And in the best sports news of any kind since October 18, the University of South Florida Bulls today captured their very first bowl victory, 24-7, over the East Carolina University Pirates in the inaugural PapaJohns.com Bowl in Birmingham, Alabama.
Like you hadn’t already planned your Saturday around that.
Wherever your collegiate loyalties lie, even if they lie nowhere (unless they lie with those ECU shinkickers), won’t you join the USF Alumni Association chapter of Stephanie and me in a hearty round of what we used to shout on alternate sides of the Sun Dome?
SOUTH!
FLORIDA!
SOUTH!
FLORIDA!
SOUTH!
FLORIDA!
YOU! ESS! EFF!
YOU! ESS! EFF!
YOU! ESS! EFF!
Ahhh…
For those of you somehow unfamiliar with this heretofore untapped bastion of scholar-athleticism, the University of South Florida — USF to us, if not the sports media community at large (screw you, University of San Francisco) — has been in business for 50 years and just completed its first decade of college football. The Bulls/Golden Brahmans entered the top tier of play in 2002 and have been quietly successful as a Division I program. There’s been more quiet than success in North Tampa if you measure your standing in the sport by, say, Ohio State standards, but it’s only been a few years of competing at this level. You needn’t be an Oracle to understand that this piping hot triumph in the PapaJohns.com Bowl, one year after a misfire in the equally prestigious Meineke Car Care Bowl, is a saucy milestone…a tangy topping on a 9-4 season…a crunchy, crusty bite of pigskin pizza for those of us who intermittently bleed green and gold.
If you find this audible self-indulgently off-topic, know that ESPN2 assigned Gary Thorne play-by-play duties. He’s as pompous and clueless at college football as he was as a latter-day Metscaster on WPIX. In the first couple of minutes, he referred to USF as “underlooked” and left the South out of Florida (thus giving the hated Gators an extra game). He may have even said a museum at a church that is an icon of the civil rights movement celebrates segregation. That’s Gary Thorne, talking without thinking, whatever the sport.
But he couldn’t ruin this. A molasses-slow crew of Sun Belt Conference officials that kept this thing trudging from 1 until past 4:30 couldn’t ruin this. The inept Pirates hairline-fracturing our redshirt freshman quarterback sensation Matt Grothewith a kick in the shin couldn’t ruin this. The rush of ESPN2 to dump out of the postgame so it could kiss that horse’s ass of horse’s asses Bobby Knight couldn’t ruin this. Even the knowledge that we remain the most obscure 42,000-student school on the planet — bigger by half than it was during my early ’80s studies — couldn’t ruin this.
To be fair, USF is pretty obscure to me since I turned north on I-275 on April 29, 1985. As a Big East member, we’re on TV now and then, but I usually seem to miss it ’cause I don’t go out of my way to find it. My ability to drop a name like Matt Grothe surprises even myself. Alma mater is alma mater, however. USF’s greatest college athletics tradition may be apathy (the cameras revealed plenty of good seats were available in Birmingham) and I may throw every single fundraising appeal straight into the trash, but gosh darn it, we just won a bowl game. Until it happened, I wasn’t sure what sports outfit I identified with most when there are no Mets around.
SOUTH! FLORIDA! indeed.
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