Lexington HeraldLeader

Know Your Foe: Southern Miss aims to ruin another Kentucky football season opener

By Mark Story,

9 hours ago

Scouting Kentucky’s opponent for its 2024 football season opener , the Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles:

Game details

Kentucky (7-6 overall, 3-5 SEC in 2023) will open its 2024 season against Sun Belt Conference foe Southern Mississippi (3-9 overall, 2-6 SBC) at 7:45 p.m. EDT on Aug. 31 at Kroger Field.

The game will be telecast by the SEC Network.

Southern Miss is a program with a proud football history that has fallen on hard times. The Golden Eagles have endured losing seasons in three of the past four years.

History and trends

Kentucky leads the series 3-1.

The 2024 opener will be the third time in the past nine seasons that UK and USM have met in the season’s first game. The two teams also played the first game of the year in 2016 and 2017 (see below).

As UK head man, Mark Stoops is 8-3 in season openers and has won six of the past seven.

Southern Mississippi coach Will Hall is 1-2 in season openers.

Kentucky has won its last 20 regular-season, nonconference games (last loss vs. a non-SEC foe in the regular season was a 44-17 defeat to Louisville in the 2017 regular-season finale).

Most recent meetings

On Sept. 3, 2016 , Southern Miss quarterback Nick Mullens threw for 258 yards and two touchdowns and star running back Ito Smith ran for 173 yards and a TD as the Golden Eagles rallied from a 35-17 halftime deficit to stun Kentucky 44-35 in Lexington.

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The following year, on Sept. 2, 2017, UK opened its season with a hard-fought 24-17 win at Southern Mississippi .

Kentucky quarterback Stephen Johnson ran for a touchdown and threw for another and the Wildcats defense forced two crucial fumbles, including one that Denzil Ware returned 20 yards for a score.

Pride of the program

Southern Miss has two alumni who went on to earn places in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Punter Ray Guy (Hall of Fame class of 2014) and quarterback Brett Favre (2016) each played for the Golden Eagles.

Interestingly, USM has produced the same number of Pro Football Hall of Famers as has UK — George Blanda (1981) and Dermontti Dawson (2012).

Three things to know

1 . Since defeating Kentucky in the 2016 season opener, Southern Miss has subsequently lost its last 11 games against power conference opponents, including losing eight straight to SEC teams.

Last season, the Golden Eagles were pulverized 66-13 at Florida State of the ACC and lost 41-20 at SEC foe Mississippi State.

2 . Southern Mississippi enters 2024 with new coordinators on both sides of the football.

A porous defense killed USM in 2023. The Golden Eagles gave up in excess of 30 points eight times in 12 games; in excess of 40 points six times; in excess of 50 points three times; and in excess of 60 points once.

To run the USM defense in 2024, Southern Miss coach Will Hall has tabbed Clay Bignell off the staff at Eastern Illinois. At EIU, Bignell’s defense ranked 16th in the FCS in points allowed (19.73) and forced a whopping 25 turnovers, recovering 11 fumbles and picking off 14 passes.

New USM offensive coordinator Chip Long spent the past season as a quality control specialist on Jeff Brohm’s staff at Louisville in 2023. Long also spent the 2020 season as an offensive quality control analyst at Tennessee.

Prior to Southern Miss, Long has been an offensive coordinator at four schools: Memphis (2016), Notre Dame (2017-19), Tulane (2021) and Georgia Tech (2022).

3 . Incoming transfer quarterback Tate Rodemaker spent the first four seasons of his college career at Florida State.