Samford Looks To Knock Off A Power Four Opponent This Weekend In Waco
By Steve Irvine
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - September 11, 2025
Samford’s football season hasn’t been must-see viewing to this point. However, Samford head coach Chris Hatcher suggests giving it more time to develop.
“There's no question it is a tough start,” Hatcher said of his team, which is 0-2 heading into Saturday’s visit to Baylor. “You look around the country, you still aren't sure exactly how good or maybe not as good as you want to be. I put it in a reference to watching a Netflix series to our players on Monday. I'm a big Netflix guy. When I get home late at night, I’m trying to find a show to watch. You start watching one and it's kind of boring at the beginning. Then you say, you know what, I'm going to give it five more minutes and then all of a sudden you're binge watching it for three weeks to see how the how the story ends. I think that's the type of season that we're gonna have, I really believe that. Right now, you want to turn off the TV and maybe start another show. But if we just keep hanging in there keep working hard keep working on our fundamentals and techniques there's a lot of people are gonna watch how this thing ends.”
It certainly hasn’t been the expected start, especially with a pair of home games to begin the season, for a young Samford team that returned few starters. The Bulldogs lost to West Georgia 34-3 in the opener and opened Southern Conference play with 40-13 loss to The Citadel. It didn’t show on the scoreboard but Hatcher said he felt his team played better in the second week of the season than they did against West Georgia.
In some ways the week two improvement showed in the stats. Samford had 94 snaps and gained 452 yards, including 362 through the air. The Citadel had 330 yards on 55 plays. But Samford lost the turnover battle, 5-1, and was penalized nine times for 88 yards. The Citadel had a pair of fumble recoveries returned for touchdowns with one coming on a fake field goal attempt.
“We just continue to beat ourselves,” Hatcher said. “We had four explosive plays over the defensive side that accumulated almost 200 yards of their total offense. We eliminate them. We hold them to 151 yards of offense defensively. Other than that, I thought we played an outstanding game. We continue to tackle well. We line up and execute pretty good most of the time offensively. We did a whole lot better moving the ball. We had 94 plays over 450 yards of offense, but only scored 13 points. Like I told the team on Monday, that's extremely hard to do to have that many yards and that many plays and score that few of points. But four turnovers in that area, three of them inside our own 20. You just can't win Southern Conference football games turning the ball over like that. And then the fourth (offensive) turnover we had was a fumble they scooped up and scored.”
Hatcher also pointed a finger at himself.
“We did fake a field goal that they picked up and ran back,” Hatcher said. “That was just a horrendous call by myself at that juncture of the ball game. I wish I could take that one back. So I put the players in a bad position there.”
Now it’s time to move forward, though. Having to travel to Baylor, which is coming off an overtime win over nationally ranked SMU doesn’t seem to be part of a recipe to get better. Following that, the Bulldogs plays game against Western Carolina, Furman and Mercer, which were all preseason picks to be in the top four in the SoCon.
The focus right now is squarely on Baylor.
“We're gonna go down there and give it our best shot,” Hatcher said. “We have a great game plan in place. Our guys are excited about the opportunity. It's twice this season our guys get to play on the national stage and get to play in a huge stadium against a powerful team to showcase their talents versus the best in the nation. Then,also as coaches, we have a lot of pride too. We want to put on a good show, put ourselves in a position to win late in the fourth quarter to show that we could coach like the Power Four boys can.”