bullsbucsfan426

CJL also had lower expectations at the outset, and Tampa's favorite son at his back (Lee Roy Selmon) to help sell the program. USF was not likely expected to go beyond FCS for a while but he won so much that making the move couldn't be decided it against. It also helped keep UCF off our back for several years until we were better than them.

Please with that level of spending everyone in the freaking athletics department will be Diamond, the leadership will all be Delta 360.

What a ridiculous catch and following TD

The Formula to win is easy. 1. Receive kick-off. 2. 20 play, 75 yard drive where we use all 40 seconds on the play clock and we score with 2 minutes or less left in the 1 quarter. Force a 3 and out. 3. Repeat. Be up 14-0 with a gassed SMU defense and cold SMU offense with 2 minutes left in the first half. 3. Unleash tricksteration and go into the half up 21-0 as the gassed SMU defense trudges off the field. 4. Kick-onside to start the second half recover. Watch the headbutted SMU defense deflate even further. 5. Score to go up 28-0 as Mangham gives CJL hallucinations of Andre Hall. 6. Pin our ears back and rush the passer over and over as SMU repeatedly attempts to get back into the game with their passing attack. 7. Keep scoring. Eventually the clock will hit zero.

Someone here thought we were around 5-6k season ticket accounts. That's not actually true. I asked my ticket rep before the season, and I asked this same question several years ago-we've been hovering around 10k season ticket holders for a while now. I think an OCS will boost that.

Given current situation, I would be okay if the seats were free to people donating for chairs for five years assuming we raised $300 million or so. The concessions and parking would make up for the free seats.

Imagine if we had hired CJS in 2016 after Taggart left. There would have been no drop-off in performance. We might even have still managed to land BJM (who was a good DC). We are starting to see some offensive weapons develop. Mangham is this team's version of Darius Tice, except he scores a lot more option. The receivers are starting to see some production as well and look like they are dropping the ball less. The biggest problem we have is that there is ZERO depth or production on the defense. The coaching staff needs to go out there and actually land recruits, it's okay if they don't have skills, if they're athletic and can run at their given position that's good enough. I'm also looking forward to seeing some passing TDs in the red zone. My one beef with the comeback last week was that we took so long on that last drive because we ran it up the middle four times. When you are behind by 2 TDs, we have to throw the football. If it's an incomplete pass at least you stopped the clock, if it's complete then it's a TD.

To be frank if it was going to happen it would have happened in 2016 vs FSU.

The thread asked how I'm feeling? Well, firstly, I'm happy the team continued to fight it out. I personally don't agree that UF let off the dogs until the Richardson TD, the back to back INTs in the second half were proof that UF was not in fact finished trying to run up the score, particularly the second one as it happened deep into the secondary. Richardson was giving me 2018 D'Eriq King flash backs, he will not be fun to face next year, but I'm rather hopeful that neither will McClain. Next week will be an easy win if we play the way we did in the second half. BYU is facing two ranked teams in a row, so until we see how they perform it is hard to say how good we will be. Someone suggested we could be 3-2 at the start of October and I'm questioning how. SMU is not a bad team. If we beat them we will have earned it. I'll add that if we beat BYU and SMU, it's likely we could run the table until we meet Houston on November 6. That is a long ways away.

If VInik writes the check, it will be because he will finally get his long awaited move of MOSI to downtown Tampa...which would be a win regardless. The place is still stuck back in the 90s and is in DIRE need of a demolishing and repurposing.

Posted this in another thread, but all but about $15 million of that endowment is restricted for specific funds. It was not clear how much of that restriction was allocated for athletics. There are around 1300 different funds set up through the USF foundation. I suspect getting a full list of those funds would be rather enlightening.

Faza, having known you since middle school, that is encouraging. But you worked hard to get where you are. I want USF to succeed. I badly want it. But I've been taken body blow after body blow for supporting this program, and the situation isn't the same as it was 18 years ago when we got the Big East invite. I really want to hope that the Big 12 is the new tallest Midget conference, and we will be back...but until we earn it on and off the field, it's all fools gold. Jeff Scott is looking more Chad Morris than Dabo Swinney at this point. As for FAU, their admin decided to support athletics and it has helped them, especially with a win at all costs mentality. They have a pretty decent stadium too-one that was more than buildable had we taken on debt for it even 7 years ago. They are doing a lot of the same things we were doing years ago to get to Preeminent status. But based on what some have said here over the past couple of days, we are facing a potential chicken-egg paradox, and it goes back and forth. Here's what I've essentially heard the past few days:: There are parts of the BOT that do not want to make athletics a priority and are trying to hold back any kind of athletics expansion. We cannot build anything without fully funding it-a statewide policy, which coincidentally, harms USF. UCF's borrow and build strategy is not available to us and has not been since at least July of 2018 (start of Genshaft's last year). If not for this an IPF could have gotten built then. I can understand that it would have been very challenging to keep the lights on during a pandemic had we gone the debt route-it would have been around 2.4 million a year in debt service assuming a 30 year note. On a more financially related note-while the 2020 990 for the USF Foundation is not available as of yet, the 2019 one is (keeping in mind that the 2019 990 is used for a year ending in 06/30/20). Of that $636 million in endowment assets reported on the 990s, approximately $15 million is unrestricted. I suspect most of that is working capital for the foundation and would not be available to fund something else, or even to be borrowed against. IF we want the USF foundation getting involved in athletic fundraising, we will need to see them take a much more hands on role. The foundation raised around $70 million last year and had around 45 million in investment income. They are more than capable of making this happen.

Dude all of what I've just mentioned is what I had to use to start getting my own CPA firm going and I'm still 5 years away of making it a good enough business to be worth selling.

Weatherford is indeed an FSU graduate, but he's lived his whole life in Tampa. I was not aware of the push to make athletics important being a factor in Currall's firing, but closing one of your most important colleges and then backtracking (Education) was not a move I would expect from a University President. I would hope that Weatherford would consider athletics important as a factor for USF, rather than using this as an opportunity to push our athletics programs down further. It's not as if USF is a threat to FSU on the field these days, although in academics we're clearly even or better with them. It does seem convenient that Currall got fired right on the brink of the next round of realignment.

I may as well add on- The new USF president will have a lot of help on the academic side, and he or she needs to leave that to Ralph Wilcox, who best I can tell has been doing an excellent job. The next president needs to be a networker, a schmoozer, a community-driven entrepreneur who is going to make athletics part of his strategy to lead USF into a brave new world. Someone suggested Brian Lamb. If we landed him I think that would be a coupe. He's obviously seen the issues that USF has faced while serving on the BOT and I suspect he was a major reason USF advanced as much as it did on D&I initiatives. Can he make it work as well with the marketing and athletics? He's obviously got huge connections in corporate America and globally, but he will need to work the Tampa Bay angle too. I also wonder how much he did previously to ensure that sports were supported at USF-or if Genshaft and Currall after her made the point to ignore it. There also needs to be some kind of effort to reach out to the billionaires who actually make Tampa their home for some kind of large donation for athletics. We have at least six that live here-Tom James who owns Raymond James, Ed Debartolo (who may be the first guy we try to work with), Ronald Wanek (owns Ashley Furniture), Robert Duggan (owns Summit Theurapeutics), and Todd Christopher (who sold Vogue). Plus Jeff Vinik of course, but we already have a relationship with him. 10 years ago it would have been easy to pull this off. Heck, DeBartolo may have backed USF just to spite the Bucs. But now? It must be tried regardless of result. I also heard on TOS that Currall basically hamstrung the IPF building until it was 100% funded. **** fool move if true. We needed that a year ago.