It is just about 340 miles from Ruston to Mobile. Six hours in the car, most of it spent in the great state of Mississippi, and your last real rest stop before the coast is Hattiesburg. Yes, that Hattiesburg, home to such attractions as the perfectly uncontroversial Southern Miss volleyball arena.
So, if we’re going to make the road trip down for our first conference clash on Halloween, we might as well find some reasons to hate South Alabama to fuel our drive down to Mobile.
Reason 1: The Best of Sports, the Worst of Sports
Grievance Rating: 7/10
If you line up every sport, South Alabama holds a bit of an upper hand in our athletic relationship.
In football, Tech does own a slight 2-1 series lead, but the most recent meeting was an absolute rout, the Jaguars winning 38-14 in Sonny Cumbie’s debut season. If you don’t remember that game, and who could blame you, Tech turned the ball over five times, including on four straight possessions. Men’s basketball is a close series too, but one South Alabama leads 15-12.
Baseball, though, is South Alabama’s definitive sport. They are 1538-809-3 all-time, boast 13 Sun Belt regular season titles, 24 NCAA appearances, and even a number one national ranking in 1972 and 1975. So it’s no surprise that Louisiana Tech trails the all-time series against the Jaguars 9-24.
But luckily, we are not yet out of sports to talk about.
In women’s basketball, the Lady Techsters have played South Alabama 25 times and won 25 times. And that is not just early-era Techster dominance padding the numbers, two of those wins have come in the past two seasons.
So they can frame the baseball record. Even there they aren’t pitching a shutout.
Reason 2: From One Nursery to Another
Grievance Rating: 6/10
Tech spent its final years in Conference USA watching that league get gutted by realignment and restocked with call-ups from the FCS. Jacksonville State and Sam Houston walked straight up from a lower division in 2023 and into our conference. We wanted out of that churn.
But here is South Alabama. A program whose 2012 jump up from the FCS already feels like ancient history, except the whole football team is only three years older than that. If South Alabama football were a person, it would be seventeen years old, not even eligible to vote yet, and here it is on our conference schedule. We escaped a conference full of teams barely up from the FCS and landed next to a team barely out of diapers.
It fits, really. Even the name of their city sounds like something you would hang over a crib.
Reason 3: Well, This is Bananas
Grievance Rating: 3/10
An older program, one with actual history, already has actual facilities. A weight room. A locker room. A fieldhouse. Decades of accumulated infrastructure that nobody thinks about because it has always been there. But in 2008, all South Alabama had was a coach, Joey Jones, who ran the entire operation off a legal pad on the front steps of the basketball arena because he did not even have an office yet. The real fieldhouse, with a functional weight room, would not be finished until the fall of 2009.
So in the meantime they needed somewhere, anywhere, to lift. First they got stuck on the second floor of an office building across town, where drop sets would knock ceiling ties loose onto cubicle workers below. Then the school found them a different space. A squat, windowless building with no ventilation. In Jones’s own words: “That’s when they put us in what they called the monkey lab.”
That is not just a nickname the players cooked up for a grungy gym. It was the literal, former, documented use of the building. South Alabama is, as far as anyone can tell, the only program in the country whose road to the FBS ran directly through a repurposed animal-testing facility.
Every program starts somewhere, but theirs started with literal monkey business.
Reason 4: Letting the Cat Out (Literally)
Grievance Rating: 4/10
Every good mascot name comes from somewhere. If you’ve never heard the story of the Louisiana Tech bulldog, in 1899, five students took in a stray bulldog hanging around campus. A fire broke out in their house that year, and the dog barked until every one of them woke up and got out. But sadly, the bulldog did not make it out of the blaze itself. The athletic teams play as the Bulldogs in homage to that heroic pup.
South Alabama picked a jaguar because it looked good on a board resolution in 1965. Jaguars are not native to Alabama, and their old American range ran through the Southwest and into Louisiana, not the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Then when South Alabama decided in 1968 that it wanted a live one, a donor in Baton Rouge shipped up a South American jaguar. I guess Louisiana has just always been in the big-cat import-export business.
The school ran a campus contest to name her, and the winning entry, Mischka, is a Russian word for a dancing circus bear. Understandable mix-up. Jaguars and bears are notoriously difficult to tell apart. Then they kept Mischka in a pen… until someone left the door unlocked. Mischka let herself out and went for a stroll around campus, which ended the live mascot era about as fast as it started.
Plus someone driving a Jaguar cut me off this morning. And what is more hatred-inducing than a little road rage?
Reason 5: A Streetcar Named Resentment
Grievance Rating: 7/10
Mobile was the first capital of French Louisiana. Founded in 1702 as Fort Louis de la Louisiane, it held the seat of the entire colony. Then the capital moved west, to Biloxi, and then permanently to New Orleans by the early 1720s. Mobile got demoted so hard it fell clean out of Louisiana and into the much worse Alabama.
Three hundred years later, they are still not over it. Mobile insists, repeatedly, that it and not New Orleans invented American Mardi Gras. And, uhh, they kind of did. They just do not feel they have gotten the credit they deserve for it. So much so that earlier this year, all seven of Alabama’s members of the U.S. House signed onto a resolution formally declaring Mobile the Birthplace of Mardi Gras.
But nobody really argues about who threw the first party. They argue about which is better. And that one is not close. New Orleans built the version of Mardi Gras the entire world flies in to see, while Mobile’s big cultural contribution is throwing MoonPies off the floats. First is a trivia answer. Best is a destination.
Reason 6: Star Spangled Overreach
Grievance Rating: 4/10
The University of South Alabama really only abbreviates one way – as USA. And they lean all the way in. Their athletics site calls the teams USA. The university calls itself USA. The official athletics website is usajaguars.com. A regional school in a Gulf port city claims, as its initials, the abbreviation of the entire United States of America.
I mean, you cannot convince me that these wouldn’t also be the uniforms worn for a World Cup of Marching Band competition:
So between the initials and the baby-faced football program, honestly, they might have been a better fit back in C-USA.
The Reunion
Just like Arkansas State, South Alabama is a face we already know. Tech and South Alabama ran together in the Sun Belt once before, back from 1991 to 2001, a full decade as conference-mates before Tech left for the WAC. Now Tech is home, and South Alabama is right where we left them.
And it is nice to see a familiar face, even if they went out and got a whole football team while we were gone.