Charles Huff says playing for him is like joining Navy SEALs of college football

Outside of North Carolina 15, TCU 10, the most notable result of Week 0 was easily Memphis's late-night upset of UNLV. Coming off a 10-4 season and with former 5-star recruit Jackson Arnold brought in to play quarterback, Dan Mullen's team was -- and still is -- viewed as a favorite to win the Mountain West and a challenger to Boise State for the Group of 6 playoff bid. Memphis, meanwhile, was playing its first game under Charles Huff after losing Ryan Silverfield to Arkansas.

Lo and behold: Tigers 27, Rebels 21. In Las Vegas.

Memphis trailed 14-7 at the half, but won the second half 20-7. Most impressively, the Memphis defense slammed the door late on UNLV's offense, holding them scoreless on their final six possessions. 

As Huff explained after the game, Memphis began turning the tide of the game not at halftime, but seven months ago. 

"It starts in January. Everybody else is touching the cone and feeling really good about themselves, we're taking them to deep water. That's our process. We plan to win the game in the fourth quarter because we work harder than a lot of teams," he said. "We practice a lot. We are borderline Child Services need to be called, we are right on the edge. We work our guys really hard. Why? Because life's hard. Life's really hard. We take them into that realm of rep overload, going multiple days in a row, so in the fourth quarter and everybody else is breathing hard, we've been there."

Huff went 32-20 in four seasons at Marshall, winning the Sun Belt in 2024. Unable to reach an agreement with the Marshall brass, Huff took the Southern Miss job in 2025 and led a 1-11 team to a 7-5 season. That propelled him to Memphis, where the perennial American Athletic Conference contenders scored an impressive victory over another Group of 6 favorite. 

What the Navy SEALs are to the rest of the armed forces, Huff said his program his to the rest of college football. And just as Babe Ruth called his own shot many moons ago, Huff predicted his quote would go viral in the middle of giving it. 

"We are the Navy SEALs, everybody else is the military. It takes a group to be Navy SEALs. That'll go viral -- I'm not comparing us to Navy SEALs, what I'm saying is our training is different. We train different so we can play different," he said. "The training we do prepares us to dominate in the fourth quarter."

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