Post by rainman on Oct 18, 2007 8:54:21 GMT -5
Overnight sensation South Florida a title contender
TAMPA -- When South Florida hired Jim Leavitt, then Kansas State's defensive coordinator, in December 1995, the school couldn't offer much.
"I can't even say it was grassroots. It was roots," says Lee Roy Selmon, the former Oklahoma Sooners star, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' first draft pick and a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
"We started off very much with nothing," says Selmon, brought on as associate athletic director to help launch the football program and later served as athletics director.
The football offices were housed in trailers near the baseball field. Given the sparse accommodations, Selmon says his main concern was, "I hope we don't run (Leavitt) off."
Mike Canales, the team's first offensive coordinator who returned this season as an assistant, laughs now at those early days.
"True story," Canales says. "Not long after we started, Jim brought in a hat-full of pieces of paper with assignments, which read 'Clean the toilets,' 'Vacuum,' 'Dust,' Empty the trash,' Sweep the walkway.' " All the coaches had to pick a chore out of the hat.
The trailers soon defined the program, although rivals derided the school as "Trailer Park U." Three years ago, the coaching staff moved into the expansive training center which houses most of the athletics department.
"I miss the trailers some days because nobody bothered you and you can park right there and you didn't have to go through all these doors and all these steps to get in and out of the building and you could go barefoot into the trailers wearing shorts," Leavitt says. "I miss that. But it's not the buildings that make a program, it's the people."
Ask Leavitt if he has any keepsakes from those halcyon days, and he leaps from his office couch. "Come on," he says, as he heads down the hall.
Before he left Kansas State he measured the size of the slots for the coaches' mailbox, 4 inches by 8 inches, then built an exact replica for his staff at South Florida. "That gives you an idea how detailed it was," Leavitt says, pointing at a wood mailbox hanging near a copy machine.
In recent seasons Leavitt has turned down job offers at Alabama, Kansas State and another prominent school he declines to name. His parents still live in the St. Petersburg, Fla., house where he was raised.
He says he has also spurned other Big Ten and Southeastern Conference suitors who have shown interest.
"Why do I love this place? I grew up here, my mom and dad are here, my family is here, and we started it all in a trailer," Leavitt says. "I love these players. I can't speak for other head coaches, but I don't know how they leave their players."
THURSDAY'S GAME
No. 3 South Florida (6-0) at Rutgers (4-2)
Time/TV: 7:30 ET/ESPN
Surface: Artificial
Sheridan's line: South Florida by 2
Sagarin difference: South Florida +12.31
The anticipated scenario of top-10 power against Big East spoiler has, indeed, come to pass. Though the roles are reversed from preseason expectations, Rutgers remains in the hunt for the conference title after ending a two-game skid. But the upstart Bulls have answered every challenge, thanks mostly to the nation's 11th-ranked defense. South Florida has gone 14 consecutive games without allowing a 100-yard rusher, but the last to do it was Rutgers RB Ray Rice. He will look to follow up his best outing of this season. Rice will need air cover from QB Mike Teel, but South Florida DE George Selvie must be accounted for. Scarlet Knights LB Kevin Malast and S Courtney Greene must corral Bulls dual-threat QB Matt Grothe, whose top deep weapon is aptly named WR Taurus Johnson.
TAMPA — Perhaps the most tangible sign of South Florida's brand-spanking newness can be found in its gleaming $15 million athletic training facility. Inside the lobby, the Hall of Fame is filled with empty trophy cases just waiting for history to happen.
Could this be the year? South Florida's football program, only as old as the average fifth-grader, is a stunning success story in a sport defined by tradition. The Bulls, ranked last month for the first time in their 11-year history, are not only in the Bowl Championship Series standings for the first time but also No. 2 behind venerable Ohio State.
If USF can win its remaining six games, beginning with Big East rival Rutgers on Thursday night (7:30 ET, ESPN), the Bulls could be playing in the BCS title game Jan. 7 in New Orleans.
It took 137 years for Rutgers, which played the first college football game in 1869, to be top 10. It was 1900 when Ohio State was in its 11th season. When Boston College, No. 3 in the BCS, was in its 11th season in 1909, one of three wins was against the College of Osteopathy.
