Ask anyone who lived through it, and they’ll tell you about the mold behind the walls, the “shitty” offices, and playing home games at Legion Field, a stadium that felt like a tomb to Bear Bryant, where even a good crowd didn’t look like one.

Look at UAB now: playing in a shiny downtown Birmingham stadium, with new facilities overlooking a covered practice field. 

Ask them again, and you’ll be prompted with a question: “How in the world did they do this?”

It’s a bonkers slate of games in Week 7, with college football’s apex predators on the hunt for a big win.

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When the game clock struck zero on Saturday, November 29, 2014, no one knew it yet, but the University of Alabama at Birmingham football program was about to change forever. 

Just days later, UAB president Ray Watts announced the university was shutting down football minutes after meeting with players and coaches, as angry students and fans gathered outside the facilities to protest for a third straight day. UAB made the decision after a campus-wide study was conducted by a consulting firm during the past year.

“The fiscal realities we face – both from an operating and a capital investment standpoint – are starker than ever and demand that we take decisive action for the greater good of the Athletic Department and UAB,” Watts said in a statement released by the university. “...When considering a model that best protects the financial future and prominence of the Athletic Department, football is simply not sustainable.” 

“Total betrayal, that’s how I’d put it,” said Alex Scarborough, a veteran reporter who formerly covered football in the state of Alabama, and now covers national college football for ESPN. 

What came next was the unlikeliest of timelines. Fresh off a 6-6 finish to the 2014 season, the program’s best mark since 2004, head coach Bill Clark was navigating uncharted territory. 

His football program evaporated seemingly overnight. He, his staff, and his players were now facing uncertain futures, with many of his assistant coaches and players scrambling to resolve their murky coaching and playing careers long before the onset of the transfer portal that we know today. 

After the school president announced the closure of the football program in December 2014, a month later, Clark told AL.com that he’d decided against coaching elsewhere in 2015 because he’d become fully vested in the state retirement system within a year and because he saw “a glimmer of hope” the program could be revived. 

He added that if UAB football were reinstated that year, there was a “definite possibility” he’d return as head coach, “but it would have to be done correctly.” Around that same time, the school announced a task force to review the financial reports that led to the cuts. 

Fast forward to June 2015. UAB president Ray Watts — the same man who killed a proud program and sent assistants and players scattering elsewhere — announced plans to restore the football program, about six months after the initial shutdown, thanks in large part to a vocal fan and student campaign and a wave of financial pledges to support the athletic department. 

That September, Clark and the university agreed on a new five-year contract extension with hopes of getting back on the football field in 2017. 

Clark did what no one thought possible. He stayed through it all. 

He had opportunities to leave after the shutdown, but didn’t. He stayed through the vote to reinstate the program. He stayed when almost everyone else left, through the two years it took to raise money, recruit new players, and rebuild from the ground up. 

Why did he do it? 

“He’s the closest thing you can get to being a college football saint,” Scarborough explained. “...He put his money where his mouth is. He was loyal to a thing that was disloyal to him.”

After the program was reinstated, Clark had his work cut out for him. Most of his staff left. The same goes for his old roster. Understandably so. What came next was a masterclass of figuring it out on the fly. He cobbled together a staff. He and his coaches worked the junior college ranks and around the edges to find new players. He fought through unfathomable levels of college football adversity to resurrect the program he held so near and dear to his heart. 

“He was doing this, maybe, to prove a point if he could. He had this loyalty and belief,” Scarborough said. “There was a piece of ‘we’re doing this in the face of all odds’, but that only sustains you for so long. It’s just coaching talent and belief and having a culture that takes you beyond that. It’s what Bill Clark has.”

Perhaps the most remarkable part of Clark rebuilding the program from scratch was the way he did it. Remember, this was long before the transfer portal was a viable option. What he did took hard work. It took ingenuity. It took unwavering belief that if anyone could do it, he could. 

“It’s totally unprecedented,” Scarborough said. “You think of the Indiana’s of the world where you can flip a roster – they couldn’t do that. That wasn’t accessible. Even if NIL was a thing, which it wasn’t, how do you go and sell a vision to guys? How in the world do you do that? How do you get buy-in?... It’s mind-boggling how they did that.” 

At every turn, Clark would’ve been well within his rights to say enough is enough. He never did. 

“He had every excuse in the world, and didn’t take it,” Scarborough said. “The situation was remarkable.” 

After two years of sweat equity and unwavering belief from Clark and many others around the program, the Blazers returned to action in the fall of 2017. 

Against all odds, Clark and the Blazers picked up right where they left off, winning eight games during the comeback season. 

In 2018, Clark led the Blazers to a Conference USA title. He did it again in 2020. 

Almost two years later, Clark had nothing left to give. During the summer of 2022, Clark announced he was retiring, citing chronic back problems that required spinal fusion surgery. He stepped down on August 1, and offensive coordinator Bryant Vincent took over as interim head coach. 

“Retiring as the UAB football coach is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make,” Clark wrote in a social media post. “But my future health and well-being depend on it.” 

Scarborough did an excellent story about Clark and his decision to retire after enduring years of back problems. Thinking back to his time spent with Clark and his family, he remembers Clark wearing a back brace and describing how he lived with pain for many years. 

“I think it was the impetus for (him) walking away,” Scarborough said. “...But do I think asking for support and never feeling like you have all of it (played a factor)? Maybe.”

Tonight, 12 years after the UAB football program died and nine years after it came back to life, new head coach Alex Mortensen will lead the Blazers in their homecoming game against East Carolina. 

UAB will run out of the tunnel at Protective Stadium, a $200 million multipurpose facility located in downtown Birmingham, a far cry from playing home games at Legion Field not so long ago. 

Clark won’t be coaching, but his immeasurable impact on the Blazers’ football program still looms large. If not for Clark, there might not be a UAB football program. 

Maybe the question of “how the hell did they do this?” isn’t the right question at all. Maybe it’s about why he stayed. Why he never gave up. Why at every turn, even with everything stacked against him, he never folded. 

“I can’t climb into his head, but it was improbable because it was just pure faith,” Scarborough said. “Loyalty and faith and faith in the face of not knowing whether the administration was ever going to be behind him. It was like ‘we’re going to do this on our own.’”

College Football Week 7 is here, and the schedule is absolutely loaded. We've got top-five showdowns, historic road trips, heated rivalries and a Saturday where survival might be the name of the game. We're making our picks for more than 20 matchups, and things could get wild in a hurry.

We start with Ohio State at Indiana in a massive Big Ten showdown. Are the defending champion Hoosiers still the team to beat, or can the Buckeyes expose some cracks? Then it's Notre Dame at BYU for a historic top-10 matchup in Provo. Can the Cougars turn their home-field advantage into something special, or will Notre Dame's increasingly dangerous offense be too much? We also break down Alabama-Tennessee, Missouri-Ole Miss, Mississippi State-LSU and Oklahoma State-Houston, with some strong opinions and a few surprising predictions along the way.

Then we work our way through a packed Saturday schedule, including Florida-Texas, Penn State-Michigan, Kentucky-Oklahoma, Florida State-Miami and Nebraska-Oregon. We debate which favorites are vulnerable, which underdogs have a fighting chance, and which games could get downright ugly. Plus, our Locks of the Week, under-the-radar games worth watching, and a new Saturday nickname inspired by the animal kingdom.

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