Chris Hatcher Previews Samford's Matchup Against Mercer

By Steve Irvine

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - October 2, 2025

This season marks the first time that a Samford football team coached by Chris Hatcher lost the first five games of the season.

There have been a couple of slow starts in Hatcher’s 11 seasons as the Samford head coach. In 2018, the Bulldogs won the opener before losing the next four games. They responded with a four-game winning streak to put the skid in the rearview mirror. In 2023, coming off a Southern Conference championship season, the Bulldogs opened the season 1-3 before turning things around. Both of those teams finished 6-5.

Now, truthfully, those seasons have nothing do with turning this season’s fortunes around but they do offer a lesson on how things can change.

“Well, the biggest thing that I've told the team is that the morale is the most important aspect of being a good football team,” said Hatcher, who is 61-55 in his time at Samford after last week’s 31-13 loss to visiting Furman. “You can have the most skilled players, you can have the best schemes, the most depth, but if your morale's bad, you're not going to be successful. So at least right now we got one thing going for us, we got high morale on our team. Our team understands that it is not a success (so far). Saturdays are not guaranteed, but you have no chance to be successful if you don't put in the work during the course of the week. And that has not been an issue with our squad. I don't expect it to be an issue moving forward this week. Again, we're excited about playing football. We're just disappointed about the way the Saturdays have turned out for us this so far this fall.”

Turning it around won’t be easy this week with a trip to play reigning SoCon champion Mercer in Macon, Georgia with kickoff slated for 3 p.m. CST on Saturday. Mercer is 3-1 with all the victories coming in SoCon play. The Bears have the top defense in the SoCon and is ranked 34th nationally the FCS in total defense. Mercer is 36th in FCS in total offense.

Hatcher acknowledges that it’s a challenging game for his team. But he also feels his team is developing.

“Our effort has been tremendous, but our lack of focus and critical situations has lacked,” Hatcher said. “That's something that you run into sometimes with some younger, immature type players. We’ve got to find a way to clean that up. Again, looking at the game, I thought that we improved in a lot of areas.”

One of those improvements came from a group that has struggled with consistency early in the year.

“I went home after the game, didn't think maybe our offensive line played very well, but then going back and watching the film, overall that may have been their best game of the season,” Hatcher said. “If you really just want to put (the Furman loss) into context, we're two tipped passes that were intercepted and one blocked field goal from at least having a tie game there late in the fourth quarter, maybe even having the lead. So we're not far off. I know I say that every week, I really believe that, but we got to play better in critical situations than we played this the entire season.”