Marshall Faulk Says Trey Holly Is the Best Back in the South. He Also Expects to Lose Him.

Marshall Faulk has carried a football about as well as anyone who ever lived, so his verdicts on running backs come with a weight most coaches cannot borrow. This week he delivered one on his own: Trey Holly, Southern's redshirt junior, is "the best back in this state or any southern state right now." Then, in the same conversation, Faulk said the quiet part out loud. "There's no doubt he will be in the portal, and somebody will be paying him. If he doesn't play another down for us, his resume is what it is."

The resume is real. Holly has rushed for 1,239 yards and 11 touchdowns on 215 carries — 5.8 yards a carry, 123.9 a game — and he leads the SWAC in rushing and sits sixth in the entire FCS, per the conference's own weekly awards release, which named him its Offensive Player of the Week on Monday. On Previously's Stats Hub board of HBCU leaders, folded today, Holly is the No. 1 rusher in Black college football. Saturday against Bethune-Cookman he needed 16 carries to get 206 yards and two touchdowns, both of them 44-yard scores in the second quarter, as Southern won 45-17 at A.W. Mumford Stadium and never punted.

It was his third 200-yard game of the season. He ran for 200 against Louisiana Christian in September and 204 at Florida A&M on October 31, the afternoon Southern won at Bragg Memorial Stadium for the first time in 25 years. This is the best season by a Southern ballcarrier since Lenard Tillery's All-American campaign in 2015 — Tillery, who remains the SWAC's all-time rushing leader. And Holly arrived with a pedigree Louisiana already knew: at Union Parish High School in Farmerville he piled up 10,523 career rushing yards, beating the state record by nearly 2,000.

None of it was handed to him by the Hall of Famer. Holly ran for 798 yards in eight games last season, and Faulk's review of that year is the kind of line that ends relationships or starts great ones: "He was the best player on a bad team. That's easy. I challenged him that you have to get better at everything. And I nit-picked him at everything he did."

Faulk says Holly reminded him of himself — a back who had to try it his own way before he would listen. What changed, by the coach's telling, is everything around the carries: showing up early, taking care of a 5-foot-7, 192-pound body, and closing games late instead of styling early. "All the fancy stuff, the dressing, you do that in the beginning of the games," Faulk said. "At the end of the games, you close it out with hard-nosed, tough football."

Which is why the portal sentence lands the way it does. Faulk is not bitter about it — he is proud of it, the way a coach is proud when the work shows. He praised Holly's leadership in the same breath as his running: not words, actions, the kind teammates watch. But the economics of the sport now run through every season like this one. A junior leading his conference in rushing, with three 200-yard games on film and a Hall of Famer's endorsement on the record, does not stay a secret, and Faulk knows the offers are a form of respect his player earned. Southern gets whatever is left of this season. The rest is negotiation.

What is left starts Saturday, and it is not a victory lap. Alcorn State visits Mumford on Saturday at 2 p.m. CT on HBCU GO, and the Braves bring the other half of the SWAC's player-of-the-year argument: quarterback Jaylon Tolbert, who sits No. 1 on Previously's Stats Hub board of HBCU passing leaders and threw for 314 yards and four touchdowns against Florida A&M last Saturday. Alcorn is 6-4 and 4-2 in the SWAC. Southern is 5-5 and 3-3, and its West math is unforgiving — the Jaguars must beat Alcorn and then Grambling in the Bayou Classic on November 28, and they still need help from the Prairie View–Pine Bluff race that this front has been tracking. Any loss ends it. The conference's full championship picture, model and all, is in this morning's projection piece.

So Saturday in Baton Rouge is two races in one game: the conference's best runner against its best passer, with a division hanging on it, in front of a coach who has already told everyone what his runner is worth and what it will probably cost to keep him. Holly's last home game of the regular season could be close to his last, period. Faulk's advice, all season, has been to enjoy the present. The present has a kickoff time. The full HBCU slate lives on the HBCU front.