The 8th Best Play of the 2023 USF Football Season
A cathartic moment for Bulls fans who'd been around since the Big East days.
With the USF football season now officially in the books, it’s time to say a proper goodbye to what ended up being a wonderful 2023 season by reviving an old Voodoo Five/The Daily Stampede staple and counting down the top ten plays of the Bulls’ season.
If you missed any of the previous entries, you can find them linked below:
Honorable Mentions
#10: Golesh and Byrum Send a Message
#9: Nay’Quan Wright, Angry Bowling Ball
Play #8: Nay’Quan Flips the Script
The feelings you harbor towards certain teams tell me a lot about the era in which you grew up watching USF*. For instance: I still get indigestion every time I see Greg Schiano on TV, which means that my formative USF-watching years were around 2006-2009. When I meet USF fans who have a particularly hatred for Southern Miss, I know they’ve been around a lot longer than I have. When I meet USF fans who have a particular hatred for FAU… well, I haven’t met one yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
One of the other big differences in perception between older and newer Bulls fans has to do with UConn, of all teams. A newer USF fan whose only familiarity with UConn was the program’s AAC days probably views the Huskies as a total pushover - a program that hasn’t finished a season with a winning record since 2010 (!!!), and was basically a guaranteed win whenever they showed up on the Bulls’ schedule. It may come as a bit of a surprise to this bunch, then, that many Bulls fans who were around during the program’s Big East days still harbor a bit of a lingering fear of the Huskies.
I’ll keep this relatively short, because I’m sure that many folks reading this post are already aware of the storied USF-UConn football history, but it bears repeating that for all the Bulls’ recent success against the Huskies, there was a time when they absolutely could not beat the University of Connecticut football program for the life of them. It was infuriating. Not only could they not beat them, but they specialized in losing in increasingly ridiculous and confounding ways. To wit:
2005: in a game that would’ve put USF one win away from a Big East title and BCS bowl in their first season in a power conference, the Bulls blew it, 15-10, against UConn thanks to an absolutely nightmarish play call on 4th and goal from the six - a double reverse pass that was immediately swamped for a 13 yard loss (a play so horribly memorable that it served as the first-ever namesake for this very website).
2007: in a game that would’ve given USF a Big East title and BCS bowl bid in just their third season in a power conference, the Bulls blew it, 22-15, against UConn thanks to an absolutely nightmarish play call on 3rd and goal from the one - a naked QB bootleg that was immediately swamped for an 11 yard loss (no websites were named after this play, as far as I’m aware).
2009: no conference title hopes were on the line here, but seeking an eighth win under then-freshman quarterback and future Super Bowl champion B.J. Daniels, the Bulls rallied from a 20-7 third-quarter deficit to take a one-point lead with 40 seconds to go. The Bulls inexplicably kicked off deep into swirling winds to ill effect, allowing the Huskies to take over around their own 40. UConn drove 31 yards in five plays and kicked the game-winning field goal as time expired.
2010: no conference title hopes were on the line here (for USF, anyway), but seeking an eighth win under then-freshman quarterback and (presumably) future Super Bowl watcher Bobby Eveld, the Bulls rallied from a 16-6 fourth-quarter deficit to tie the game with 1:16 left. The Bulls inexplicably squib kicked with plenty of time left to ill effect, allowing the Huskies to take over around their own 40. UConn drove 25 yards in five plays and kicked the game-winning field goal as time expired.
2011: would you believe me if I told you this might have been the worst one? In a horrifying Frankenstein’s monster-type amalgamation of all that came before it, the Bulls’ conference title hopes were effectively dashed against a hopelessly bad UConn team that won despite not scoring an offensive touchdown. As an explanation, Skip Holtz said that B.J. Daniels’ hands weren’t properly moisturized (???).
OK, that was much less brief than I wanted - but point is, USF games against UConn used to mean sloppy, low-scoring affairs that USF would manage to lose in mind-blowing fashion, complete with goofy turnovers, inexplicable red-zone play-calling, and un-moisturized hands. So even with the Bulls having won their last eight games against the Huskies - some of them total laughers - you’ll forgive USF fans if the game against UConn this season was starting to bring some particularly horrid memories back to life. This was a game that the Bulls absolutely had to win to reach six wins, against a Husky team that was just 1-5 entering the game, and yet the Bulls found themselves trailing late in the fourth quarter, desperately needing an offensive spark to keep their bowl hopes alive.
DID SOMEONE CALL NAY’QUAN WRIGHT, ANGRY BOWLING BALL???
A stat that gets a lot of play on football broadcasts nowadays is “win probability,” a nebulous tracker that supposedly calculates how likely a team is to win at any given point in the game. If USF’s season had a “bowl probability” tracker that kept tabs on how likely the Bulls were to make a bowl at any given point in the season, I suspect that this play would have caused a larger positive swing on said tracker than any other play this season. At this moment, the Bulls were limping, coming off brutal blowout losses to UAB and FAU, and very much engaged in a dogfight with a 1-5 UConn team. A loss here would have made getting to a bowl nearly impossible. After Wright’s 47-yard rumble, the Bulls’ season had life again.
But there’s more to come on that point later in the countdown. For now, I want to focus on the demons that were exorcised with this play. Wright’s run was a pivotal moment in the game, but Big East-era Bulls teams had been in this situation many times before - facing a must-win game against UConn, struggling early, grinding their way to their red zone in the fourth quarter - and, of course, they would inevitably find a way to blow it.
Instead, that didn’t happen. There’s a reason the clip above cuts off abruptly - it’s because the Bulls hustled to the line so quickly after the 47-yard gain that the UConn defense panicked and had to try to substitute a defender off the playing field by having him run out of the back of the end zone, which is regrettably against the laws of football, though admittedly ingenious.
The Bulls punched it in on the next play, taking a late lead that they wouldn’t surrender. This wasn’t just a pivotal win for the 2023 season - it helped soothe the tortured memories of USF fans who were bracing themselves for another goofy collapse against UConn. None of that would have been possible without Nay’Quan Wright’s run, his biggest play of the season.
(Also, the whole “winning nine consecutive games against them” thing. That helped too.)
*For the record: I very much do not think having followed USF football for a while grants me any sort of fan-related superiority over newer USF fans. Quite the opposite, even. I am deeply, deeply jealous that they’ve never had to watch a USF-Rutgers game.