South Alabama’s early-season football schedule has been loaded with road challenges, but Saturday’s trip to Louisiana-Monroe is always a little different.

The Jaguars are 0-4 all-time at Malone Stadium, including a 41-31 loss two years ago. How good or how bad the Warhawks are in a given year doesn’t seem to matter, as they have something of a voodoo hold over South Alabama when playing in Monroe.

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“I think experiences allow you to be better-prepared the next time and we’ve got some guys on our team that have gone over there before and played and been in those moments,” third-year South Alabama coach Kane Wommack said. “I’ve been there twice and had really tough moments, once in 2016 (as defensive coordinator) and then in 2021. And so my job is to kind of set the tone for how challenging an environment it is to go over and play, because they seem to play really well at home.”

South Alabama (2-3, 0-1 Sun Belt Conference) has faced a trio of hostile packed houses on the road this year, losing 37-17 at Tulane and 31-23 at James Madison but also winning 33-7 at Oklahoma State. But they won’t face that type of pressure at ULM, which rarely draws a capacity crowd.

Instead, teams that play at Malone Stadium are often responsible for “creating their own energy,” Wommack said. And that’s not something the Jaguars have consistently done on the road, this year or in past visits to ULM.

“I have seen them gain and steal momentum from teams, and really make it challenging for you to hold momentum on your sidelines,” Wommack said. “So our sideline has to have great energy. We’re going to do some things different in pregame than what we’ve done before. Their (visiting) locker room is really tight, and it’s challenge to get the things done that we normally get done in our pregame routine, and so we’re going to adjust some of those things.

“And I think all those things help, and then simply just being aware of what you’re going into is a big piece of it. For me personally, I’ve had two really, really poor experiences there as a coach, once as a coordinator and once a head coach. So it’s something that I’ve had circled for a long time.”

This year’s ULM team appears much-improved, at least on offense. Terry Bowden’s Warhawks (2-2, 0-1) totaled 471 yards in a 41-40 loss to Appalachian State last week, and rank second in the Sun Belt Conference in rushing at 205.5 yards per game.

South Alabama has been very good stopping the run this year, less so against the pass. And ULM has one of the best big-play receivers in the conference in Tyrone Howell, who scored three touchdowns vs. App State and torched the Jaguars for 244 yards and three scores in USA’s 41-34 win in Mobile last season.

“They’re more of a running team this year than they were last year,” South Alabama defensive end Jamie Sheriff said. “That’s a big deal to us up front. We know their goal coming in is to run the ball on us, so we have a challenge ahead of us.”

Speaking of energy, South Alabama looked a little flat early in its loss at unbeaten James Madison this past Saturday. The Jaguars’ charter flight was four hours late leaving Mobile on Friday due to weather delays in other parts of the country, meaning the team did not arrive at its hotel until nearly 11 p.m. Eastern time.

Then traffic on the surrounding highways and interstates on Saturday morning caused the team to be 30 minutes late arriving at JMU’s Bridgeforth Stadium. Though the Jaguars found themselves down 14-0 in the first quarter and 24-7 at halftime, Wommack didn’t blame the travel issues for his team’s poor performance early on.

“When you have a routine, you’d like to stick to your routine as best you can to build consistency in what you’re doing,” Wommack said. “(Delays) are certainly things that are outside of our grasp and I would hope that our players would be able to overcome that and take care of business regardless of if we had some travel issues.

“But for us, the way that we’re structured in terms of our Friday, we don’t have a lot of things on the back end of the day. Typically, even before we get on a plane, we handle our meetings and all those things here (in Mobile) so that we don’t get too far out of rhythm when we start traveling. The day of the game, we got behind a little bit with our police escort and that wasn’t ideal. But I would expect our players to be able to execute through some travel adversity.”

Kickoff Saturday for South Alabama-ULM is set for 6 p.m. at Malone Stadium. The game will stream live via ESPN+.