Let me start by saying that I was a huge fan of Will Hall’s hiring by the University of Southern Mississippi back in 2020.

I wrote about how Hall checked all the boxes in what the Golden Eagles needed in a leader after an embarrassing 2020 season when the Golden Eagles had three different coaches following the resignation of Jay Hopson after only one game that year.

I am pro-coach and hate to see anyone lose their job, but it was time to move on from Hall and that’s what the school did this week, announcing that he had been relieved of his duties following a 1-6 start to the season.

A postmortem of what went wrong for Will Hall will come later, but there is no time to dawdle for Southern Miss athletic director Jeremy McClain.

McClain is the one who hired Hall away from Tulane, where he was the offensive coordinator, to take over in Hattiesburg.

With McLain under contract until 2026 and Hall’s firing coming this week, it looks like McClain, a Hall of Fame pitcher at Delta State during his playing days, will get to pick a second football coach in his tenure that began in 2019.

There is no time to dawdle because the world of college football is currently set to warp speed, with new issues arising on a weekly basis. Your team is not off to a hot start to begin the 2024 season? You might then have one of your star players asking for a red shirt to preserve their eligibility during the upcoming transfer window, an issue that has cropped up at programs around the nation this year, from Mississippi State to Southern Cal.

I applaud McClain for making the move now and not waiting any longer. Southern Miss should be ready to make its hiring of its next coach with a similar resolve.

I do not have any insider information about who might be on McClain’s wish list of coaching candidates, but I’ve seen a couple proposed lists with some wild reaches.

Guys, if you think Billy Napier is going to get fired from the University of Florida and then take a job coaching in Hattiesburg, I’ve got some ocean front property in Eastabuchie I’d like to sell you. The same goes for anyone on this current staff, it’s time to completely turn the page.

Regardless, if McClain is looking to go for a coordinator who’s having a successful run at a similarly sized school as Southern Miss, then go for it. Move quickly to get your guy.

Another option might be looking for a successful head coach from a lower level of NCAA football. Hall was really good during his years leading West Georgia and West Alabama on the Division II level, but that should not scare McClain from kicking the tires of successful coaches at the FCS level.

Texas State went 8-5 last season and won a bowl game with a first-year head coach G.J. Kline who had previously been head coach at Incarnate Word when that program was playing in the Southland Conference against the likes of Southeastern Louisiana and Nicholls State.

Let’s just be honest, right now, there is not a whole lot of difference between those programs and Southern Miss. Head coach Nathan Brown at Central Arkansas saw his team lose 34-31 to Arkansas State in the 2024 the season opener, a better result than the 44-28 homecoming loss for the Golden Eagles on Saturday to Arkansas State that wrapped up Hall’s time in Hattiesburg.

Watching the lone win for Southern Miss this season, a 35-10 home victory over FCS Southeastern Louisiana, you might have heard color commentator Austin Davis say that the talent level for the teams looked even.

Davis, one of the great quarterbacks in program history, said that as the Golden Eagles led the Lions from Hammond just 14-10 at halftime before pulling away in the second half. As painful as it was to hear that, Davis wasn’t wrong, and the results afterwards this season proved the statement to be spot on.

Did you watch Louisiana-Monroe beat Southern Miss 38-21 earlier this season? If you did, then you saw true freshman Ahmad Hardy run 15 times for 121 yards and two touchdowns to lead the Warhawks offense. He also had two catches for a team high 53 yards.

That’s Lawrence County alum, Ahmad Hardy. That’s nephew of former Southern Miss all-conference running back Kendrick Hardy.

That’s the type of guy that’s got to play in Hattiesburg, not in Monroe.

ULM also had a defensive lineman that was blowing up plays during that game that is familiar to football fans in this area, Kevontay Wells, an alum of Copiah-Lincoln CC.

Guys like Wells and his teammate Billy Pullen, another starter on the line for the Warhawks who was a standout at CLCC, need to play in Hattiesburg.

Guys like Wesson senior defensive tackle Korbin Ashmore, a verbal pledge to ULM, need to play in Hattiesburg.

When Ashmore told me the schools that had been recruiting him the hardest this summer and he listed Monroe, Louisiana-Lafayette, and Central Arkansas, it bummed me out as a Southern Miss fan.

Ashmore reminds me of the type of guys that Southern Miss football used to be built on, overlooked guys from small schools throughout the Southeast.

I want the next iteration of Southern Miss football to be one that identifies and develops talent, like it used to.

You can’t expect to build a program on guys that are no longer wanted in Starkville and Oxford. That’s what I hear the most from the fellow Golden Eagle fans that I talk to, they want to see a recruiting strategy that relies on more than who’s transferring out of Mississippi State and Ole Miss.

Former UAB head coach Bill Clark is supposedly wanting to get back into coaching. He’s a worthy candidate that knows what it takes to build a program, but he might also be interested in the recently opened East Carolina job, one that has a larger profile than Southern Miss.

Former Southern Miss player Kane Wommack is another often mentioned name. He is in his first year as defensive coordinator at the University of Alabama and went 22-16 during his stint as head coach at South Alabama.

There were a lot of fans who hoped Wommack would get the job the last time it was open, as South Alabama hired him 10 days after Southern Miss picked Hall to lead its program.

Georgia Tech offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner, a former assistant coach in Hattiesburg, is another name that has been mentioned along with former Golden Eagle great Patrick Surtain, who is currently an assistant coach at Florida State.

McClain said in a press conference on Monday that he believes this will be an attractive job for a search that he expects to last until the end of November.

“This is a really, really good football job and I believe that with every fiber of my being,” said McLain in the presser. “This is a place where you can win, where you can win at a high level. We’re in a great football league and this is going to be a job that is heavily sought after.”

As an alum and fan, I hope that’s true.

Sports Editor Cliff Furr can be reached at sports@dailyleader.com.