The 10th Best Play of the 2023 USF Football Season
Our play #10 occurred in the Bulls' first game of the year.
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:
Play #10: Golesh and Byrum Send a Message
Time moves at hyperspeed in college football. We spend nine long months of offseason running through every possible mental permutation of how the season might go, tweaking the formula ad nauseam with every new recruit, transfer, or sound byte - then all of a sudden September hits and reality smacks us in our stupid little faces. All our theories, predictions and instincts are basically thrown out the window as soon as the ball is snapped, and our poor brains, coddled by a spring and summer of inactivity, are left scrambling to recalibrate to the cold, hard truth in front of us. Sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise. Oftentimes - especially in Tampa, lately - it’s less so (see, e.g. - Wisconsin 49, USF, 0 (2019); NC State 45, USF 0 (2021); BYU 50, USF 21 (2022)). And then the madness never really stops until the year is out. The college football regular season is the smallest of all sample sizes in major American sports - just twelve-ish tiny games all mushed into a few months - so all it takes for a season to transform from a rousing success into a total disaster, or vice versa, is just a few bounces of a weirdly-shaped ball.
All this to say: a whole lot can change in a few months in this sport. It’s easy to forget after the near-euphoria of the Bulls’ late November and December, but as recently as early September, the mood around this program was still… let’s say cautiously optimistic at best, and downright grim at worst. I’m sure I don’t have to remind anyone reading this about how rough the Jeff Scott era was, but let’s set the scene a bit here:
USF’s record under Jeff Scott: 4-26
USF’s record against FBS teams under Jeff Scott: 1-26
USF’s record against conference opponents under Jeff Scott: 1-19
USF’s record in one-possession games under Jeff Scott: 0-7
Number of Jeff Scott’s 30 games in which USF was trailing by 14 points or more at halftime: 17
It was often unquantifiably bad, from a team that prided itself on being… well, at least not that. Combine all of [gestures wildly at the above] with a team that was losing its only real weapons from the 2022 team to the transfer portal (Brian Battie to Auburn; Xavier Weaver and Jimmy Horn to Colorado), and you’ll forgive USF fans for expecting progress under Alex Golesh to be gradual, even if they were fans of the hire.
Not helping matters was the fact that the Bulls opened their season on the road against Western Kentucky. WKU isn’t quite Bama, of course, but entering this season under Tyson Helton they were about as close to a well-oiled machine as there was in the Group of Five. They’d won nine games in three of his four seasons there, and each of their last two quarterbacks had thrown for over 4,700 yards. A plug-and-play passing offense, up against a USF team that boasted the country’s worst defense in 2023, and was breaking in a new coach along with a new… basically everything. It was a recipe for disaster, and I think most reasonable Bulls fans were prepared to grit their teeth and endure a rough first few games of the season in hopes of sunnier skies ahead in conference play.
About that. Meet play #10!
On USF’s first drive of the 2023 season, coming off a 1-11 record, under a new coach, as double-digit road underdogs, facing a 4th & 1 in the red zone, the Bulls responded with a silky spread-option keeper where their freshman QB faked a defender out of his shoes and dashed in for six.
I was on Tweets Duty for this game, and let me assure you that I was handling this moment with the utmost calm and perspective.
Look, I know. This play wasn’t as flashy or as meaningful scoreboard-wise as some of the other plays in this countdown, or even in the honorable mentions list. But man, this play was an absolute godsend for USF fans. We’d been subjected to four straight FBS openers in which USF opened as a sizable underdog and responded with all of the resistance of a wet leaf. USF didn’t even score against Wisconsin in 2019, or against Notre Dame in 2020, or against NC State in 2021 (what a deeply horrifying timeline), and they spotted BYU a 38-0 lead before they got in the end zone in 2022. This touchdown was our first indication that things might just be different in 2023 - an exclamation point on a decisive, exciting drive that shouted “we may not win this game, but we’re not rolling over.” And while the Bulls indeed did not win, they battled the Hilltoppers hard in an impressive showing that provided the first clues, for the well-trained eye, that the 2023 version of the Bulls might have a bit more juice than its predecessors.
This play also ranks highly because it’s emblematic of two of my favorite aspects of the 2023 USF football team. First, it was our first glimpse at Alex Golesh’s approach to fourth downs - which is to say, Alex Golesh’s utter disregard for the concept of kicking the ball on fourth downs. You don’t have to be an analytics savant to know that the general football consensus around going for it fourth down is trending hard towards the more aggressive end of the scale, and Golesh is clearly a believer. He was one of the most aggressive coaches on fourth down in FBS this season; the Bulls finished second in the country in fourth down attempts.
One’s tolerance for fourth down shenanigans will vary person to person - I’m definitely more Team Go for It - but I hope that even Bulls fans who were alarmed by how much Golesh elected to send the offense out there in 2023 can appreciate his attitude on the subject. Check out his response in the presser after the Alabama game, where the media drilled him a bit on a few risky fourth-down decisions that didn’t pan out.
The fake punt, I'd do it again. Going it for it on 4th & 2 there, I'd do that again. Zero blitzing when you've got to go zero blitz, I'd do that again. I don't regret anything […] These guys appreciate being aggressive. We ask them to be aggressive, we've got to be aggressive. Now we've got to be smart, but we've got to be aggressive.
I love this attitude. Not only does Golesh’s answer here suggest a level of knowledge of the game beyond “fourth down bad, punt ball”, it also frames his decisions not in spreadsheets or math (which are very useful, to be clear!), but in an attempt to instill a mindset of aggressiveness in his players and trust in their ability to execute. It doesn’t take a numbers-cruncher to believe that when your team scores 32 points per game and gets about five-and-a-half yards per play - and has a defense that is very, very generous to opposing offenses - 4th and 1 from just about anywhere (save for deep in your own territory, Biff Poggi) should be “go for it” territory. Golesh clearly understood that this season, and Byrum Brown’s option keeper was our first indication of the new USF coach’s play-calling and game management chops.
The second aspect of this play that I love? Byrum is just so, so smooth running the ball. Bulls fans were well aware he was capable runner entering the 2023 season, but I suspect few of us were prepared for the confidence and athleticism he displayed when he tucked it and ran this season. His run here was one of a few moments in the WKU game where my jaw dropped a bit - this guy is 6’3”, 210 pounds, and he can do that? - and our first real indication that the Bulls had a special player at quarterback this season.
In conclusion:
