UAB basketball begins a new era this season — and that's not marketing language, it's roster math. Head coach Andy Kennedy, entering his seventh year in Birmingham, rebuilt the entire team: eleven newcomers — a mix of Division I transfers, junior college standouts, and high school signees — from last season's 20-12 squad. It's one of the tallest, most overhauled rosters in program history. For a program that has made a habit of winning anyway, the question isn't whether the Blazers will be interesting. It's how fast the new faces become a team.
Last season's 20-12 mark (11-7 in the American, fourth place) was solid but unsatisfying by UAB's standards — and Kennedy's response was the boldest roster surgery of his tenure. The lone returner is Salim London, the Hoover, Alabama guard who played all 32 games as a freshman with 12 starts, averaging 4.9 points and showing the poise of a future floor general. Walk-on Joey Kahn is the only other familiar face. Everyone else is new, which means the 2026-27 Blazers are simultaneously the program's biggest unknown and its most intriguing experiment in years.
The portal class is built to compete immediately. Tim Holliday arrives from Itawamba Community College as a proven scorer — 14.0 points a game as a freshman, 38.7 percent from three, with thirteen 15-point games and seven 20-point outbursts. Matt Mbole, a 6-foot-11, 280-pound center from South Georgia Tech, brings rare physical presence: 10.0 points, 12.2 rebounds, and 2.6 blocks a game with fourteen double-doubles, all with just four years of organized basketball experience. Antallah Sandlin'el, a 6-foot-8 wing from South Plains College, adds length and versatility. The staff calls it one of the tallest teams in school history, and the game plan writes itself: defend the paint, own the glass, play big.
The coaching staff got new blood too. Longtime assistants Ryan Cross and Noah Dartmann departed, and Kennedy brought in Jesse Bopp and former Blazer player Jon Coleman — a nod to the program's family, and a fresh set of voices for a fresh roster. Kennedy himself — the former Ole Miss and Cincinnati coach, now past 400 career victories — owns a 145-62 (.700) record at UAB — the winningest stretch of sustained success the program has seen in decades.
That success is the standard everything gets measured against. UAB basketball was born fast and born big: Gene Bartow founded the program in 1978, and by year three the Blazers were in the NCAA tournament. The 1981 and 1982 teams made back-to-back Sweet Sixteens — the 1982 squad upsetting No. 1 seed Virginia, with Ralph Sampson, 68-66, before falling to Louisville one game from the Final Four. Bartow Arena, the program's 8,508-seat home, is named for him, and the building's rafters carry the weight of one of the great program-building feats in college basketball history.
The modern chapters are nearly as rich. Mike Anderson's 2004 team authored one of the tournament's great upsets, stunning No. 1 seed Kentucky 76-75 in the second round en route to the Sweet Sixteen — a game Birmingham still talks about. Jerod Haase's 2015 team won Conference USA and knocked off Iowa State in the NCAAs. And Kennedy's era has been a model of consistency: an NCAA berth in 2022, an NIT runner-up finish in 2023, and the 2024 American Conference tournament championship that sent UAB dancing again with a first-round date against San Diego State.
The 2024-25 season — 24-13, third in the American, an NIT quarterfinal run — showed the program's floor is high. But the league keeps getting tougher, and Kennedy clearly decided that tweaking wasn't enough. The full rebuild is a bet on his own eye for talent: the Blazers have thrived on transfers and junior college finds before, and this staff's developmental track record — turning overlooked players into all-conference performers — is the program's quiet superpower.
The American schedule offers no grace period for a new roster. UAB's 2026-27 league slate includes a January trip to Tulane, home dates with Tulsa and South Florida, February visits to Memphis and Temple, and a season-ending stretch against North Texas and East Carolina. The nonconference includes a December 5 trip to Troy. For a team with eleven newcomers, every one of those games is both a test and a classroom.
What will define this team is still unwritten, but the outlines are visible. Size and physicality in the frontcourt. A freshman-turned-sophomore point guard in London being asked to run the show. A JUCO scorer in Holliday with the green light. A 6-foot-11 anchor in Mbole who alters everything at the rim. Kennedy's teams have always defended and rebounded; this one is constructed to do both at an elite level. If the chemistry comes — and Kennedy's track record says it usually does — the Blazers will be a problem for everyone in the American by February.
Birmingham has always shown up for this program. Bartow Arena, tucked into the Southside campus, has hosted some of the loudest nights in mid-major basketball — the 2004 Kentucky upset watch parties, the conference title runs, the NIT deep runs that turned March into a civic event. A new era means new heroes to cheer for, and Blazer fans have never needed much convincing. The names are new. The standard is not.