Gus, let’s not get cute and try to play both Keene and Plumlee please. Don’t try to out smart yourself
To clarify, I mean like physically, he runs like kyler. Like that holding the ball out and running like a large fast toddler type of form
In addition to the Knights, Jamal Meriweather held offers from Tennessee, Mississippi State, Michigan State, Utah, Virginia Tech, USC and more than a dozen other programs. He is UCF’s second commitment this weekend, joining four-star EDGE Isaiah Nixon. I’ll take it!
Hopefully we get this Jayvontay Conner dude on Wednesday. No idea how he is a mid 3 star with his offer list and size.
Is that normal though? How many teams give out rings for bowl games? And if the players like them then whatever.
yeah all FL teams were average so doing this is cringe but we seem to be addicted to creating offseason outrage/mockery from the Finebaum caller demographic
I see no issue at all with doing bowl game rings, and I have to believe it plays really well with the kids in recruiting. Now what is cringy is the people in the UCF FB group posting pics of 30-year-old "state champs" posters and t-shirts from UF and saying "see they do it too!!"
I am nervous that Vinik could gift USF more money than the $5M. Other than a huge financial backer, I don't see how they raise a couple hundred million for an OCS. This summer, USF’s board of trustees will sink its teeth into a stadium financing plan. Kelly said he expects it to cost anywhere between $200 to $400 million to build a 35,000- to 40,000-seat stadium with the capability to expand. https://archive.ph/25SsQ
I mean we have 18 WRs but still sucks losing Jaylon Robinson. I’m sure he was tampered with or maybe O’Keefe and something separated themselves from him?
Here's the full text of the USF article on The Athletic... Spoiler USF was ranked No. 2 (really) 15 years ago. Can the Bulls rebound and catch up to UCF? Chris Vannini and Manny Navarro Apr 20, 2022 77 The image will forever exist, in screenshots of game clips or the polls that week. It might not seem real these days, but it very much was. South Florida: No. 2 team in the country. It was Oct. 14, 2007, in the middle of one of the wildest seasons in college football history. USF entered the Top 25 in mid-September. A month later, after a string of top-five upsets across the country, the Bulls reached No. 2, one day after demolishing rival UCF 64-12. The Bulls program was barely a decade old. It was perhaps the fastest rise in the history of the sport. In 2022, the dynamics are much different. UCF has played in three New Year’s Six bowls and is on its way to the Big 12. USF has three total wins in the past two years, still lacks adequate on-campus football infrastructure and is in a Group of 5 conference. How did it change so drastically? As he was in the midst of leading the fast-rising Bulls from a new Division I-AA program with a $90,000 budget for assistant coaches in 1997 to a spot in the Big East in 2005 and a No. 2 ranking in 2007, head coach Jim Leavitt never took UCF seriously. He was gunning to make USF the next Miami, Florida or Florida State, the programs he saw evolve from nothing into powerhouses as he grew up in the state. “People don’t realize, we were No. 2 the one year, but the next two years, we were 10th and 21st. We went three years in a row getting ranked pretty high,” Leavitt, now 65, said. “I went through the first 10 years and never took a vacation. It was all I thought about, trying to build a great program, and we were the fastest winningest program in history. … The last year I was there, we averaged 53,000 (fans) a game.” During his final three years on the job, from 2007 to 2009 — when Florida competed for national titles under Urban Meyer with Tim Tebow at quarterback — Leavitt’s Bulls made more appearances in the AP poll (22) than Miami (16) and Florida State (11). The Bulls beat No. 18 Florida State in 2009 in Tallahassee — their fifth consecutive win against ranked opponents, a run that also included wins over top-seven West Virginia teams in 2006 and 2007. The Bulls owned the War on I-4 with UCF. The Knights, who had an 18-year head start on USF’s football program, didn’t crack the Top 25 for the first time until 2010. USF was in a BCS conference, while UCF was in Conference USA. The No. 4 team in the state was clear, and the Bulls’ future felt unlimited. “I really saw building South Florida to the level of Miami,” Leavitt said. “That’s who I had targeted to be our rival. We’d already beaten Central Florida four times. I’d gone down and met with (Miami athletic director) Paul Dee, had lunch with them in Miami to get a rivalry started. He