How many times does a coach have to fix a broken program before it stops reading like a nice hire and starts reading like a trend? Charles Huff has now done it twice, at two different schools, and he opened his third job Saturday night with a 27-21 road win over UNLV that made him the first Memphis coach to win a debut game away from home, per ESPN.
That result is the least interesting part of the story. The interesting part is that Charles Huff’s Memphis debut win over UNLV isn’t an isolated data point for the Memphis Tigers. It’s the third leg of a pattern that started at the Marshall Thundering Herd in 2021, repeated at the Southern Miss Golden Eagles in 2025, and just showed up again in the Nevada desert. Two rebuilds and a road win over a program that isn’t a pushover later, Charles Huff’s coaching record makes a clean case that he’s the most underpriced hire in college football right now.
The Rebuild Formula, Run Twice Already
Start with Marshall, because the four-year arc tells you everything about how Huff actually builds a program. The Thundering Herd went 7-6, 9-4, 6-7, and 10-3 across his four seasons there, per Wikipedia. Translated out of the win-loss column, that’s a team that was bowl eligible in all four years — the only Marshall coach in the FBS era to manage that streak. The dip in year three didn’t derail anything. Year four ended with a 31-3 win at Louisiana for the Sun Belt Championship, Marshall’s first conference title since 2014 and its first 10-win season since 2015.
A coach who can absorb a losing year without losing the program is rarer than the transfer portal era wants you to believe. Most Group of Six jobs turn over exactly because a bad year triggers a fire sale of players and staff. Huff’s answer to a 6-7 season was a Sun Belt title the following fall.
Then look at Southern Miss, which is the more startling number of the two. The Golden Eagles went 1-11 in 2024, including an 0-8 mark in Sun Belt play, and fired head coach Will Hall in October after a 1-6 start, per Wikipedia. Huff inherited that wreckage and, in a single offseason, turned it into a 7-6 team that played in the New Orleans Bowl, per Wikipedia. A six-win swing in one year, at a program that had just fired its coach mid-season, is the kind of turnaround speed that normally gets a coach a Power Four phone call. Instead, Memphis hired him away in December.
Is Charles Huff a Good College Football Coach?
Yes. Huff has taken over two broken or plateaued programs, Marshall in 2021 and Southern Miss in 2025, and produced a winning trajectory at both, capped by a Sun Belt title at Marshall and a bowl berth at Southern Miss in a single season. He then opened his Memphis tenure with a road win over a UNLV team that had won 11 straight games when leading at halftime. That’s not a small sample.
The résumé isn’t padded with a single great year that never repeats. It’s two full rebuilds, at two different rosters, in two different conferences, with the common variable being the coach.
What Beating UNLV in Week 0 Actually Proves
UNLV wasn’t the trap-game version of a Group of Six team. The Rebels had won 11 consecutive games when leading at halftime coming into Saturday, and for most of the night, the same Week 0 slate that opened the season elsewhere was shaping up to hand them a 12th. UNLV led 14-7 at the break on a 38-yard Jackson Arnold touchdown pass to Tavian McNair and a short touchdown run.
Memphis quarterback Marcus Stokes answered with a 48-yard touchdown to Stonka Burnside to open the third quarter, tying the game before Arnold pushed UNLV back in front on a 22-yard scoring pass to Kayden McGee. Jaylin Carter tied it again on a 36-yard run, and from there Memphis simply took the game away. The Tigers scored the final 13 points, and the defense held UNLV scoreless over the final six drives, allowing just 113 yards down the stretch and stuffing Arnold on 4th-and-7 at the Memphis 18 with 6:08 left.
Stokes finished 15 of 26 for 223 yards and two touchdowns without a turnover. Carter ran 15 times for 97 yards and a score. The Memphis defense piled up six sacks and 11 tackles for loss against an Arnold-led UNLV offense that still put up 291 passing yards. That’s a defense that didn’t just survive a shootout — it closed one, against a team that had made a habit of closing games itself.
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The Power Four Math Nobody’s Doing Yet
Group of Six coaching stories get buried under Power Four noise every August, when nobody can agree on the preseason No. 1 and the sport’s attention is fixed on the same eight or nine programs. That’s exactly how a coach builds a two-rebuild résumé without anyone outside his own conference noticing.
Huff has now proven the same formula twice, at two different programs, and opened his third job with a road win over a team that doesn’t lose leads. If Memphis Tigers football in 2026 tracks anything like the Marshall-to-Southern Miss arc that got him hired, the next opening Huff considers won’t be another Group of Six lateral. It’ll be a Power Four athletic director calling to ask how a coach keeps doing this on a budget nobody else would touch.