So how did the Bulls pull this off so quickly? Many of the answers can be found in the cave-like corner office belonging to Jim Leavitt, the only head coach the program has known. With the green blinds shut tight, the lights off, the door closed as usual, the only glow illuminating the room belongs to the X's and O's projected on a big screen.
"Do you mind the dark?" Leavitt asks.
Leavitt, formerly Kansas State's defensive coordinator, is wearing a white dress shirt and a tie only because he must go before TV cameras at his news conference. Otherwise, he might be barefoot. On the table in front of him is an ever-present gallon of orange juice to soothe a persistently hoarse throat. Struggling with a lingering cold, he lost his voice in last year's loss to Rutgers.
"I truly believe to this day that that affected it," Leavitt says of the game's outcome.
Despite the geographical confusion — Tampa is in the west-central part of the state, but the school is South Florida because it was the state's southernmost public university when founded in 1956 — Leavitt has quite literally put USF on the map. Using Kansas State's remarkable turnaround as his blueprint, Leavitt built the Bulls, who joined Division I-A in 2003 in Conference USA. Two years later they moved to the Big East Conference.
"He loves this program probably as much as anyone has loved a program, like Knute Rockne at Notre Dame or John McKay at Southern Cal or Bear Bryant at Alabama," says defensive coordinator Wally Burnham, in his fourth decade as a college coach. "His passion for this program is one of the major reasons why it is where it is today."
Coach runs gassers, head-butts
The one word used most often to describe Leavitt is "intense."
When the team leaves the locker room on game day, Leavitt does not simply run to the sideline. He tears across the field as if his visor is on fire. Once the game begins, he runs gassers up and down the sideline, tosses the occasional visor and hugs players as if delivering a sack.
At times he has head-butted his players so hard, while they were wearing helmets and he wasn't, he "just about knocked himself out," senior linebacker Ben Moffitt says.
Once in awhile, Leavitt will do his bull run during practice.
"We'll look across the field and see him kicking feet as if he's a bull," sophomore quarterback Matt Grothe says. "He turns his hat backward and starts sprinting 100 yards toward us and then slides face-first into the grass and skips about 10 yards into us. It looks pretty painful."
Defensive line coach Dan McCarney, Iowa State's longtime coach — who, with running backs coach Carl Franks, formerly at Duke, gives USF two former BCS head coaches — has known Leavitt since both were at Iowa in 1989. "In a positive way, he walks to the beat of a different drummer," McCarney says.
Leavitt, 50, allows he "can't sit still" and he's a "pretty hyped-up guy." You think? His energy helped turn this upstart start-up into college football's version of Google, going from nothing to now in an equally short time.
"We have just built a foundation," Leavitt says.
The foundation was built on players from Florida, arguably the top state for talent. There are only nine out-of-state players on the roster, although Leavitt says, "That's high for us." The team's makeup is a combination of overlooked players, a few highly recruited ones who wanted to stay home and a handful of transfers who left big programs to return home.
"The so-called 'Big Three' (Florida, Florida State and Miami) can't get 'em all," says Burnham, who was at Florida State for nine years.
Finding the right players
Sophomore defensive end George Selvie, who leads the nation with 11½ sacks and 21½ tackles for loss, was one of those overlooked players. USF was the only Division I-A school to offer Selvie, then a center, a scholarship. There was concern Selvie, now 6-4, 245, wasn't big enough to play in Division I-A. When Leavitt came to visit in Pensacola, Fla., the coach made Selvie stand and turn around so he could take a good look.
"Why in the world would anyone think you're too small?" Leavitt told him. "Look at you. God, I want you to come to South Florida. Would you please come to South Florida?"
At USF, Selvie was converted into a defensive lineman simply because the team needed one.
"I still think he'd be a great center," Leavitt says.
When Leavitt recruited Grothe, from nearby Lakeland, he wasn't sure if he would be a quarterback or a defensive back.
"Everyone said he was short, but all I kept seeing was a guy who moved the chains," Leavitt says.
