase went on the locker room blackboard.

"We've fought image forever," Brown said afterward. "We were 4-2 in Conference USA last year and beat East Carolina, and everybody said, 'Oh, it was a fluke.' I don't know when it's going to be that people say UAB is just a pretty good football team."

Thomas Cox, who started the game at quarterback before being pulled for Dixon, saw it more simply: "These guys have been playing football just about since it was invented. We've been around for about 10 years. And we come in here and knock them off."

Three minutes from a bowl

The season didn't end the way the team wanted.

Southern Miss came to Legion Field on Nov. 11 ranked 25th nationally. UAB led 20-17 with 3:43 left. Special teams collapsed — a long punt return and an 82-yard kickoff return set up the scores that forced overtime. A throwback pass in the second overtime ended it, 33-30.

Linebacker Adrian Abrams said what everyone felt: "In a game like this, when you give it so much, it doesn't seem right that it can all just be over in one play..."

The bowl bid died with it. UAB finished 7-4 but only 3-4 in conference play, not enough for one of CUSA's four guaranteed bowl berths. The best season in program history ended without a postseason. After the finale at Army — a 27-7 win at West Point — Brown said what he believed: "This football team deserves a bowl. There is no doubt about it in my mind."

They didn't get one. The first bowl bid wouldn't come until 2004.

The standard

But the standard was set — and it lasted longer than anyone expected.

The 2000 team finished with a defense ranked 11th nationally, two future NFL draft picks on the same defensive line and a win at Tiger Stadium that nobody outside Birmingham thought was possible. Brown wasn't talking about surviving anymore.

"We can be a consistent top-25 program," Brown said at midseason. "That's our goal."

That optimism would soon meet reality. Not everybody was rooting for UAB to succeed, and the forces that had tried to prevent the program from existing in the first place had not gone away. The 7-4 record stood as UAB's best winning percentage in a season for 18 years — through the rest of the Watson Brown era, through coaching changes, through a 24-60 stretch from 2006 to 2012, through the 2014 shutdown that killed the program entirely and through the 2017 return that brought it back.

It took Bill Clark's 2018 team going 11-3, winning UAB's first conference championship and winning the program's first bowl victory to finally break through the ceiling the 2000 team had set.

Melick wrote the program's trajectory in August 2001: "One step up — from no program to no scholarships; from signing 25, to 50, to 75, to finally getting a maximum 85 scholarships. From no league to Conference USA. From NFL free agents to first-round draft choices."

That was the 2000 team. On Saturday night, the men who lived it will be together again.

Sidebar: The flag — Wayne Champion's daughter made him a sign for the LSU game in 2000. Twenty-six years later, it's still here.

The 2000 UAB Season Series

Part 1: Setting the standard (you are here)

Part 2: The Quest

Part 3: Breakthrough on the Bayou