did it, which I couldn’t believe. “But then they fired me.” ‘We had everything going’ Leavitt went 95-57 in his 13 seasons, including 7-12 against ranked opponents and 3-2 in bowl games. He was fired on Jan. 8, 2010, after a school investigation revealed that Leavitt had grabbed a walk-on player inside the team’s locker room during halftime against Louisville two months prior and struck him across the face. The investigation also cited Leavitt for interfering with the investigation. A year later, Leavitt and USF settled for $2.75 million in a wrongful termination lawsuit and became the linebackers coach for Jim Harbaugh’s San Francisco 49ers. He then returned to the college ranks as an assistant at Colorado, Oregon, Florida State, Florida Atlantic and, most recently, SMU. He’s taking a year off now, coaching his daughter’s middle school flag football team back home in St. Petersburg. “I’ll stay with the positive,” Leavitt said of his end at USF. “(Building USF) was a great story. I’ll just focus on that.” In the 12 seasons since Leavitt was fired, USF has had five winning seasons and four head coaches. For a couple of seasons, after Willie Taggart replaced Skip Holtz and Quinton Flowers emerged to lead the Bulls’ potent offense, USF went 21-4 and finished 19th and 21st in 2016 and 2017. But Taggart left for Oregon, and Charlie Strong, coming off of a failed tenure in Texas, stopped recruiting to the level Taggart had. Now Jeff Scott, the former Clemson co-offensive coordinator with two national championship rings, has turned to the transfer portal to find help after going 3-18 in his first two seasons in Tampa. Once ahead of the game, the Bulls have now been hurt by conference realignment. They initially beat out UCF for a spot in the Big East in the early 2000s and held that valuable BCS conference designation. But by 2010, realignment shifted college sports again. There were rumors and allegations that USF lobbied against UCF joining the Big East, but with the conference losing teams like Syracuse and Pitt, the Big East ultimately added UCF and other schools from Conference USA. When the non-football schools broke off and took the Big East name with them, the leftover schools created the American Athletic Conference and lost their power conference status. USF and UCF were back on equal footing. The advantage was gone. Now, USF is 2-7 with five consecutive losses to UCF since Leavitt started the series 4-0. “It doesn’t surprise me,” Leavitt said of the current UCF-USF dynamic. “The administration blew it. We had everything going. Everything. To let UCF pass you and get into the Big 12 shouldn’t have happened.” The Bulls will finally have the indoor practice facility they’ve longed for in place this August. Athletic director Michael Kelly promises an on-campus stadium could be completed as early as 2026 or 2027. Will it be too late by then for USF to catch the I-4 rival it had surpassed? Or is there still a chance for Leavitt’s vision from 25 years ago to come true? Road back starts on campus One issue no one in USF’s administration will debate: The road back to where USF once was begins with upgrading on-campus facilities. Twenty years ago, before he served as the chief operating officer for the College Football Playoff, among other jobs, Kelly spent 13 months as USF’s associate athletic director. Working alongside the late Lee Roy Selmon, a Tampa Bay Buccaneers legend who took over as USF’s athletic director for Paul Griffin in 2001, Kelly helped Leavitt and the Bulls make the transition to the FBS level. “In 2007, the difference between us and Alabama might have been $10 million.” athletic director Michael Kelly said. “Now it’s $50 million every year.” (Cliff Welch / Icon Sportswire via AP) “I still remember our first (power conference) win the week before 9/11 up at Pittsburgh,” Kelly recalled. “It was … kind of humble beginnings. I still remember visiting with (Leavitt) in The Ponderosa — the office trailers where his staff was, a lot different from what coaches’ offices are like nowadays. “Obviously, Leavitt got it built up and had success really quickly, going all the way up to No. 2 in 2007 and then beyond it. To have won 150 games faster than any program in the state my first year back here in 2018, there’s been some sustained success. Sometimes, though, you just have to kind of take a step back and realize that we’re still only 25 years old as a football program.” Since Leavitt’s run at USF ended, the gap in revenue and spending has widened considerably between Power 5 programs and Group of 5 schools. Those without top-tier facilities have often been left in the dust in