It’s daunting work, maintaining a football program. It’s downright exhausting building one from scratch, and there are few who know that better than South Alabama Jaguars head coach Joey Jones. The Mobile native and Bear Bryant era Crimson Tide alum was a year into helping resurrect the D-III Birmingham-Southern program, which had been shuttered since 1939, when he returned home in 2008 to try an even trickier stunt: building a Division I football team from, pretty literally, nothing. As in “his first desk was a legal pad balanced on his knees outside a basketball gym” nothing.
(Read the rest at Grantland.)
I'm a multi-platform journalist and story producer, a Tennessee Volunteer by birth, a West Virginia Mountaineer by blood, an occasional Angelena, a current ATLien, and an Aquarius, if you're interested. Past work samples to the left, where all the words are.