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New kid on the block

South Florida officially is Division I-A which means Division I-A opponents and plenty of difficult games.

By BRUCE LOWITT

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 30, 2001

[Times photo: Bill Serne] Bulls coach Jim Leavitt wants to focus on the journey to the future. ‘‘The first year you go into I-A you’re never going to be ready for it. . . . but you’ve got to have a first year sometime.”

TAMPA -- The theme of this year's South Florida football season could be Great Expectations.

Or maybe Not So Great ...

"There aren't many people out there who think we're going to win many games," said coach Jim Leavitt, whose Bulls move this season to Division I-A after playing their first four in I-AA. "But there weren't that many people who thought we were going to win many games last fall."

They were 7-4 in 2000. That's the good news.

The bad? The four losses were to I-A teams by an average score of 35-10.

That was the "transition" season.

This year there are eight I-A teams on the schedule.

So how bad can it be?

"I hate to use this as an analogy, but you're never prepared for death," Leavitt said, making it sound as if he's leading not a herd of charging Bulls but the charge of the Light Brigade. "I don't care if someone is 80, 90 years old and dies; when that moment comes, you have to deal with it. Even though you think you're ready for it, you're not.

"Okay, when you go to Division I-A in football -- I know this is a horrible analogy, not like apples and apples -- you're never going to be ready for that. You've never played that kind of schedule. You're in all the publications and everyone knows you're I-A now. The first year you go into I-A you're never going to be ready for it ... but you've got to have a first year sometime."

The timing is right for the jump to I-A, athletic director Lee Roy Selmon said, "although maybe a little faster than what most of us would have expected. I can't recall any other football program in the country to have made it quite as quickly. ... People probably don't expect too much out of us this year. Maybe we can surprise a few of them."

USF's inaugural year was 1997. It finished 5-6 and could have done better. The Bulls' smallest margin of victory was 16 points. They had victories by 44, 45 and an absurd 77 points in the 80-3 opener over Kentucky Wesleyan. Two of USF's losses, on the other hand, were by one point: 23-22 to Drake when the Bulldogs erased a 12-point deficit, and 24-23 to Georgia Southern when a 2-point conversion attempt after a fourth-quarter touchdown failed.

The Bulls haven't had a losing season since.

This could be the next one.

And "could be" might be understating things.

"We've played four years of football," Leavitt said. "What are we? We're a strong I-AA team. That's obvious because of who we've played. Are we anything in I-A? No. We haven't done a thing in I-A. ...

"I think everything we've done for this program is right on target. I don't think anybody can debate that because we've had success. But I don't think anyone's ever going to believe we're going to be that good until we start beating I-A teams consistently. That's normal."

So, rose-colored fantasies aside, how does he prepare his players for a season that could end 4-7, maybe 3-8, maybe worse?

He doesn't.

"I don't think you talk to them about records," Leavitt said. "I never have. You talk to them about getting better. I don't want to underestimate what our players can do, I don't want to put a limit on them. ... I just have to make sure the guys play with confidence. They know they're as good as any I-AA team out there. What they don't know is how good they are in I-A. But they're excited about the challenge.

"Our guys realize they were recruited by other I-A schools. We don't have many players who weren't offered a full I-A scholarship somewhere else. That mentality alone makes them feel like they can play with any of (their opponents)."

So Leavitt stresses the journey, not the destination. He said they are pioneers of sorts, that they're going into a program that is moving up to I-A, something that only happens once. And he said his freshmen and sophomores will be pioneers in 2003 when USF becomes part of Conference USA. And when that happens, USF will have a chance at a bowl game. "Will we be there? I don't know," Leavitt said, "but there's always that chance."

The idea, of course, is to turn the Big Three (Florida, Florida State, Miami) into the Big Four, with the Bulls muscling their way into the company of Gators, Seminoles and Hurricanes.

"That's where we're going," Selmon said. "Our goal is to be one of those elite programs. Two years from now, five, 10, I don't know if we'll be there and I don't know if I'll be here, but what's most important is that we do our best every day. You never know. Someday soon we might be able to look around and say, "Wow! Look how far we've come.' "

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