Bryant Vincent is the new guy at ULM, for all the right reasons
A year after getting snubbed by UAB, an impressive interim gets his full-time gig.
Note: rankings for this series are set by the final 2023 rankings from TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings.
Football teams just keep hiring inexperienced former players, huh? The logic behind it might be understandable, if not reasonable, but the results of this trend tend to be pretty embarrassing. As bombastic and inconsiderate as Deion Sanders can be, he’s one of the more successful attempts at bringing in a celebrity player, which is pretty telling. At least he’s not Ed Reed, who walked into Bethune-Cookman and almost immediately started trash-talking his new program’s facilities, getting fired before he was even fully hired for his trouble. Even that might be better than Trent Dilfer—not even a particularly accomplished player (compared to Sanders and Reed), and utterly unqualified to leap directly from the Tennessee Division II Class AA high school ranks to the top job at UAB. Predictably, the Blazers had their first losing season since the program’s resurrection, while Dilfer earned further scrutiny for blowing up at an assistant coach on the sideline during a loss to Tulane.
UAB’s decision to hire Dilfer was particularly bewildering and embarrassing because of who they could’ve had instead. The mantra of this series is optimism, even when a program’s hiring process is bad or confusing, and (aside from the obvious exception of Liberty) there was only one choice so unreasonable that I eschewed that approach last year. It wasn’t just that the Blazers picked such a poor option to take over the program—they did so after watching an interim coach step up on short notice and pull a solid 7-6 season together, earning overwhelming support from players and fans alike. It hurt to see a clearly talented and well-liked HC turned down for a full-time role, especially knowing how hard it can be to get a second chance in this sport, no matter how popular you are.
And yet, just a year later, Bryant Vincent is finally getting his shot…for a program that happens to be one of the worst and most fascinating in FBS. If you’re here, there’s a good chance you’ve already read The Wrong Side of History, a longform piece in which I delved into what makes ULM so intriguing to me; if you haven’t (and you’ve got an hour or so to spare), go read it! It’s nearly two years old at this point, yet it’s still one of the best things I’ve written, in my opinion.
Anyway, what’s important here is the one thing you might know about ULM without any other context: they have never won a bowl game. This program is historically awful—more losses in last four seasons than wins in the last ten—and, despite early indications of progress, previous hire Terry Bowden fizzled out here in rather depressing fashion. The Warhawks finished 2023 at a five-year low of #130 in TERSE, and for the third time in a decade, they moved on to a new HC.
There’s certainly an air of fatality to assessing a program’s newest hire when their entire FBS history features maybe one successful coach (and even Todd Berry, who led ULM to their only bowl, was fired three years later). And it’s hard to ignore that Bowden was a good choice on paper, too—he took over a 1-11 Akron team and had them 8-5 just three seasons later, after all. So even with a good choice at the helm, the possibility of another disappointment looms large.
It’d be hard to come up with a better choice, under the circumstances of a job that many coaches would never consider, than Bryant Vincent, though. He’s extremely well liked in football circles, has shown a knack for holding things together in difficult circumstances, has a long history of coaching in the general area, and has that recent coaching experience at UAB. Despite the disjointed state of his résumé, it could hardly be in better shape; he took the OC job at New Mexico after 2022 and instantly turned the Lobos around from 130th in PPG to 65th. Hiring Vincent was the easy part.
Now comes the hard part. How do you even go about trying to win at ULM? It’s not like anybody’s done it with any consistency before.
The answer is the same as it would be for any other struggling program in the southeast, albeit a lot harder. The Warhawks are in the same place as the likes of South Florida and Charlotte, needing investment to make success a realistic possibility—although at ULM, money is tight enough that the problem is more with raising funds than redirecting an existing surplus.
That’s where new AD John Hartwell, recently of Utah State, comes in. Like Vincent, Hartwell is far from a household name, but he’s highly respected within his field; during his seven years in Logan, USU programs rarely stayed down for long. Within the two-year period around Hartwell’s resignation (in late 2022, to move closer to family in Arkansas), football won the Mountain West and finished #24 and men’s basketball went 26-9 and earned a 10 seed. Few ADs have found more consistency across the board at a G5 program, in revenue and non-revenue sports alike.1
Hartwell has a reputation as a fundraiser, on top of being an all-around solid AD, which makes him a similarly great fit to Vincent for the Warhawks. ULM, possibly the poorest program in FBS, set a direct goal to raise $3 million annually by 2025 in a five-year plan unveiled by the university in late 2023, which…well, it might not be fully realistic, but it’s at least ambitious, which is encouraging enough. The Warhawks, as ever, clearly want to win; as an admirer and distant supporter of this program, that’s the thing that always keeps me coming back.
This is a series about uncertain beginnings, and those rarely lead to good places at ULM, no matter how promising things may look at the start. They were here three years ago with the Bowden hire, and there’s a good chance they’ll be back here in three or four years without much to show for it. But pessimism isn’t going to help anything, and if there’s ever been a hire to get excited about for this perennial bottom-feeder, it’s this. Beyond Vincent getting a well-earned chance to show off what he can do, the Warhawks are throwing their weight behind football more than they have in years. Even knowing where history says this is probably headed, it’s easy to get excited about the possibilities if ULM can stick the landing.
The Last Five Years
ULM has had two types of seasons recently: bad ones and really bad ones. The highs are years like 2022, when the Warhawks still finished 4-8 but pulled off some close wins, defeated rival ULL, and looked like they had some positive momentum going forward. The lows, well…in 2023 ULM started 2-0, surged as high as 80th in TERSE, then finished the season on a ten-game losing streak. It was ugly.
It wasn’t quite as hopeless as the record—and Bowden’s firing—might make it appear, though. The Warhawks dropped a ton of close games, losing to Appalachian State and Texas State by one point each, then to Georgia Southern and Arkansas State by ten points each as winning choices slipped away late. So ULM probably wasn’t that bad last season, at least on paper, and the pieces for another four- or five-win season were there. Problem is, they’re mostly gone now; the Warhawks rank 125th in returning production going into 2024, bringing back just 40% from last year’s team. They’re starting at rock bottom—nothing new there.
The Next Five Years
ULM’s overall athletic kickstart and Vincent’s tenure leading the football program are setting their first goals fairly close together. The Warhawks, as mentioned, hope to hit that $3 million a year mark by 2025, and football should probably be showing its first signs of life around the same time. Ideally, the positive effects of both planned turnarounds should be making some real, tangible progress not long after that.
What makes this tougher for Vincent is the fact that his chances of building something are heavily dependent on what Hartwell can accomplish further up. ULM isn’t going to get much of anything off the ground unless they start investing like a Sun Belt program—and that requires actually having the money to invest, which is an open question for a football team at a university that would probably be in FCS if not for its history.
There’s no reason it can’t go right, though. History may be against the Warhawks here, but if they can pull together respectable resources and facilities under Hartwell’s leadership, they’ll have the foundation to build a solid football program in Monroe. It’s a long way from where they are now to that potential future, and a harder road to reach that point than almost any other program in FBS is facing, but it’s not impossible. If ULM is going to build something special in the near future—and, despite everything, I still believe they can—it all starts here.
Those familiar with college athletics might recall controversies that arose around Utah State in 2019 and 2020, regarding a mishandled sexual assault allegation and alleged discriminatory comments by President Noelle Cockett about a candidate during the 2020-21 football HC search. Hartwell wasn’t directly implicated in either case, but it’s worth being aware of.