Grothe, listed at 6-0, 200, says, "All that three-star, four-star stuff in recruiting is kind of overrated. Not to diss on him, but (Notre Dame's) Jimmy Clausen was supposed to be one of the best quarterbacks ever, and he's struggling this year. It's just a matter of what kind of coaching you have."
Grothe committed early to USF, but he also considered South Carolina, Central Florida and Wake Forest. Now Grothe is one of the best dual-purpose quarterbacks in the country, rushing for at least 100 yards in the last two games.
"He is incredibly mobile, and he throws the ball accurately on the run," Rutgers coach Greg Schiano says.
But what Schiano likes most about Grothe is his moxie. Last year, when Grothe was scrambling near the Rutgers sideline as he threw a pass, Schiano yelled out to the officials, "He's over the line!" Without breaking stride, Grothe turned to Schiano and said, "No, I wasn't!" and kept running.
"That's my kind of guy," Schiano says. "He looks like he just loves being out there. He's a big part of why they're playing so well now."
The defense, which has forced three or more turnovers four times this season and hasn't allowed a 100-yard rusher in 14 consecutive games, is led by Moffitt in the middle. Moffitt, 6-2, 240, was a highly regarded recruit who wanted to go to Florida, but the Gators didn't have a spot for him.
Moffitt makes a 110-mile round trip every day from his home in Bushnell to Tampa so he can be with his wife, who works as a data specialist, and two young children. On a typical Monday, for instance, he rises at 6 a.m., takes his children to school, drives to Tampa for his 9:30 class, goes to his second class, lifts weights, goes to meetings and attends evening practices, which end at 9.
"A lot of times I don't get to tuck the kids in, but when I get home I kiss them and pray over them and make sure they're OK," Moffitt says.
Criticism over academics
When South Florida became the fastest in the modern era to go from Division I-AA to a top 10 ranking in Division I-A, the criticism began to surface. Alabama coach Nick Saban, who lost two players to USF he initially signed, chimed in about USF's admission policies.
"The distribution of players is not the same for everybody," Saban told The Birmingham (Ala.) News. "There's a significant amount of players who don't qualify (at some schools) and they end up being pretty good players at some other schools. I think there are six guys starting on South Florida's defense who probably could have gone to Florida or Florida State, but Florida and Florida State couldn't take them. And if you do a good job of recruiting that way … ."
The perception USF is full of players who wouldn't qualify at other places is wrong, says Leavitt, who resents the suggestion his program has taken shortcuts.
"You can't do something because you've worked hard?" he asks. "Let's be honest, (some of his players) didn't go to Florida or Florida State not because of academics. They didn't have the ability (according to those schools). They could have gotten in. No doubt. If they were recruited."
USF director of undergraduate admissions J. Robert Spatig recently worked at Georgia and is familiar with the Southeastern Conference.
"There's not a football player on our team that Nick Saban couldn't get admitted to the University of Alabama if he wanted that player," Spatig says.
In the NCAA Academic Progress Rate data released last spring, USF had a 910, lowest among the Big East's football teams, which Leavitt attributes to the transition that took place as it prepared to join the league. With an enrollment of more than 45,000, largest in the league, the school's median SAT score for all students last year was 1,110, above only West Virginia among Big East football schools.
When the Bulls began play in the Big East in 2005, possibilities opened for the team that once seemed farfetched, including an automatic BCS berth and a shot at the national title.
"When I researched them, people said to me they are no different than what Miami and Florida State were early in their histories," Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese says.
Tranghese saw USF had everything in place for the Bulls to be successful — a strong recruiting base, a large stadium (Raymond James, where the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers play) and a good market. Now USF is the top-ranked football school in the state.
"It probably happened sooner than some people thought, but I'm not terribly surprised by it, to be honest," Tranghese says. "I've seen basketball programs do it (so quickly), but I don't know if I've seen a football program."
The one trophy case that is filled in USF's Hall of Fame contains items from landmark moments in the program's nanosecond history. There's the picture of the day Leavitt was hired. There's a photo of the trailers that housed the program until three years ago. There's the first game ball from Sept. 6, 1997, a win.
"Hopefully," Grothe says while scanning the lobby, "I'll see these stacked full with trophies when I come back 10, 15 years from now."
