Sports

Colleges

Bulls try to avoid second straight upset loss

By GREG AUMAN, Times Staff Writer
Published October 27, 2007

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TAMPA - Former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli once wrote that "There is no education like adversity," but in this improbable college football season, that has often been a lesson learned a week too late.

This has been the Year of the Upset, to be sure, with 19 losses by Top 10 teams, including USF, which rose to No. 2 amid the chaos, then fell to the same upset bug last week at Rutgers.

More remarkable, perhaps, than the losses by Top 10 teams is the way they've followed disappointment with disaster: In games following a team's first loss as a Top 10 team, those teams are a combined 6-8, more often than not losing a second game in a row.

"You want to come back and play awfully good football, and it's going to take awfully good football to beat Connecticut," said coach Jim Leavitt, whose team lost a chance at playing for the Big East title in 2005 with a 15-10 loss in East Hartford.

Could the No. 11 Bulls fall to the same national upset-begets-upset pattern today? The precedent is there: Burn too much emotion getting to the top, and you have nothing left to slow your descent after a loss.

"That's the hard part: There's been so many emotional highs for this football team," said Leavitt, whose Bulls beat ranked Auburn and West Virginia teams last month. "There's a lot of football left to be played. We're just into the Big East season. We've played two games. To stay focused on the game you're getting ready to play is really important."

So as the Bulls travel to face an unranked but dangerous Connecticut team today, they hope to instead join the six Top 10 teams that have been able to collect themselves after a humbling loss, a group that includes LSU, Oklahoma and West Virginia, who each could rebound all the way to the national championship game.

USF (6-1, 1-1) is just focusing on the Big East, and Connecticut is the last Big East team remaining without a conference loss. If the Bulls can take care of that today, they'd have the inside track on the league crown, needing to win their remaining games and have Rutgers lose, as the Knights could today against West Virginia.

Connecticut (6-1, 2-0) is the only one-loss team from a BCS conference not ranked in the major polls, but the Huskies have enough rankings to earn USF's respect. They're No. 3 in scoring defense and haven't allowed any opponents to score more than 17 points; No. 1 Ohio State is the only other team that can boast such stinginess.

The Huskies, sixth nationally in yards allowed, are also tied for second in turnover margin, forcing 11 more than they've committed; USF is right behind at fourth nationally with a plus-10 margin. Last week taught the Bulls that turnovers aren't enough, as they forced three against Rutgers and didn't commit one until their final offensive play.

Having lost on a Thursday night, the Bulls had two extra days to put the Rutgers loss behind them. Quarterback Matt Grothe went on a hunting trip in Ohio with long-snapper Eric Setser, which gave him time for reflection, if no meat for the freezer.

"It was nice. It (stunk) that I didn't kill anything," Grothe said. "But it was nice to get away, to get off on a different path."

The Bulls today will put the rest of their season on one of two paths; a win would keep them as front-runners for their first Big East crown, while a loss would simply add them to the list of Top 10 teams unable to stop themselves from a second setback.

"We've got to bounce back," defensive tackle Aaron Harris said. "Our thing is finishing strong, and that's what we're going to do."

[Last modified October 26, 2007, 16:42:12]