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UAB gets first-ever bowl win two years after football program was restarted

Nick Bromberg
College football and motorsports writer
UAB wide receiver Xavier Ubosi had seven catches for 227 yards and three touchdowns against Northern Illinois. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
UAB wide receiver Xavier Ubosi had seven catches for 227 yards and three touchdowns against Northern Illinois. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

Is the revival of UAB football the greatest turnaround story in modern college football history?

The Blazers easily dispatched Northern Illinois 37-13 in Tuesday night’s Boca Raton Bowl. It’s the team’s first bowl victory in three tries and comes in the program’s second season after a two-year shutdown.

Wide receiver Xavier Ubosi powered the Blazers with his seven-catch, 227-yard, three-touchdown performance. Ubosi caught a 70-yard touchdown pass from Tyler Johnston on UAB’s first offensive play of the game and followed it up with touchdown catches of 46 and 66 yards. Johnston was 17-of-28 passing for 373 yards, four touchdowns and an interception.

UAB football was shut down after 2014

In the face of budget issues, the school decided to shut down the football program along with other sports at the end of the 2014 season. The Blazers had just finished 6-6 in coach Bill Clark’s first season with the school, though UAB ended up missing out on a bowl game.

The school officially announced the decision to disband the football team, effective immediately, on Dec. 2 along with the women’s rifle and bowling teams. It cited a study that said the costs of maintaining an FBS program would continue to rise in the coming years.

“When considering a model that best protects the financial future and prominence of the Athletic Department, football is simply not sustainable,” UAB president Ray Watts said at the time.

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UAB announced its return six months later

The decision was met with a bunch of outrage and grassroots efforts immediately began to get the UAB football program (and rifle and bowling) back. Timothy Alexander, now a UAB staffer, got 60 city councils to vote on resolutions of support for the team.

Fundraising to help get the program restarted quickly had totals in the millions and on June 1, 2015 — nearly six months to the day after announcing the football team would disappear — Watts said it would return for the 2017 season, citing a “broad base of support never before seen.”

Announcing the football team’s return was the easy part. While the school had much of the infrastructure in place for a football team, it’s still hard to recruit and build from the ground up to play football games in two years. Especially when players from UAB’s 2014 team were freely able to transfer to other programs or leave to pursue other interests.

Clark was retained as the team’s coach and the school built a football facility that opened before the 2017 season. While teams like Fresno State and Georgia Southern have recently gone from double-digit losses to double-digit wins in the span of a season, Clark and his staff had to rebuild an entire team in the 26 months between the announcement of the team’s return and its first game back. It was a near-herculean task to field a team that would be merely competent.

Last season’s UAB team was more than competent. The Blazers won eight games for the first time in school history. But the season ended on a sour note with a 41-6 loss to Ohio in the Bahamas Bowl.

2018 was even better. UAB lost in Week 2 to Coastal Carolina, an also-ran in the Sun Belt Conference. After that game, Clark’s program ran off eight-straight wins, including victories over bowl teams Tulane and North Texas. UAB ended the regular season with losses to Texas A&M and Middle Tennessee State, but the winning streak was good enough for UAB to win Conference USA’s West Division.

UAB faced off against MTSU again in the C-USA title game and won 27-25 after a late MTSU penalty for the first 10-win season and conference title in the program’s 21 seasons. Clark was named the Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year.

Tuesday night, UAB’s record moved to 11-3 with a dominating performance over the MAC champions. UAB football is not only back, but the Blazers are really good.

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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.

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