If not sooner.
TAMPA -- When South Florida hired Jim Leavitt, then Kansas State's defensive coordinator, in December 1995, the school couldn't offer much.
"I can't even say it was grassroots. It was roots," says Lee Roy Selmon, the former Oklahoma Sooners star, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' first draft pick and a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
"We started off very much with nothing," says Selmon, brought on as associate athletic director to help launch the football program and later served as athletics director.
The football offices were housed in trailers near the baseball field. Given the sparse accommodations, Selmon says his main concern was, "I hope we don't run (Leavitt) off."
Mike Canales, the team's first offensive coordinator who returned this season as an assistant, laughs now at those early days.
"True story," Canales says. "Not long after we started, Jim brought in a hat-full of pieces of paper with assignments, which read 'Clean the toilets,' 'Vacuum,' 'Dust,' Empty the trash,' Sweep the walkway.' " All the coaches had to pick a chore out of the hat.
The trailers soon defined the program, although rivals derided the school as "Trailer Park U." Three years ago, the coaching staff moved into the expansive training center which houses most of the athletics department.
"I miss the trailers some days because nobody bothered you and you can park right there and you didn't have to go through all these doors and all these steps to get in and out of the building and you could go barefoot into the trailers wearing shorts," Leavitt says. "I miss that. But it's not the buildings that make a program, it's the people."
Ask Leavitt if he has any keepsakes from those halcyon days, and he leaps from his office couch. "Come on," he says, as he heads down the hall.
Before he left Kansas State he measured the size of the slots for the coaches' mailbox, 4 inches by 8 inches, then built an exact replica for his staff at South Florida. "That gives you an idea how detailed it was," Leavitt says, pointing at a wood mailbox hanging near a copy machine.
In recent seasons Leavitt has turned down job offers at Alabama, Kansas State and another prominent school he declines to name. His parents still live in the St. Petersburg, Fla., house where he was raised.
He says he has also spurned other Big Ten and Southeastern Conference suitors who have shown interest.
"Why do I love this place? I grew up here, my mom and dad are here, my family is here, and we started it all in a trailer," Leavitt says. "I love these players. I can't speak for other head coaches, but I don't know how they leave their players."
THURSDAY'S GAME
No. 3 South Florida (6-0) at Rutgers (4-2)
Time/TV: 7:30 ET/ESPN
Surface: Artificial
Sheridan's line: South Florida by 2
Sagarin difference: South Florida +12.31
The anticipated scenario of top-10 power against Big East spoiler has, indeed, come to pass. Though the roles are reversed from preseason expectations, Rutgers remains in the hunt for the conference title after ending a two-game skid. But the upstart Bulls have answered every challenge, thanks mostly to the nation's 11th-ranked defense. South Florida has gone 14 consecutive games without allowing a 100-yard rusher, but the last to do it was Rutgers RB Ray Rice. He will look to follow up his best outing of this season. Rice will need air cover from QB Mike Teel, but South Florida DE George Selvie must be accounted for. Scarlet Knights LB Kevin Malast and S Courtney Greene must corral Bulls dual-threat QB Matt Grothe, whose top deep weapon is aptly named WR Taurus Johnson.
TAMPA — Perhaps the most tangible sign of South Florida's brand-spanking newness can be found in its gleaming $15 million athletic training facility. Inside the lobby, the Hall of Fame is filled with empty trophy cases just waiting for history to happen.
Could this be the year? South Florida's football program, only as old as the average fifth-grader, is a stunning success story in a sport defined by tradition. The Bulls, ranked last month for the first time in their 11-year history, are not only in the Bowl Championship Series standings for the first time but also No. 2 behind venerable Ohio State.
If USF can win its remaining six games, beginning with Big East rival Rutgers on Thursday night (7:30 ET, ESPN), the Bulls could be playing in the BCS title game Jan. 7 in New Orleans.
It took 137 years for Rutgers, which played the first college football game in 1869, to be top 10. It was 1900 when Ohio State was in its 11th season. When Boston College, No. 3 in the BCS, was in its 11th season in 1909, one of three wins was against the College of Osteopathy.
So how did the Bulls pull this off so quickly? Many of the answers can be found in the cave-like corner office belonging to Jim Leavitt, the only head coach the program has known. With the green blinds shut tight, the lights off, the door closed as usual, the only glow illuminating the room belongs to the X's and O's projected on a big screen.
"Do you mind the dark?" Leavitt asks.
Leavitt, formerly Kansas State's defensive coordinator, is wearing a white dress shirt and a tie only because he must go before TV cameras at his news conference. Otherwise, he might be barefoot. On the table in front of him is an ever-present gallon of orange juice to soothe a persistently hoarse throat. Struggling with a lingering cold, he lost his voice in last year's loss to Rutgers.
"I truly believe to this day that that affected it," Leavitt says of the game's outcome.
Despite the geographical confusion — Tampa is in the west-central part of the state, but the school is South Florida because it was the state's southernmost public university when founded in 1956 — Leavitt has quite literally put USF on the map. Using Kansas State's remarkable turnaround as his blueprint, Leavitt built the Bulls, who joined Division I-A in 2003 in Conference USA. Two years later they moved to the Big East Conference.
"He loves this program probably as much as anyone has loved a program, like Knute Rockne at Notre Dame or John McKay at Southern Cal or Bear Bryant at Alabama," says defensive coordinator Wally Burnham, in his fourth decade as a college coach. "His passion for this program is one of the major reasons why it is where it is today."
Coach runs gassers, head-butts
The one word used most often to describe Leavitt is "intense."
When the team leaves the locker room on game day, Leavitt does not simply run to the sideline. He tears across the field as if his visor is on fire. Once the game begins, he runs gassers up and down the sideline, tosses the occasional visor and hugs players as if delivering a sack.
At times he has head-butted his players so hard, while they were wearing helmets and he wasn't, he "just about knocked himself out," senior linebacker Ben Moffitt says.
Once in awhile, Leavitt will do his bull run during practice.
"We'll look across the field and see him kicking feet as if he's a bull," sophomore quarterback Matt Grothe says. "He turns his hat backward and starts sprinting 100 yards toward us and then slides face-first into the grass and skips about 10 yards into us. It looks pretty painful."
Defensive line coach Dan McCarney, Iowa State's longtime coach — who, with running backs coach Carl Franks, formerly at Duke, gives USF two former BCS head coaches — has known Leavitt since both were at Iowa in 1989. "In a positive way, he walks to the beat of a different drummer," McCarney says.
Leavitt, 50, allows he "can't sit still" and he's a "pretty hyped-up guy." You think? His energy helped turn this upstart start-up into college football's version of Google, going from nothing to now in an equally short time.
"We have just built a foundation," Leavitt says.
The foundation was built on players from Florida, arguably the top state for talent. There are only nine out-of-state players on the roster, although Leavitt says, "That's high for us." The team's makeup is a combination of overlooked players, a few highly recruited ones who wanted to stay home and a handful of transfers who left big programs to return home.
"The so-called 'Big Three' (Florida, Florida State and Miami) can't get 'em all," says Burnham, who was at Florida State for nine years.
Finding the right players
Sophomore defensive end George Selvie, who leads the nation with 11½ sacks and 21½ tackles for loss, was one of those overlooked players. USF was the only Division I-A school to offer Selvie, then a center, a scholarship. There was concern Selvie, now 6-4, 245, wasn't big enough to play in Division I-A. When Leavitt came to visit in Pensacola, Fla., the coach made Selvie stand and turn around so he could take a good look.
"Why in the world would anyone think you're too small?" Leavitt told him. "Look at you. God, I want you to come to South Florida. Would you please come to South Florida?"
At USF, Selvie was converted into a defensive lineman simply because the team needed one.
"I still think he'd be a great center," Leavitt says.
When Leavitt recruited Grothe, from nearby Lakeland, he wasn't sure if he would be a quarterback or a defensive back.
"Everyone said he was short, but all I kept seeing was a guy who moved the chains," Leavitt says.
