By David Porter

One could certainly be excused for thinking Elijah Faulkner might have momentarily taken leave of his senses, or perhaps forgotten where he was. The UMass sophomore running back made his comment last month as the Minutemen prepared to start a new season after finishing the last one as the worst team in major-college football, statistically and by pretty much any other available metric.

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Turns out, Faulkner and his second-year coach, Joe Harasymiak, must have known something the rest of us didn’t. A month later, the Minutemen are riding the crest of a four-game winning streak that has attracted national attention and created a level of excitement on campus and in the area not seen in years. Saturday’s game against Mid-American Conference foe Eastern Michigan is an expected sellout at McGuirk Alumni Stadium. 

“The reaction the last few weeks, it’s tremendous,” said Garrett Waller, senior executive director of development for the UMass Gridiron Club, a football fundraising group. Waller worked in a similar capacity at UMass from 2004 to 2013, a period during which the Minutemen experienced national success playing in a lower rung of NCAA football, reaching the national championship game in 2006 against Appalachian State. He sees a similar vibe now, which likely will translate to more alumni investment.

“I think we will definitely have a bump, just from the sheer amount of people we interact with,” he said. “Because people can believe in what they’re seeing now, that it’s a program worth investing in.”

Understanding how dramatic the turnaround has been requires the unfortunate task of revisiting how low the program has sunk in recent times. From 2021 through 2025, the Minutemen won just seven of 60 games, only one of which came against a school (Army) in the Football Bowl Subdivision, college football’s highest tier that includes schools at the top end like Ohio State, Georgia and Alabama. The UMass program reached a nadir in 2025, losing all 12 games in Harasymiak’s first season and finishing 134th and last among all FBS teams in points scored and points allowed. 

Unlike in earlier eras in college football, players can now move freely from school to school  – and, significantly, to the highest bidder. There were mass departures before the 2025 season, but Harasymiak and his staff were able to convince enough quality players to stay and, perhaps more important, lure others to Amherst. Faulkner mentioned his confidence in the coaching staff as a reason for returning; 6-foot-6, 315-pound offensive lineman Greg Knox, who played at McNeese State in Louisiana and is now a graduate student, sounded a similar note. Knox admitted some of his former teammates were skeptical when they heard he was heading north.

“I know it shocked them,” he said last month. “They were like, ‘You sure you want to do that?’ I was like, ‘Man, I’ve never been so sure about something in my life.’ I feel like just people doubting this place, it’s what is going to make it better. I want to be part of something that came from the ground up.”

At the center of it all is Harasymiak, who looks considerably younger than his 40 years and exudes the look-at-the-bright-side confidence required of all coaches, tempered with a disarming matter-of-factness. 

A New Jersey native, Harasymiak was a standout player at Springfield College and went on to coach at the University of Maine before landing assistant coaching jobs at Minnesota and Rutgers. In advance of the team’s opening game – fittingly, against Rutgers and his former mentor, Greg Schiano – he spoke about the changes he’s seen since last year.

“Second year for me, it’s a lot more hands-on in terms of the culture, in how we run the program. So the standard of our culture will always be day to day, living up to that. But make no mistake about it, we’re here to win. Success and goals, if you shoot low, you’re doing it wrong. Like if I tell the team, ‘Let’s just go out and win an FBS game for the first time since ‘23,’ they’ll be looking at me like, ‘What the hell is this guy talking about?’”

The Minutemen got that first FBS win since ‘23 with a resounding 37-21 win at Rutgers in the season opener on national TV, as a 29-point underdog. Harasymiak said before the game he borrowed from a scene in the movie “Hoosiers,” where the small-town Indiana high school basketball coach played by Gene Hackman measures the height of the rim before the state championship game, to show his players that it’s the same game with the same court dimensions, regardless of the opponent.

“That’s something our team struggled with last year, the anxiety of those moments,” he said. “I told them, it’s 120 (yards) by 53 and a third, go out and measure it, it’s the same field no matter who you play over these 12 games.”

I covered Schiano at Rutgers for Associated Press in 2005 and 2006 and watched him transform a program in the doldrums into a national Top 10 team. It helped that he had the services of several future NFL players, but is it farfetched to think that Harasymiak could lead a similar renaissance here, albeit on a more modest level? Even if he does, it’s not likely it will mollify those in the community who argue UMass shouldn’t even be attempting to compete in college football’s upper echelon. But for now, it’s hard not to enjoy the ride.

David Porter grew up in Amherst and spent many years as a sports and courts writer for the Associated Press. He returned to Amherst with his wife, son, and cat.