Alabama NewsCenter 2022 football preview: Birmingham-Southern College
Birmingham-Southern Coach Tony Joe White is expecting a lot of rushing yards from Jon Lewis this season. (Birmingham-Southern College Athletics)
Tony Joe White and his Birmingham-Southern College football team were within a 2-point conversion of accomplishing everything he thought his Panthers could do in 2021.
“We had a lot of seniors that made a lot of plays and contributed a lot in the past, so we had high expectations,” White said. “It was a fun season, to be sure. What you want to do is put yourself in position in every game to be able to compete and give yourself a chance to win every game. We were able to do that at a very high level.
“We won 10 games (the most in school history) and I don’t care what level you’re playing, 10 (wins) is a great season,” he said. “We’re very proud of what we accomplished last year.”
But that was last year. White and his Hilltop team can’t rest on last year’s laurels. BSC, ranked No. 25 in the country by D3football.com, must face the challenge of matching – or perhaps surpassing – last season’s success.
Alabama NewsCenter is taking a look at the upcoming season and today is focused on Birmingham-Southern.
[vimeo 739642717 w=640 h=360]Birmingham-Southern Coach Tony Joe White talks about team leadership from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo.
Alabama NewsCenter: What are the prospects for this season?
Tony Joe White: I feel like our staff has done an incredible job of recruiting over the years and the seniors that we’ve had from ’17 to last year have done a tremendous job of changing the culture and establishing a culture where the expectation now is wins and success and playing for championships. With this year’s bunch, we’re starting over from scratch; we graduated a lot of production. But because the coaches have done a tremendous job of recruiting talent, we’ve got as much talent as we’ve ever had. The issue is inexperience. We’ve got a lot of talented kids, but they haven’t got the game experience because of the guys that were playing ahead of them in years past. We had our seniors do our senior retreat where we come up with our goals and discuss the issues that they think that they need to address and prioritize for this year’s team. They feel like that if they are very disciplined and very thorough in their preparation and game planning and film study and practice effort and execution, that they will overcome that inexperience with just being totally prepared. That’s where their talent will be able to be showcased as opposed to the inexperience being showcased.
ANC: What is the strength of this year’s team?
White: Their camaraderie, their brotherhood, their love for each other. Back in the spring we do a straw poll or survey when I do the exit meetings with each individual player before they go home. Almost to a man, when I asked them that question: What do you think the strength of this team is? They feel like this is a tight-knit, closely bonded brotherhood, just of friends. The friend groups all bleed over. There are certain cliques, to be sure, but all the cliques kind of bleed into each other. They’re a very close-knit team. That’s going to be probably our greatest strength. They will hang together when adversity hits. They love each other and they understand that’s going to be the thing that puts them over the top when the hard times hit or when adversity hits. Whether it’s getting behind the chains or if we suffer a loss or somebody gets injured, whatever the case may be. They’re going to stick together because they love each other.
ANC: Who are your team’s standouts?
White: We’ve got several defensive linemen that I think are solid, solid players. We’ve got a young man from Mountain Brook named Trey Gory. He is anticipated to be an all-conference defensive tackle. Connor West is a senior leader at linebacker that has made a lot of plays for us in the last couple of years and will contribute heavily. Jimmy Anderson is an all-conference safety who’s coming back for his fifth year, his COVID year. Zion Thomas is another D tackle coming out of Tuscaloosa that I think is going to be great for us. Those are all guys on the defense. Offensively, first-team all-conference receiver Branden Rew is back for his COVID year. Our left guard Derrick Maddox is back for his COVID year. Those fifth-year guys are always invaluable to have. Both of those guys were all-conference guys in their real senior year and now they get their COVID year. Jon Lewis played behind Chris Shufford last year, who was “the man,” one of the best players in Division III football. Jon without Shufford last year would have had a 1,000-yard rushing year. He’s strong, he’s fast and I expect he will have a really good year this year. Both of our starting tackles are back from last year: Brandon Armstrong and Mike Gray. Mike’s from Corner, Alabama, and didn’t play until his senior year of high school. He’s an all-conference offensive tackle now. I think that speaks a lot to Coach (Anthony) Colucci, our offensive coordinator and our offensive line coach, in how he’s developed Mike to an all-conference kind of guy. We’ve got a lot of guys who have been in the fires, been in those big games, been in those crucial moments. When we have some inexperienced, younger receivers, a younger tailback, a very inexperienced quarterback, it kind of helps those guys feel comfortable knowing that they’ve got that experience out there in those guys who’ve been in the fires that they can rely on to help them out.
ANC: What game(s) do your fans have circled on your schedule?
White: Obviously when we play for the Wesley Cup against Huntingdon. That’s one. They’re down the road in Montgomery and we played them in the playoff game last year. That’s always a big game here. When you play the big rivalry game for the trophy, that’s a big one. Trinity is ranked in the Top 10 in the country and they’re the team that we were the 2-point conversion away from beating last year for the conference championship. We’ve got to go to San Antonio this year, so that’ll be a big one for us. We recruit against Berry quite a bit in Atlanta. … Because all of our guys were recruited by Berry and all of their guys were recruited by BSC, there’s that rivalry.
ANC: What is your lingering question?
White: Who’s going to play quarterback? Simple as that. We’ve got to figure out who our quarterback is going to be and if we can get production out of that position. If you look at the teams in our conference that are good, they’ve all got great quarterbacks. The teams that are struggling in our league don’t have strong quarterbacks. We lost a senior quarterback last year that was one of the tops in the country, definitely one of the tops in the conference. We’ve got to replace him with someone who’s never started a game before. We’ve got to figure out who’s gonna play quarterback for us. If we can get that position lined up and feel good about that person, I expect us to have a really good year.
Alabama NewsCenter is posting season previews for all 16 college football programs in Alabama. Read previews for Jacksonville State University, the University of North Alabama and Alabama State University, and look for a new preview each weekday.
