Alright, so I decided to really dig into the USM football depth chart recently. Wanted to get a feel for who’s likely starting and who the key backups are gonna be this season.
My First Steps
Naturally, the first thing I did was just search around online. Typed in the obvious stuff, you know, “USM football depth chart,” “Southern Miss football starters,” things like that. Got a bunch of results right away, which is always a good start, but you gotta sift through it.
I spent a bit of time on the official athletics website. That’s usually the best place to start, right? Sometimes they have a clear chart posted, especially closer to game day. I clicked around the football section, looked for news releases, checked the roster page again just to make sure I hadn’t missed a link somewhere. Found the roster easy enough, but an actual depth chart? Not immediately obvious.
Checking Other Places
Okay, so the official site wasn’t giving me a simple chart right off the bat. Next, I started looking at sports news sites. You know the ones, the big national ones and then the more local or conference-focused ones. Here’s kinda what I looked for:
- Pre-season predictions or analysis articles.
- Practice reports, sometimes they mention who’s getting first-team reps.
- Post-game summaries from last season, just to see who finished strong.
- Fan forums or message boards – gotta be careful there, lots of opinions, but sometimes you find nuggets from people who follow practices closely.
This part took a while. Lots of reading. Some articles were helpful, giving hints about position battles, like who was competing for the QB spot or who might step up on the defensive line. But, a lot of it was projection, not a concrete “this guy is #1, this guy is #2” list.
Trying to Piece it Together
After looking through all that, I didn’t have one single perfect chart. So, I started trying to build my own picture. I grabbed the official roster first. Then, based on the articles and reports I’d read, I started penciling in names.
For positions where the starter seemed obvious based on returning experience or consistent mentions in reports, I put them at the top. For spots where there was clearly a competition mentioned, I noted down the main contenders. It felt a bit like detective work, honestly.
I paid attention to:
- Returning starters from last year – usually a safe bet for the top spot unless news suggested otherwise.
- Transfers who were getting hype in practice reports.
- Any injury news that might shake things up.
It wasn’t perfect, mind you. Some positions were still kind of murky, especially further down the depth chart with the third and fourth string guys. But I got a much better sense of the two-deep, the main starters and their immediate backups, for most position groups.
So yeah, that was my process. Didn’t find a magic button, just involved digging through different sources and trying to connect the dots. Now I feel like I have a decent baseline understanding heading into the season, but you always know things can change fast once the games actually start.
