Ask Jim Leavitt about the sudden emergence of the University of South Florida football program, and the coach spreads his hands as if describing a huge fish he caught.
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The $15 million athletic complex opened in 2004, replacing
a collection of double-wide trailers. |
“Eleven years is a long time,” said Leavitt, the program’s first and only head coach. “That’s a significant segment of my life. I don’t know if you’d call it a short time.”
After starting the season 6-0, the Bulls were second in the season’s first BCS poll before their first loss of the year, to Rutgers on Oct. 18. In a topsy-turvy season where a top-five team seems to lose weekly, the young Bulls represent how quickly the college football landscape has changed.
If Leavitt bristles at suggestions of overnight success, it’s only because USF has taken a systematic approach to football since its board of regents approved the sport in September of 1995. In just 12 years — this is the team’s 11th season — the school has gone from startup to Division I-A to BCS conference member to national title contender.
In the last four years, USF has defeated three top-10 teams, including West Virginia this season, opened a $15 million athletic complex, and undergone a rebranding of the entire department. Until the new complex opened in 2004, Leavitt and his staff operated out of a flotilla of double-wide trailers.
For a school with a geographically incorrect name — South Florida’s primary campus is located in Tampa, far northwest of Miami and Fort Lauderdale — the football team’s success has perhaps put USF correctly on the map.
Already the football team has inspired students to camp out for tickets, creating the type of campus spirit not generally seen at a university still trying to shake its commuter school label. USF has provided a blueprint for other recent in-state football startups such as Florida Atlantic University and Florida International University. And the football success could expedite USF’s fundraising efforts for an ambitious planned upgrade of its athletic facilities.
“The higher your profile, the more quickly things can happen,” said Tom Veit, a former USF athletic department official who now as Tampa general manager for Action Sports Media is shopping naming rights for the Sun Dome, the school’s basketball arena. “All of a sudden, people want to be part of your program.”
That could translate into everything from more high-profile recruits for Leavitt to greater alumni contributions. It also could help kick-start the struggling men’s basketball program, which many believe could thrive in a top-15 market without an NBA team.
Applications for next year’s freshman class are up 17 percent compared with the same point in late October 2006, according to USF admissions director Bob Spatig, though the school was seeing an increase as far back as July.
“I would imagine our success in football is helping to push that up,” Spatig said. “I guarantee there are more people out there today that know about USF than a month ago.”
“It’s always been a great school in a wonderful part of the country,” said Tim Ruskell, the Seattle Seahawks president and a USF graduate. “Now they’ll draw even better football players, as well as better students that might just be hearing about the school for the first time.”
Back in 1995, the goal for football was simply to raise awareness of the athletic department.
“Without college football, institutions are absent from the sports pages and public consciousness from spring to Thanksgiving,” said former USF Athletic Director Paul Griffin, who spearheaded the USF football effort and is now senior associate director of athletics at Georgia Tech. “The other ingredient was to provide another aspect to campus life that had not been available.”
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| The Bulls have done their best job ever
filling Raymond James Stadium this year. |
With more than 44,000 students, USF is the largest school in the Big East and one of the biggest in the nation. Though only about 4,400 students live on campus, more than 70 percent live within two miles, mostly in apartments marketed to students. Students have turned out in droves this season to watch USF at Raymond James Stadium, the Big East’s largest facility (66,657), located 13 miles away and home to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Bulls sold out two games, against West Virginia and Central Florida, for the first time in history, and surpassed the 20,000 mark for season tickets.
“The excitement is partly because of the team’s success, but also because a sort of critical mass has been reached in terms of campus community,” says Rick Wilber, a professor in USF’s mass communications department. “There’s a lot to do on campus these days and students no longer drive, park, attend class and drive home.”
Car flags and USF merchandise are more visible around town during the latest Bull run, though sales have been on the upswing since the athletic department rebranded in 2003 and began selling merchandise at retailers throughout Tampa Bay. USF gear previously was sold mostly on or near campus.
Veit, a USF graduate who previously had worked in marketing for arena football’s Tampa Bay Storm, the now-defunct Tampa Bay Mutiny of Major League Soccer, and the Orlando Rage of the XFL, oversaw the rebranding of an abstract green-and-yellow logo he refers to as “the electric goat.”
With the rebranding, the color scheme shifted to a darker green and from yellow to gold, which some commentators have noted this season has allowed USF to fill the void left by struggling Notre Dame in more ways than one. The electric goat was replaced by a more iconic logo, a USF with the U tweaked to look like a bull’s head with horns.
The move was done in part to give USF women’s teams an abbreviated logo to put on jerseys other than “Bulls.” More importantly, it rebranded the school from South Florida to USF, a source of contention since 1957, when school founders chose the South Florida name over nominees such as “Sunshine State University” and “The University of Florida at Temple Terrace.”
These days, the USF athletic media relations department encourages the use of USF in first reference. Local print media outlets generally have adopted the use, though television networks seem reluctant to give the school the type of treatment usually reserved for the likes of Southern Cal (USC) and UCLA.
USF’s quick rise to prominence and national title contention could not have occurred without the seismic conference realignments that took place late in 2003, with Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College bolting the Big East for the ACC. That created openings for USF, along with Louisville and Cincinnati, to jump from Conference USA to the Big East. USF accepted an invitation to join the Big East just six weeks after playing its first Conference USA game.
Besides competing for a BCS bowl bid, USF played twice this season on ESPN’s high-profile Big East package on Thursday and Friday nights.
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| USF quickly rose from a fledgling program
to,for a while this year, a BCS contender. |
“If you want to know what a difference being in the Big East means, just go over to Orlando,” Griffin said.
That’s a reference to the University of Central Florida, which started its football program in 1979, entered Division I-A in ’96 and went 9-2 with quarterback Daunte Culpepper two years later. USF has defeated the Conference USA school in each of the last three seasons, including a 64-12 rout in Tampa on Oct. 13.
Many credit USF’s move to the Big East to Lee Roy Selmon, the hall of famer and former Tampa Bay Buccaneers star who succeeded Griffin as athletic director in 2001. Selmon had worked in banking after his NFL career and knew the strategic business position of Florida.
“I didn’t believe that the Big East wanted to lose that identity in the state of Florida and I thought we had an awful lot to offer,” Selmon said.
Since 2004, Selmon has been in charge of the USF Foundation Partnership for Athletics, which is raising money for the proposed “USF Athletics District,” consisting of nine new or renovated facilities for basketball, baseball, softball, soccer, tennis and track, along with additional football practice fields.
The district does not include an on-campus football stadium. USF Athletic Director Doug Woolard points out that many prominent programs, including Pittsburgh, Southern Cal, Miami and UCLA, play off campus and that an on-campus facility at USF would need to rival the state-of-the-art Raymond James Stadium in amenities.
That makes such construction cost-prohibitive for now, though it speaks volumes about the quick emergence of USF football that the possibility is even open for discussion.
“An on-campus stadium would be a real advantage to do at some point,” Woolard said. “If and when we build something, we want to make sure we do it the right way, building something that meets our needs.”
Pete Williams is a writer in Safety Harbor, Fla.