Grothe, listed at 6-0, 200, says, "All that three-star, four-star stuff in recruiting is kind of overrated. Not to diss on him, but (Notre Dame's) Jimmy Clausen was supposed to be one of the best quarterbacks ever, and he's struggling this year. It's just a matter of what kind of coaching you have."
Grothe committed early to USF, but he also considered South Carolina, Central Florida and Wake Forest. Now Grothe is one of the best dual-purpose quarterbacks in the country, rushing for at least 100 yards in the last two games.
"He is incredibly mobile, and he throws the ball accurately on the run," Rutgers coach Greg Schiano says.
But what Schiano likes most about Grothe is his moxie. Last year, when Grothe was scrambling near the Rutgers sideline as he threw a pass, Schiano yelled out to the officials, "He's over the line!" Without breaking stride, Grothe turned to Schiano and said, "No, I wasn't!" and kept running.
"That's my kind of guy," Schiano says. "He looks like he just loves being out there. He's a big part of why they're playing so well now."
The defense, which has forced three or more turnovers four times this season and hasn't allowed a 100-yard rusher in 14 consecutive games, is led by Moffitt in the middle. Moffitt, 6-2, 240, was a highly regarded recruit who wanted to go to Florida, but the Gators didn't have a spot for him.
Moffitt makes a 110-mile round trip every day from his home in Bushnell to Tampa so he can be with his wife, who works as a data specialist, and two young children. On a typical Monday, for instance, he rises at 6 a.m., takes his children to school, drives to Tampa for his 9:30 class, goes to his second class, lifts weights, goes to meetings and attends evening practices, which end at 9.
"A lot of times I don't get to tuck the kids in, but when I get home I kiss them and pray over them and make sure they're OK," Moffitt says.
Criticism over academics
When South Florida became the fastest in the modern era to go from Division I-AA to a top 10 ranking in Division I-A, the criticism began to surface. Alabama coach Nick Saban, who lost two players to USF he initially signed, chimed in about USF's admission policies.
"The distribution of players is not the same for everybody," Saban told The Birmingham (Ala.) News. "There's a significant amount of players who don't qualify (at some schools) and they end up being pretty good players at some other schools. I think there are six guys starting on South Florida's defense who probably could have gone to Florida or Florida State, but Florida and Florida State couldn't take them. And if you do a good job of recruiting that way … ."
The perception USF is full of players who wouldn't qualify at other places is wrong, says Leavitt, who resents the suggestion his program has taken shortcuts.
"You can't do something because you've worked hard?" he asks. "Let's be honest, (some of his players) didn't go to Florida or Florida State not because of academics. They didn't have the ability (according to those schools). They could have gotten in. No doubt. If they were recruited."
USF director of undergraduate admissions J. Robert Spatig recently worked at Georgia and is familiar with the Southeastern Conference.
"There's not a football player on our team that Nick Saban couldn't get admitted to the University of Alabama if he wanted that player," Spatig says.
In the NCAA Academic Progress Rate data released last spring, USF had a 910, lowest among the Big East's football teams, which Leavitt attributes to the transition that took place as it prepared to join the league. With an enrollment of more than 45,000, largest in the league, the school's median SAT score for all students last year was 1,110, above only West Virginia among Big East football schools.
When the Bulls began play in the Big East in 2005, possibilities opened for the team that once seemed farfetched, including an automatic BCS berth and a shot at the national title.
"When I researched them, people said to me they are no different than what Miami and Florida State were early in their histories," Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese says.
Tranghese saw USF had everything in place for the Bulls to be successful — a strong recruiting base, a large stadium (Raymond James, where the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers play) and a good market. Now USF is the top-ranked football school in the state.
"It probably happened sooner than some people thought, but I'm not terribly surprised by it, to be honest," Tranghese says. "I've seen basketball programs do it (so quickly), but I don't know if I've seen a football program."
The one trophy case that is filled in USF's Hall of Fame contains items from landmark moments in the program's nanosecond history. There's the picture of the day Leavitt was hired. There's a photo of the trailers that housed the program until three years ago. There's the first game ball from Sept. 6, 1997, a win.
"Hopefully," Grothe says while scanning the lobby, "I'll see these stacked full with trophies when I come back 10, 15 years from now."
If not sooner.
