USF in upbeat time, but basketball looks like a downer
By HUBERT MIZELL
Published November 9, 2003
It's stunning, blurring even to the competitive mind, what is happening with USF athletics.
What smarts, fortune, timing and fortitude in initiating a football program, something I once characterized as a bad risk ... because no university had created a flourishing big-time program in more than a half century, not since FSU in 1947.
I'm not counting Air Force.
What a sweet USF stroke in hiring Jim Leavitt, co-coach of a stout Kansas State defense with Bob Stoops, and the St. Petersburg guy escalated the Bulls at a heroic pace, developing a delightful and reasonably priced alternative to the Bucs at Raymond James Stadium.
Opportunity kept coming in unexpected, unprecedented waves. But now, as USF skips through its brief romance with Conference USA, with fancier times coming in the Big East, the fun should keep growing, but so too will the challenges.
It's not USF football that most concerns me, it is Bulls basketball, whose achievements still have to work up to sparse. I can see Leavitt, with enhanced budget and facilities, becoming anything but a tortured toy for Syracuse, West Virginia, Pitt, Louisville and Big East others.
Hoops, that's a teeth-chattering USF risk. As charming and magnetic as it will be to have a Sun Dome schedule jammed with Orangemen as well as UConn, Villanova, Louisville, Marquette, Georgetown and Cincinnati - all seven having won NCAA national championships - along with St. John's and Seton Hall, it is easy to see USF getting beat up like a nerd at a biker bar.
USF, if it doesn't beef up talent and speed up its basketball product, will become the weakest link in what will be America's strongest basketball conference.
Football/money are reasons for wild conference jumping triggered by the ACC, forcing the Big East to scramble for new friends, but in such proud, visible, fierce company you don't want your basketball chaps to become the conference's well-stuffed joke.
Miami and Virginia Tech will dilute forever-proud ACC hoops. Those are football toughies but their basketball is insufficient. Along with FSU, a football stud but rarely a basketball threat in its dozen ACC years, league members 9-10-11 are all but certain to water down a power product featuring Duke, North Carolina, Wake Forest, Maryland, N.C. State and Virginia.
Get busy, Bulls. Playing basketball in C-USA is challenging, opposing Louisville as well as Cincinnati, DePaul and Marquette. USF has snoozer status. Ante is about to rise. USF must recruit better, coach smarter and play a lot better to not be embarrassed once the Huskies, Hoyas, Orange and the other Big East bullies begin showing up at the Sun Dome.
JUMP SHOTS: Bob Cousy, the NBA's slickest '50s point guard, triggerman on a Boston run of nine championships, now 75, says he is "not a yesterday person" and is putting his trophies, rings, plaques and other memories up for sale, hoping to earn $200,000 to help two daughters. ... Billy Donovan came to a "football school" and coached an already respected basketball show to even greater heights, and this year's Gators, ranked a preseason eighth in the country in the coaches' poll, will find out a lot early with crusty games at Arizona and Louisville plus a Gainesville exam against Maryland. ... Pardon me if I don't get excited about Kobe Bryant's dynamic play.
GO HORNED FROGS!: I'm no TCU booster, but any school that threatens to make the BCS look foolish - which it is - becomes a favorite of mine. TCU isn't close to Oklahoma or USC in power, and probably not among the nation's dozen best teams, but the Frogs are undefeated and deserve their little stab at a national championship.
Not even Congress is strong enough or gutsy enough to bring down BCS bosses and their TV co-conspirators, but I want America screaming because the Horned Frogs are being robbed of an opportunity.
I have pleaded for Division I football playoffs since Bobby Bowden was an AARP rookie. It disgusts me that self-serving conference commissioners, along with the TV knuckleheads, refuse to do what is right by creating a 16-team playoff.
Imagine the prospects.
What if, in round one, we had top-seeded Sooners against No. 16 Frogs? Would that be fun? We'd be talking 15 games with mighty meaning, not just one Sugar Bowl as arranged by BCS instigators.
Ohio State and Florida State would definitely be in the race for the national championship, as would Tennessee, Virginia Tech, LSU, Ole Miss, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, Pitt and Florida. It wouldn't be Oklahoma-Southern California and nothing else.
