The 9th Best Play of the 2023 USF Football Season
Why run away from your problems when you could Simply Run Them Over?
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
Play #9: Nay’Quan Wright, Angry Bowling Ball
The theme of last week’s entry was “sending a message” - how USF’s first drive of the Western Kentucky game set the tone for how Alex Golesh was going to coach, and how Byrum Brown was going to play, in 2023. In one drive, USF fans got a bit of a pleasant wake-up call - oh, maybe it’s safe to raise our expectations a little bit?
You wanna talk about sending a message and raising expectations? Can I interest you in Nay’Quan Wright absolutely flattening a valued (former) member of the Alabama Crimson Tide football team?
Gracious. When someone puts together the definitive highlight reel of the 2023 USF season, this play will be the centerpiece. It’s an eye-popping, SportsCenter-ready run from Wright - against Bama, no less - complete with a tremendously satisfying “OOH!” from color commentator and former Heisman trophy winner Robert Griffin III. As a general rule, if your play makes a former Heisman winner let out an involuntary squeal of joy, you’ve done something right.
Just check out the reactions to this one. A hit like this against the Crimson Tide is basically guaranteed to go national, quickly.
This run took place on USF’s second drive of the game, after the Bulls’ defense had incredibly held the Tide’s offense to one first down and zero points on two possessions. In the same way that the Bulls’ first drive against WKU showed that the 2023 offense might have some juice to it, Wright barreling over five-star freshman Caleb Downs announced to a national audience that the Bulls - 34.5 point underdogs - didn’t invite the Tide to Tampa just to collect a check.
But - spoiler! - this is the first of two plays from the Bama game that will appear on this countdown, and I want to save a more in-depth discussion of what the game meant to the 2023 USF season in the second installment. Today, I want to focus on the hero of this play - one Nay’Quan Wright.
Wright had, by all accounts, a very solid debut season for the Bulls. When he transferred in from Florida, I think the expectation was that he would get the lion’s share of the running back carries in 2023, helping to fill the void that Brian Battie left behind. He very much did - while Byrum Brown was probably the Bulls’ most dangerous runner, Wright had almost three times the carries of any other Bulls running back, and was generally effective with them. He finished with a respectable 797 rushing yards on 4.4 yards per carry, and while he wasn’t the explosive weapon that Battie was, he was a solid early-down bruiser and stepped up in a couple big moments (more on that to come later in the countdown). Much will be expected of him in a similar role next season.
This is all well and good, but it omits Wright’s greatest asset as a running back: he absolutely loves, more than you or I will ever love anything, Simply Running People Over. Many USF running backs have had a signature move: Marlon Mack is most famous for stiff arming defenders while waving the ball in the air like an Olympic torch, and Darrell Scott loved nothing more than hurdling over would-be tacklers. This is all very nice, but Nay’Quan Wright does not understand why they felt the need to go through all that trouble - he would prefer Simply Running People Over. His breakaway speed and lateral movement leave something to be desired, but that’s no matter to Wright, a man who knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and if a defender happens to be standing on said line, a two-car collision is imminent.
The lack of explosiveness and dynamism in the 2023 USF running back corps gave some fans headaches this past season, but during our season recap, I prefer to focus on the other side of the coin. Part of what makes college football magical to me - especially at the lower levels of the sport - is that unlike the NFL, its heroes are often unusual, imperfect players. To wit: until this season, the USF leader in single-game receiving yards was a sub-six-foot, 240-pound man who was built more like a linebacker. The Bulls’ all-time leader in tackles is a converted fullback. Some of the most legendary efforts in program history have come from walk-ons. You just don’t get the same wild cast of potential characters in other sports. In professional football, a Bobby Eveld - who completed 48.8% of his passes in his career, and threw nine interceptions to five touchdowns - would be a footnote; amongst devoted USF fans, he is a program icon.
To that end, I humbly present the ninth best play of the USF football season - not just because it was the biggest headline-grabber of the season, and not just because it signaled the Bulls’ intent to give Alabama as much of a game as they could muster, but also because it’s a reminder of one of my favorite aspects of USF football. Our stars may not always be future NFL players or perfectly well-rounded five-star athletes, but they are stars nonetheless. And sometimes those stars are Nay’Quan Wright, an absolute angry bowling ball of a running back, who is capable of making future NFL players into future NFL player pancakes. Wright is a wonderful addition to the USF tradition, and I’m excited to see him bulldoze more unsuspecting bowling pins in his encore season.
Also, come on. He ran him all the way over! Sometimes it’s just that simple. One more time for the road: