UMass is asking a question few programs ever have to: What comes after 0-12?
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Who on Earth would possibly want one of the worst FBS jobs in college football?
Well, that would be Joe Harasymiak. If you asked him, he would say he’s probably an idiot.
“That's ultimately probably a fault of mine,” he told USA TODAY Sports. "I look at some things and want the challenge.”
Ask, and you shall receive. The 40-year-old coach has one of, if not the, greatest challenge in college football: UMass coach. It has been at the basement for more than a decade, and in 2025, it reached its nadir: a winless 0-12 season.
It was the 18th time a team went winless since the expansion to a 12-game schedule in 2006. Not exactly how Harasymiak envisioned his first season. But the vibe is different in Amherst this fall. UMass feels good about football.
“I feel really confident that we got it right,” Harasymiak said. “Hopefully we can show that this year.”
There’s bad, then there’s UMass
UMass football hasn’t always been bad. In fact, it’s got some good history. It was a consistent winner in the 1970s, won the 1998 FCS championship and finished runner-up in 2006.
That success led to the decision in 2011 to move up to FBS for the 2012 season. While there was excitement over the jump, there was one problem: UMass wasn’t really all that good at that juncture.
The Minutemen were 16-17 in the three seasons before the move, bringing in a new coach in Charley Molnar yet hoped it would work using the same recipe. It didn’t, and UMass went 1-11 in Year 1, a sign of things to come.
Molnar went 2-22 in two seasons before UMass brought back Mark Whipple, who coached that 1998 title team. There was some improvement with back-to-back three-win seasons, and going 4-8 in 2017 and 2018.
That’s the best it’s gotten.
Since moving to FBS in 2012, UMass is 28-142, a 19.7% win percentage that is by far the worst by any team since then. The next closest record is Kansas at 43-124 (34.7%). Years of losing, while FBS newcomers like James Madison and Jacksonville State had no trouble making the move.
In fact, UMass is the only FBS team to never make a bowl game, and that includes Delaware and Missouri State, who made one in Year 1 in 2025.
Why has it been so bad? Those in charge point to not an aligned vision for football, and no solid foundation. UMass joined the MAC when it made the move, but only stayed for four seasons, leaving to become an independent in 2016 while it searched for a new home. It ended up staying like that for 10 seasons.
“It was a real challenge trying to find our footing, given the fact that we didn't have a conference to play in,” said athletic director Ryan Bamford, who’s been in charge since 2015. “There's a reason why Notre Dame's the only one that's persisted as an independent, obviously because of their brand and you know their revenue lines and all the ways that they can support their football program in particular. And there's a reason why all the rest of us have gone in and out of independent.”
That, in turn, made it difficult for Bamford to hire — and keep — a coach. He’s hired four of them in his term, with none lasting more than three seasons.
“It was hard getting people interested in the job. You couldn't build out a full model and plan for the future,” Bamford added. “We didn't know what the future looked like, both from a resource perspective and from a conference perspective, and if you can't answer those two questions, it's hard to get somebody interested.”
The first inkling of change came in February 2024, when UMass announced a return to the MAC, as a full-time member for 2025. Coincidentally, it fired Don Brown late into the 2024 season, meaning it would need another new coach for its next era.
After becoming the coach of Maine at 29 years old and successfully turning the Black Bears into an FCS playoff team, Harasymiak spent time shoring up defenses at Minnesota and Rutgers when he decided he wanted to be in charge of a team again.
“I wouldn't have come unless they joined the league,” Harasymiak said. “I think joining the MAC was a major thing for me. I wasn't going to do it if it was independent because that's pretty much — besides Notre Dame now obviously — it's kind of suicide.”
Still, he had his doubts of what would make his tenure any different from his predecessors. What sold him on it was the decision to think of the program with a clean slate; Harasymiak compared it to ripping a house completely down to the studs and building it back how he wanted to.