recruiting battles. Four years ago, after Kelly first returned to USF, the Wall Street Journal valued USF’s football program at $58.2 million, 69th among 115 FBS schools with available data at the time. The Bulls were fifth in the Sunshine State behind Florida ($635M value, 11th overall), Florida State ($290M, 27th), Miami ($193M, 41st) and UCF ($68M, 65th). Alabama, which once pursued Leavitt in December 2002 to replace Dennis Franchione as coach, was one of three FBS programs valued at over $1 billion. “In 2007, the difference between us and Alabama might have been $10 million. Now it’s $50 million dollars every year,” Kelly said. “That’s why I think it’s so critical (for us to invest in football) these next couple of years.” Kelly has made progress as USF’s athletic department leader in a short time. He helped raise a program-record $25 million during the pandemic. USF first spent $3 million to upgrade the existing football locker rooms and meeting rooms and then broke ground last September on its $22 million, 88,000 square foot indoor practice facility. The on-campus stadium is the next project after that. “As I’m talking to you, I’m looking at the IPF right now and I’m just grateful,” Kelly said. “Full football field, state of the art, first-class indoor (facility) we’ll have. There will be a nice lobby and entrance, an observation deck for people to watch practice. When you complement that with a brand new on-campus stadium, all of a sudden in five years, you expect this thing to flip. “Even if we’re a little bit later than we wish we would have been on some of these facilities, I also look at it like now we’re also going to have the newest toys on the block.” They may not be Big 12-quality, but UCF does have facilities. The Knights’ Bounce House stadium, which opened in 2007, is often derided by rival fans as an erector set that cost just $55 million, but it’s still an on-campus stadium with an electric environment when the team is good. Its indoor practice field is not an elite facility either, but it was the first FBS program in Florida to build one. They’re facilities USF never built, and they helped UCF grow. For USF’s vision, there’s still plenty more fundraising and financial planning to be done. Last month, USF announced its plan to build a new on-campus stadium on the same Sycamore Field site where Leavitt and his players first practiced. There was also the announcement of a $5 million gift from the Morsani family, whose name is on the football team’s practice complex. Earlier this month, Jeff Vinik, owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning, donated another $5 million toward USF’s stadium. This summer, USF’s board of trustees will sink its teeth into a stadium financing plan. Kelly said he expects it to cost anywhere between $200 to $400 million to build a 35,000- to 40,000-seat stadium with the capability to expand. One of the most recent FBS teams to build an on-campus stadium that size was Colorado State. It cost $220 million to build the 36,500-seat Canvas Stadium. “I think what we’re getting is increasing momentum on campus and throughout the community to realize this is going to be great for football and athletics, and also great for campus life and for increased engagement for the campus as a whole here,” Kelly said. “And so as the proverb says, maybe the best time to plant a tree was probably 20 years ago. But the next best time is today. And that’s what we need to do.” Recruiting challenges Having better success recruiting would certainly help. Scott was born in Arcadia, Fla., less than 90 miles away from the school’s campus, 15 years before Leavitt returned home from Kansas State to build the Bulls’ program. He wouldn’t have left Clemson if he didn’t believe Kelly and USF’s administration were invested in seeing the school’s facility upgrades through. But the lack of facilities now at USF made it harder for him to recruit than he thought it would. “In my mind, what I felt like our roster and team would look like after one year, it’s actually taken us two years to get there,” Scott said. “Now, this spring, I’m looking at it like, OK, this looks like a Division I roster from an overall depth standpoint. “When I came down here, in my mind, I said, ‘Well, the top kids are gonna go to Clemson, Georgia, Alabama. But that next group of guys going to some of the other schools in the Power 5, those are the kids that we’re going to keep in Tampa.’ I firmly believed that and that we would do a great job of recruiting. I went through the process and after one year got close to some kids. Then they decided to go far away to some of those other lower Power 5 schools. And I asked them, I said, ‘What happened? I don’t understand.’ They pulled out their phones and they started showing me the locker room and the indoor facility and the stadium and the weight room at the school that they’re looking at. “Even though the school they’re going to is not a championship team that’s won a lot of games, they’ve been getting $40 million and $50 million a year for the last 10 years and so they have just poured in a lot of money into their facilities and setup. And so I realized pretty quickly, we don’t have to have the same thing, because we’re actually located in Tampa, an incredible place. But we have to have something.” Unlike Miami, Florida and Florida State, which sign top-25 recruiting classes regularly, USF and UCF have only had their recruiting classes crack the top 40 of the Rivals team rankings three times combined since 2002. The Bulls did it twice, ranking 29th in 2009 under Leavitt and 39th in 2014 under Taggart. The Knights did it once in 2011, ranking 39th following an 11-3 Conference USA championship season. Corey Long, a Tampa area native who has covered college football recruiting for ESPN and now works for Walter Football, said poor recruiting since Taggart’s departure is what has hurt USF most — not UCF’s success. “I don’t think it was because UCF was better,” Long said. “As close as they are and as similar as the players they get, they don’t often step on each other’s toes for a lot of recruits. I never really figured out (Strong’s) recruiting angle. I didn’t understand that staff and what they were looking at. I was surprised. I thought they would come in here and Charlie would have great connections and the local coaches would be more receptive, which they were. But it didn’t really pan out. “I knew Willie’s deal. He didn’t have a good relationship with Hillsborough County coaches for a litany of reasons. But he would recruit Polk County, Pinellas County, and really did a very good job in Sarasota, Manatee County and down in South Florida. He was great down I-75. Anything from the Skyway Bridge down to Miami, he was really good. He had a smart staff and they were able to slip in and get really good players. What’s ironic is Willie Taggart and Jim Leavitt weren’t really loved by local coaches and they were by far the two most successful coaches in the program.” It’s not hard to see how much of a talent drop-off the program has had over the past few years. The last high school recruit who finished his career with the Bulls and was drafted was defensive lineman Deadrin Senat, who was part of Taggart’s first class in 2013 and a 2018 third-round selection. Receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling, a 2015 transfer from NC State, was also taken in 2018. USF has had 30 players drafted over 22 FBS seasons. Leavitt brought in 21 draft picks, including three-time Pro Bowler Jason Pierre-Paul and Pro Bowl defensive back Mike Jenkins. Taggart recruited five draft picks, including running back Marlon Mack. Holtz reeled in one NFL player in Notre Dame transfer Aaron Lynch. The Bulls have ranked 76th (2019), 110th (2020), 65th (2021) and 91st (2022) over the past four recruiting years, according to the 247Sports Composite. With so many needs, Scott signed 14 transfers in the last cycle. “Their issue right now is talent,” Long said. “And they’re living a little bit too much with the transfer portal. Given the struggles of some of the other in-state programs, there’s probably places they can start working in the state and keeping players that want to stay in state. One thing Leavitt and Willie did was they were able to get a lot of Power 5 kids that weren’t going to Miami, Florida or Florida State that weren’t excited about going to Louisville, West Virginia, Maryland and some other Power 5 schools. Hiring Travis Trickett was a good start. He’s a good recruiter in a lot of areas. He knows the type of kids that they need to be successful.” In an ideal world, Scott said, he’d sign five to seven transfers a year — not twice that many. Championship aspirations How long might it take for USF to get back to winning on the field? It depends on how quickly the 21 players Scott brought in this spring can help change the trajectory. “What encourages me is the talented young players on our team,” said sophomore receiver Jimmy Horn, who caught 30 passes for 408 yards and a touchdown for a team that lost three games it led at halftime last season. “I know we’re still in a rebuilding phase, but we had games last year where we lost in the third quarter, fourth-quarter-type deal. We didn’t get beat badly. If you look at it from the outside, I’m sure you’re saying ‘Oh, they’re not good.’ But as players, we know we have a good shot for sure. We have a lot of returners coming back on offense, too.” For now, simply getting back to bowl eligibility is among the main goals. But with UCF, Cincinnati and Houston all preparing to leave the conference for the Big 12, the Bulls should be in a better position to win their first conference championship in the years to come. Kelly is proud of the fact USF won six conference championships last year in other sports and finished 69th in the athletic director’s cup with a $50 million athletic budget. He doesn’t see any reason why the Bulls can’t win soon in football. “Jeff and I are pretty clear and in step on our expectations,” said Kelly, who signed Scott to a two-year extension in January that has him under contract through 2026. “I brought him here and have every bit of confidence that he’ll be the first coach in USF history to win a conference championship, and we expect this is going to happen over the course of the next couple years.” Scott is just starting to get the roster to where he wants it to be. He said the roster he has built now is the deepest and most talented he’s had at USF. But he knows a rebuild takes time. He said he learned to accept that after a conversation with his dad’s old boss at Florida State, Bobby Bowden. “When I got the job my first year, I was actually talking to Coach Bowden a little bit,” Scott said. “We were emailing back and forth. He would get up every morning at like 5 a.m. and answer his emails. He told me that when you take over a new program or a program that has some rebuilding to do, he said the first year you lose big; the second year you lose close; the third year you win close; the fourth you win big. “Quite honestly, I know that’s kind of just coach talk, but I really feel that’s probably in line with where we are at this point. We had many games last year that we had an opportunity to win and couldn’t close it out. The goal is to be able to close those games out and be able to take the next step.”
Vinik is the sole reason that Tampa went from sort of sleepy to a pretty cool city now. it kind of sucks that UCF even w the Big 12 invite doesn’t seem to yet attract some really big financial backers , the Stadium shouldn’t have this many issues getting a better sponsor
That's the crazy thing is it probably isn't even tampering, it's all legal now. And you don't have to go directly to a kid when he can go online and see articles telling him that some 4-star WR got $1 million from a school's fan collective, so this kid who used to go to Oklahoma is thinking he should get that too. I am a big fan of players getting what they are worth but even I can see it is getting insane already and fucking up the game
ill just pushback that this isn't fucking up the game. it's just the game. rosters are big enough and theres (well...currently) enough kids playing football that it will be fine as long as all of this is happening in the offseason. its not like we suddenly can't field a team. I will say its fucking up the game if this gets to a point guys are jumping midseason to play with other teams without warning. BUT on the other hand in other pro sports we just call that "trades" as far as rosters adapting to sudden departures. So maybe thats fine too if programs are really looking to add players midseason (which most certainly are not)
the big end game here is since there is so much time between the regular season and bowl/playoff season...that some all star kid - or the heisman winner who isn't on a cfp team- will go to a playoff team in that time and have enough time to practice and make an impact. that would be some shit and quite honestly ill laugh my ass off and support it. its the monster they created.
idk if it was legal a few years ago how much of the 2017 core transfers where 2018 undefeated regular season doesn’t happen? it isn’t just talent but time To build a foundation which is going to make consistency harder for Coaches
There is definitely going to be a reckoning and market adjustment when the high school senior who got $1 million from the collective gets kicked off the team or doesn't play up to par, and people realize maybe 17 year olds shouldn't be given this kind of money before they prove anything.
no they were stupid because we can't get our camera phones to zoom in quick enough to link to the players instagram page.
That was my point... They were useless from a practicality standpoint, so their only job was media attention.
He was probably going to be our 2nd starting outside Wide Receiver. He’s small but very fast and can get open.