Roundup: Friday, January 3rd
Ahead of a busy recruiting weekend, UAB football officially hires a new coach.
AROUND THE SITE
Check out Sunday’s article about the Mars Bars game, one of the most bizarre incidents in UAB basketball history.
TODAY IN UAB HISTORY
1995: Blazers beat Alabama State but lose Carlos Williams
The men’s basketball team sports a flawless 69-0 record against the SWAC, but not all of those wins have come without strife. Take UAB’s January 3rd, 1995 pyrrhic victory at Alabama State, a game so damaging to the Blazers’ season that it might as well have been a loss.
A young UAB squad limped into ASU’s newly-constructed Joe Reed Acadome with a record of 7-6, having dropped non-conference games to College of Charleston, South Alabama, and — worst of all — American University-Puerto Rico. Entering the evening, Bartow was critical of his team’s recent performance, telling the Birmingham Post-Herald that the Blazers hadn’t played a good game in almost a month. They wouldn’t play a good game on this day, either.
Winless Alabama State put a pounding on the Green and Gold out of the gate. The Hornets ripped off an 11-0 run to take a 20-9 lead, but that wasn’t the worst of it. With 11:25 left in the first half, UAB forward Carlos Williams went up for a dunk and landed awkwardly on his left knee. As Cary Estes of the Post-Herald wrote: “After several minutes, Williams was helped to his feet, but he was unable to walk off the court even with assistance. He finally was placed in a wheelchair and taken directly to the locker room, then was sent to Birmingham before the second half began.”
The injury would later be diagnosed as a season-ending ACL tear.
Williams’ injury made national news, as he was one of the most statistically prolific players in the country; when he went down, Williams was averaging 17 points, 7 boards, 1.4 steals, and 1 block per game. The sophomore forward led the Blazers in both scoring and rebounding.
UAB cut its deficit to 2 by halftime and went on a late 12-3 run to wrest back control of the game. The Blazers proceeded to stagnate on offense, allowing ASU to take a three-point lead with fewer than 3 seconds left on the clock. Only a buzzer-beating banked three-pointer from guard Chad Jones saved UAB from humiliation.
More heroics were required in the first overtime, when three missed Blazer free throws handed the Hornets another last-second lead. This time, it was guard Leonard Bush who muscled in a driving layup to sent the Blazers into a second overtime, a period that would be marred by even more UAB miscues. The Green and Gold were penalized for calling a timeout they didn’t have and committed a five-second turnover, which occurs when a closely-guarded offensive player with the ball doesn't pass, shoot, or dribble for five seconds.
The latter violation gave ASU possession with 20 seconds left on the clock. Facing a one-point deficit, the Hornets’ Jimmy Lunsford went to the charity stripe with 2.1 seconds remaining — but only made one free throw. The game went into a third extra period, when three-pointers from Bush and forward De’Shanti Foreman would finally give UAB a 102-95 victory.
“That was one of the funniest, craziest games I’ve ever been in,” said Bush, who paced the Blazers with 25 points. “If we’d lost this game, it would have been really bad. But we got out with the ‘W.’”
However, the damage was done. Sans Williams, UAB would go on to lose 7 of its next 10 games, eventually finishing with its only losing record of the Gene Bartow era. Bartow would go on to retire at the conclusion of the following season.
Today also marks the 13-year anniversary of the death of Bartow.
FOOTBALL
The Blazers have been doling out offers to a host of mid-year transfers over the past several days. Starting today, UAB will welcome a significant number of these prospects to campus; their visits will continue en masse for the next week and a half.
Among this weekend’s few publicly confirmed visitors are Old Dominion edge rusher Amorie Morrison, who has 6 sacks and 81 tackles in his career, and Stony Brook wide receiver Jayce Freeman, who racked up 506 receiving yards in just 7 games this season.
In other UAB football news:
Blazer Victory Podcast: UAB Football Recruiting Update (1/2/25)
UAB officially named Brent Vieselmeyer its new linebackers coach yesterday.
Vieselmeyer replaces Kenwick Thompson, who was released at the end of the season.
Vieselmeyer joins Steve Russ, Ryan Lewis, Kevin Garver, and Sam Mills III on the Blazers’ new-look coaching staff.
Vieselmeyer has over a decade of experience at the high school level, having coached Christian McCaffrey at Valor Christian High School. He was also a Raiders assistant from 2015-2017 and a Commanders assistant from 2020-2022.
Vieselmeyer’s only college coaching experience came in 2013-2014, when he was the co-DC for FCS Houston Baptist, and in 2018, when he was an offensive analyst for Kansas.
“Brent has been a highly successful coach at all three levels of football and has developed elite talent during his time in the NFL,” Dilfer said in a release. “He is a great fit for what we are building on the defensive side of the ball and will maximize his players' potential on and off the field.”