When he got settled, the first person to knock on his office door was Tyler Martin, a Massachusetts-born linebacker who transferred from Arizona in 2023. This program meant something personal to him, and he made it clear his mission to change what was going on.
“I was like, you know what? I'm seeing this through,” Martin said. “I'm gonna leave this place and when whoever stays with me here leaves, people are gonna know that this was one of the classes that was able to get this, to right the ship.”
While Bamford admitted UMass “weren't going to be world beaters” in 2025, there was some renewed optimism.
The result? 0-12.
UMass averaged an FBS-worst 11.1 points per game and last in giving up 38.6 points per game. It only had two one-score games, a one-point loss to FCS Bryant and a 28-21 defeat to Buffalo.
“Certainly very difficult,” Harasymiak said. “Never really had anything close to this experience-wise.”
Injuries were cited as a major reason 2025 went so wrong. The defensive depth was depleted, and quarterbacks were consistently getting hurt.
Martin said it would have been easy to just give up, but he implored people to not jump the ship. The message resonated, with players not resembling zombies, but still coming in every day with an attitude that this can get better.
“We're doing all the right things. The results just weren't there,” he said. “Obviously, the result is what everyone is going to look at, but if you don't have a good process, you'll never find the result. Whereas if you're at least doing the process the right way, you give yourself the fighting chance at the outcome that you want.”
The outcome UMass wants seems a lot more plausible going into 2026. Going into his first season, Harasymiak described his first transfer class as a “disaster,” taking risks on players hoping it would stick.
This time around, UMass targeted players with college production. There’s investment in NIL, nutrition and just about everything Harasymiak says is needed “in order to put this right.”
“I would argue a majority of the inputs that impact success have completely changed here,” Bamford said. “I couldn't have said that in the last decade.”
One of the players added was William “Pop” Watson III, a senior quarterback from Virginia Tech. Seeking to be the guy for a program, he knew UMass “was working with the short end of the leash” when it reached out to him about joining. However, he didn’t get that feeling from speaking with the staff, and it hasn’t seemed like it all since then.
Seeing the buy-in and the tools to be a good team led Watson to take the microphone at the end of the Minutemen's spring game and deliver a bold proclamation.
“This ain’t the same team you saw last year,” he told the crowd at McGuirk Alumni Stadium. “We gonna come through, we gonna (expletive) the MAC.”
Well then.
“Probably the verbiage I used wasn't the best, but that's how I feel. Like that's the belief I got in these guys, and that's the belief I got in these coaches,” Watson said. “I still stand firm on what I said.”
You’d think after an 0-12 season, UMass would just try to win at least one game to snap its 16-game losing streak, right? Or beat an FBS team for the first time since October 2023.
“We're not thinking about ‘How do you win a handful, three, four, five games?’ We're thinking about winning as many games on our 12-game schedule as you can,” Bamford said. “Nobody's running from the idea… I don't think any of us take moral victories anymore."
UMass’ first chance at its first FBS win in 1,041 days comes in the season opener at Rutgers on Thursday, Sept. 3. It also has never beaten a Power conference team. There are some easier chances for wins afterward with FCS teams Sacred Heart and Stonehill, but it expects more than that.
All of it is good talk for a team trying to get out of the dumpster, but let’s be real: Who actually thinks UMass is capable of winning multiple games, let alone make a bowl game? The USA TODAY Sports college football 2026 season prediction has the Minutemen finishing 2-10, those victories against FCS teams and pushing the FBS-winless streak to 33 games.
“Just knowing that no one else believes in us, and I think that that is honestly one of my personal biggest motivators,” Martin said. “I'm going to absolutely love walking into Rutgers, Week 1, and knowing that the only people there that think we can win are the parents that are fortunate enough to make the game, and the guys that went on that plane and got off the bus together and are in our locker room.”
If it does indeed happen, there won’t be any hard feelings from the non-believers. Bamford said there are plenty of seats on the bandwagon, and they’ll take “everybody who wants to jump in with us.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: UMass is asking a question few programs ever have to: What comes after 0-12?
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