re: Has any college football program fallen harder than Southern Miss?

Nebraska.

Southern Miss was generally a competitive team for a good many decades of their history, but Nebraska was a national power. The hold the NCAA record for most consecutive bowl appearances and, for a good portion of that run, bowl games were few and far between. You had to be worth a shite to make one. We're talking about a team that went from finishing in the Top 10-15 every year to not making a post-season bowl game since 2016.

Southern miss was a decent mid major who usually won more games than they lost...Nebraska was a behemoth for half a century, finishing in the top 10 year in, year out, with multiple teams that are in the discussion for greatest of all time

Not even in the same stratosphere of fall

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Will Hall is a good coach despite his having played/coached at rivals to one of my alma maters.

That job just may be too big of a hole.

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I could be mistaken, but I seem to remember Southern Miss hit a patch with an administration that pretty much tried to starve and kill off athletics, or at least football.

As the Cajuns and Tulane has found, that can take a decade or more to recover from depending on how long such a mentality is allowed to last.

It's definitely not the top answer for this, but USF football fell pretty hard pretty fast. They went from Jim Leavitt coaching and being #2 in the nation, to getting into a good conference at the time (Big East), to dropping down to the AAC and only winning 4 games in 3 seasons. There were a couple good years under Willy Taggart and one under Charlie Strong, but the wheels came off bad under Jeff Scott.

Luckily things seem to be improving under Golesh and they are finally getting an on campus stadium, so things might be on the upswing.

It's just crazy to compare them with UCF, which went from 0-12 in 2015 to now playing in the Big 12.

No. LSU's defense.

Centenary College

They beat LSU two years in a row, and also during their heyday they beat Baylor, Rice, SMU, Texas A&M and Boston College.

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It's almost forgotten now, but Ty Willingham nearly killed the Washington program after going 0-12 his final season.

It's really a miracle Sark did what he did there to pull them out of the abyss that they were heading into.

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I remember sitting in the stands in 2009 for Sarks first game. LSU played it's typical Les Miles game, letting an inferior team hang around before finally pulling away late.

UW scored on the final play of the game to make it like a 10 point deficit or something. The crowd reacted like they had just won the conference on the last snap. Place went nuts. They were so starved for anything resembling competent play that pulling within 2 scores of LSU at the end was a remarkable accomplishment

The program absolutely collapsed in 2012 under Ellis Johnson. They got him out after 1 year, but the damage lasted much longer.

And, all that happened at the exact same time as the first big round of realignment. They sucked, and sucked hard, at the absolute worst time.

Southern Miss has a better athletic department, at the time, then a number of schools that got upgraded to the AAC. However, that football downfall, along with some bad admin hires, absolutely destroyed them for a minute.

Add in, Hattiesburg is a small town with no media numbers, not a huge fan base, and somewhat hard to get to.

Going into the sunbelt will at least let them rekindle some regional rivals and be in a very good baseball conference.

As many have noted Nebraska and/or Stanford appear to be the answer. But if we’re talking mid majors I’d toss ECU out there. ECU had a stretch where they were arguably the best non P5 or 6 team out there but they fell on hard times for about a decade. They had a couple of solid seasons the last 2 years but are off to a rough spot.

I swear there were a few years there where they were always knocking off VT, UVA, UNC, NC State.. or threatening to do so. They’re position has basically be usurped by App St.