100 Days, 100 Reasons G6 Football Matters

A brand new league. Three games. Two wins at SEC stadiums. The conference that would never stop reinventing itself started by announcing itself.

No conference in college football has been rebuilt more times than Conference USA. It has been raided by the Big East, gutted by the American Athletic Conference, picked apart by the Sun Belt — and every time, it has restocked, reorganized and kicked off another season. Programs have used it as a launchpad. Commissioners have used it as a stepping stone. Entire membership rosters have turned over in a single offseason.

But before any of that — before the poaching, the departures, the waves of realignment — Conference USA played football for the first time. And the opening weekend told you everything you needed to know about what the league was going to be.

The Weekend

Conference USA's first football game was played on Friday, August 30, 1996, at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati. Six schools. One league. Everything ahead of them.

Tulane, coached by Buddy Teevens and led by running backs Jerald Sowell and Jamaican Dartez, went into Cincinnati and beat the preseason-favorite Bearcats 34-14. It was a thorough dismantling — a team picked to finish last hammering the team picked to win it all. The league was one game old and already defying expectations.

The next day, two C-USA teams went to SEC stadiums. Both won.

Southern Miss traveled to Athens and beat Georgia 11-7 in front of 81,067 at Sanford Stadium. It was Jim Donnan's first game as Georgia's head coach. Six years earlier, Southern Miss had beaten Alabama in Gene Stallings' first game. Ruining SEC coaching debuts was becoming a habit.

The Golden Eagles never crossed the goal line. Johnny Lomoro kicked field goals of 20, 25 and 42 yards. Defensive end Jeff Posey sacked Georgia's Robert Edwards in the end zone for a safety with 6:18 remaining to make it 11-7. A defensive line that included future NFL players Adalius Thomas and Patrick Surtain on the back end held Georgia to one touchdown — a 34-yard screen pass that was the Bulldogs' longest play of the day.

"Please, don't call this an upset," Southern Miss coach Jeff Bower told the Hattiesburg American. "There were about 100 people on that sideline representing Southern Miss that know this wasn't an upset."

Georgia had one last chance, driving to the Southern Miss 14. Safety Jamaal Alexander and Perry Phenix batted down Mike Bobo's fourth-down pass at the 3-yard line with 28 seconds to play. Among the Georgia defenders on the field that day was a safety named Kirby Smart.

In Lexington, Louisville beat Kentucky 38-14 at Commonwealth Stadium in front of 59,384 fans. After a 94-minute weather delay, the Cardinals blocked two punts — one returned for a touchdown — and scored a safety on another botched kick. Kentucky managed 185 total yards. A freshman named Tim Couch split time at quarterback for the Wildcats. He would go on to become the No. 1 overall pick in the 1999 NFL Draft. On this afternoon, his team was overwhelmed by a brand new C-USA program.

Three games. Three wins. Two of them on the road in the SEC. Conference USA had existed for one weekend, and it had already made a statement.

The Six

The conference had been announced on April 24, 1995, in Chicago — a merger of the Metro Conference and the Great Midwest Conference, two leagues that did not sponsor football. The idea was to build something that did. Mike Slive was the first commissioner.

Twelve schools signed on. Only six played football: Cincinnati, Houston, Louisville, Memphis, Southern Miss and Tulane. The rest were basketball programs — DePaul, Marquette, Saint Louis — or schools that had not yet started football. UAB was still an independent. South Florida would not field a team until 1997.

East Carolina joined as a football-only member in 1997. Army followed in 1998. TCU came aboard in 2001. But in 1996, it was six football programs, a Liberty Bowl tie-in and a belief that they belonged. The 1996 season was the proof of concept.

It worked. Southern Miss and Houston shared the first conference championship at 4-1. Memphis beat No. 6 Tennessee and Peyton Manning 21-17 at the Liberty Bowl in November — the Tigers' first win over the Volunteers in 15 meetings. Fans stormed the field and tore down the goalposts.

Even Tulane, which finished 2-9, had planted something. Teevens recruited the core of the roster that Shaun King — a sophomore quarterback in 1996 — would lead to an undefeated season and a No. 7 final ranking two years later. Teevens was fired after 1996 because he refused to resign. He said he did not want his players to think he had quit on them.

The Launchpad

Of the six programs that played football in Conference USA's first season, none remain in the conference today.

Cincinnati is in the Big 12. Louisville is in the ACC. Houston is in the Big 12. Memphis is in the American. Southern Miss is in the Sun Belt. Tulane is in the American. Every one of them left. Every one of them used Conference USA as the platform to get where they went.

The conference has been rebuilt three times since 1996. After the 2005 Big East raid took Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida, C-USA added Marshall, Rice, SMU, Tulsa, UCF and UTEP. After the AAC's formation in 2013 stripped Houston, Memphis, UCF, Tulane and others, the conference added another wave — Charlotte, FAU, FIU, Louisiana Tech, Middle Tennessee, North Texas, Old Dominion, UTSA, Western Kentucky. After the Sun Belt and AAC came back for more in 2022 and 2023 — taking Marshall, Old Dominion, Southern Miss, Charlotte, FAU, North Texas, Rice, UAB and UTSA — the conference rebuilt again with Jacksonville State, Liberty, New Mexico State, Sam Houston, Kennesaw State, Delaware and Missouri State.

Mike Slive, the man who built Conference USA, went on to become commissioner of the SEC — the conference whose members have benefited most from raiding the league he created. He passed away in 2018.

Why It Matters

Conference USA in 2026 looks nothing like Conference USA in 1996. The membership has turned over completely — not once, but repeatedly. Programs arrive, build, win and leave for a bigger stage. The conference absorbs the loss, finds new members and starts again.

That cycle is the story of G6 football in miniature. The system is designed to take from leagues like Conference USA. The league's response, every time, has been to keep going.

It started on August 30, 1996, at Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati. A team nobody expected to win beat the team everybody expected to win. The next day, two more C-USA teams walked into SEC stadiums and walked out with victories. The league was a weekend old. It was already punching up.

Thirty years later, it is still punching.

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