Exclusive Look Inside the Closed-Doors Meeting That Killed UAB Football

Birmingham native Cornelius Williams was the wide receivers coach at University of Alabama at Birmingham during the 2014 season.

Williams gave Bleacher Report's Sanjay Kirpalani a firsthand account of the closed-doors meeting in which UAB President Ray Watts informed the team that the Blazers football program was being terminated. Williams also provided exclusive details of the emotional aftermath. All words are his own.   

It wasn't a money game. It wasn't numbers. It wasn't any of that. That's a bunch of b------t at the end of the day.

There have been rumors about shutting down the UAB program for as long as I can remember. I don't know the exact reason it finally happened, but you can read everything about how this stuff goes back to [former UAB athletic director] Gene Bartow's feud with Bear Bryant.

Even before, when I was younger and living in Birmingham, back when Roddy [White] and D-Hack [Darrell Hackney] and all those guys were here and winning, you kind of heard rumors about UAB wanting to shut down the program. The attitude was kind of like, "whatever, it's all talk."

Except it wasn't this time. 

Ray Watts was obviously kind of placed here by the Board of Trustees, and you saw what happened next. 

There was no "I'm sorry."

Watts just started trying to give a bunch of numbers and a bunch of b------t to a group of guys who had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

We had never even met the guy before. That was my first time seeing him in person, and he's talking about numbers this and numbers that and money here and money there.

John Amis/Associated Press

But there are hundreds of millions of dollars that are put into this university.

Not only that, but we got a guy in Justin Craft [former UAB player and president of the UAB Football Foundation] who has been fighting his ass off from day one for us with $10 million already raised. We also knew the mayor [William Bell] was committed to raising money.

In the meeting, Craft told him: "With all due respect, we have the money raised. I know the numbers. I've seen them myself."

Watts came back with: "You don't know the numbers. You don't know what you don't know."

What kind of man sits there and says all this stuff, and then next thing you know, he's saying we don't have a team anymore?

On top of that, you watch the thing on ESPN, and [Watts] is sitting there saying that he wishes he would've been more emotional.

I don't buy that.

Coaches were crying. Players were crying. I mean everybody who was in there was emotional. It felt like a funeral.

The bottom line is that he did not care. He still doesn't care.

In the aftermath, I tried to call all of my guys, receiver-wise, and check on them and see where they were mentally—just because, you know, you're messing with people's livelihoods. It's not just about football.

At the end of the day, it's an emotional roller coaster for a bunch of different guys—guys who probably won't be able to play Division I football ever again.

I'm still upset and crying about all the stuff that happened. It was hard as hell. It still is.

I remember Coach Clark saying "we met with the president for six or seven hours." [Clark] said the [president] was committed to this and committed to that and he's going to do it the right way—so [was] the AD.

You can see in the video, that's when Tristen [Henderson] went off and said: "You brought this man in and you lied to his face."

You feel for those guys who have put in so much time and effort into it, and then in a snap, it's all gone, swept right from up under them.

Coach [Bill Clark] always said this was a family. That's what we treated it like, and that's what it was.

That's why it was so, so, so emotional and why it still is. That's why you still want to see something happen for these guys for the best.

My family [and] I were pretty fortunate that [Neal] Brown at Troy called me and asked me if I wanted to come back to Troy and coach the receivers down there.

I'm blessed and fortunate to get that opportunity. But what about everyone else?

My heart goes out to my guys. It feels like your heart is in a million places.

You have a group of young men who have been beat down on the field over the past four years or so, who finally have it turned around academically, athletically and personally. We were able to help change and develop these guys into different people.

We were working so hard to make it happen for them, and our kids worked their butts off day in and day out to get to the point we were at.

You can't take away what those kids were able to accomplish. I don't think that should go unnoticed.

It's crazy how somebody can come in there and just not care.

This just sucks for the kids.

Sanjay Kirpalani is a National Recruiting Analyst for Bleacher Report.