USF is America's hottest underdog. Not bad for a program better known for parking tickets than wins

Four years ago, at a beach in Antigua, under an umbrella and with a drink in hand, Alex Golesh created the blueprint for his first head coaching job.

Beside him, nestled in her reclining chair, wife Alexis watched the waves lap the shore as her husband spent the week, hours at a time, furiously scribbling into his iPad.

He calls this a “vacation.”

Alex Golesh mapped out, quite literally, what he’d accomplish every day for his first 90 days if a school ever hired him.

Some 18 months later, after South Florida picked him to take over a program that had won four games in three seasons, Golesh arrived in Tampa to find a team with a 2.2 GPA, no uniform meal schedule, a shared training room and not near enough academic counselors. Players traveled to games on an off-brand airline company with sporadic air conditioning, had less than $250,000 of NIL pay and, at times, returned from practice with their vehicles ticketed or worse.

In December of 2022, Golesh began working through that blueprint, day by day.

Day 1 …

Day 2 …

Now, on Day 1,012, his USF Bulls are all the rage in the sport, having upended the 13th-ranked Florida Gators to win a 16th game in his 28th at the school. They’ve got a 3.1 GPA, at least three set team meals a day, a separate training room, plenty of academic tutors, a new airline, perhaps the most NIL of any non-power league FBS program and no more parking tickets.

“There is value in these kids waking up every day and being able to park in a parking spot and not getting booted,” said Andrew Warsaw, the team’s general manager who’s been with Golesh every step of this three-year rebuilding effort.

Alex Golesh and the USF Bulls are 2-0 with the chance for another upset this weekend against Miami. (Dillon Minshall/Yahoo Sports)

After three close calls against power league programs — the Bulls gave Alabama a scare twice the past two seasons and hung with Miami last year until late in the third quarter — Golesh’s team finally finished off big brother on Saturday night in Gainesville.

And while most of the attention rests on the precarious future of head coach Billy Napier, the outcome thrusts back into the spotlight a program that has been irrelevant for years — led by a coach who was born in Russia, a squad of former power conference players and a university board chairman determined to elevate the program within the hierarchy of college athletics.

“This is probably the best Sunday we’ve had in a while,” said Will Weatherford, the chair of the USF board of trustees, in a call Sunday with Yahoo Sports. “Alex inherited the worst program in America. We’ve invested more in our football program the last three years than the previous 20-25. We’ve gone all-in.”

Four years ago, in its latest expansion decision, the Big 12 passed on the school — a move that motivated those in Tampa, especially considering the league invited rival UCF. They are making sure that doesn’t happen again.

Leaders are positioning the school to be the most attractive brand of the non-power leagues before the long-discussed, and perhaps inevitable, split of NCAA Division I transpires. Though Weatherford speaks highly of the American and the aggressive approach from conference commissioner Tim Pernetti, he believes there will be a “new line of demarcation” within major college athletics likely determined by a school’s investment and success in football.

At a time when university finances are at their most stressful — declining enrollment, research grant cuts, etc. — many athletic departments are asking their schools for a financial infusion to support the compensation of players in this new athlete revenue-share era.

Universities have the choice, Weatherford says: Invest or be relegated.

Will the top 30 FBS teams split off? The top 50? The top 70?

“You’ll have Tier 1 and Tier 2,” he said. “We are not going to let ourselves slip down and be left behind again. We’ve made our choice not knowing where the [demarcation] line is going to be.”

Like many schools across the country — even those in the power leagues — the university, its foundation and key donors have buoyed the USF athletic department to the tune of millions. The investment — a 50-fold increase in NIL pay from the 2022 season to this year’s eight-figure revenue-share number — is paying off on the field.

Another opportunity awaits this weekend, when No. 18 USF (2-0) visits No. 5 Miami (2-0) on Saturday in a game televised on, of all places, The CW.

With wins over 2024 playoff participant Boise State and Florida, USF has another chance, even with a loss, to enhance its résumé as the frontrunner for the automatic playoff spot reserved for the highest-ranked Group of Six conference champion. The American, however, appears feisty this year. Tulane and Memphis stand in the way, and perhaps Navy too.

But USF’s non-conference schedule provides opportunities to impress the CFP selection committee, says Michael Kelly, now the athletic director at Navy who spent seven years in the same role at USF and worked previously at the CFP. He scheduled the three-game series with juggernauts Alabama, Florida and Miami in what’s described as “two-for-one” deals (one home game and two on the road).

Though Kelly was criticized for striking such contracts, he now points to, one, the opportunity that they provide the Bulls (upsets); and, two, the millions of dollars in payments the university receives from those matchups (more than $3 million).

It is all an effort to grow the brand of a football program that is less than 30 years old, he says, an attempt for USF’s athletic department to match the success of its university’s academic portfolio. The school, with nearly 50,000 undergrads, was granted the illustrious status of AAU three years ago and has what Kelly says is the highest-ranked medical school in the state.

Add in its desirable location (the Tampa-St. Petersburg metro area) and its television market (routinely in the top-15 nationally) there’s a good argument for their promotional status within college sports.

In a sign of the times, the program announced this week that it has hired a “CEO of Athletics” as opposed to an athletic director, a nod to the changing role in the new landscape of the industry. Weatherford and the search committee plucked Rob Higgins from the Tampa Bay Sports Commission.

Meanwhile, in the facilities arms race, the school completed a $22 million indoor football facility in 2023 and began construction on a $350 million, 35,000-seat on-campus stadium set to open in 2027 — a smaller venue with more premium seating. Already, season ticket and premium seating sales have provided millions in new revenues — much of it being pumped back into Golesh’s program.

“It’s all kind of coming together,” Kelly said.

The key, now, going forward: Remain competitive in football and beat those programs that, in the end, hold authority over such realignment decisions.

USF’s boomerang roster

It helps to have older guys.

There are 33 seniors on USF’s team, a mixture of those who remained during the coaching transition in 2022 from Jeff Scott to Golesh and transfers who have joined the program from places like Tennessee, Texas A&M, Iowa State and Wisconsin — many of them Florida-raised kids who wanted to return home and play more.

In fact, Golesh estimates that 80% of USF’s transfers are players originally from south Georgia or Florida. “I spent years down here trying to get Florida players to leave for Ames or Toledo,” he said. “Now I’m trying to get them to come back.”

Anchors on either line, defensive tackle Josh Celiscar and offensive tackle Connor McLaughlin, are seniors who transferred from the SEC and ACC, respectively, with roots in Florida. Three key members of the secondary arrived here from SEC or Big Ten programs but were born and raised in Florida, including high school classmates from Tallahassee, cornerbacks Kajuan Banks and De’Shawn Rucker.

“It’s easy to bring guys in when you take the Florida kid who goes to a Big Ten school and it’s cold and he doesn’t play as much,” Warsaw said. “Maybe the [money] bag was awesome, but at the end of the day, these Florida kids want to play.”

There are the holdovers, too, from the previous regime under Scott, like starting linebackers Mac Harris and Jhalyn Shuler and dual-threat quarterback Byrum Brown, who led the team in passing and rushing in 2023 before injuries last season sidelined him for five games.

But it all starts, many at USF say, with the man in the big chair.

How Alex Golesh landed at USF

Funny enough, Golesh may not have gotten the job had Deion Sanders picked Tampa instead of Boulder. “We talked to Coach Prime and saw the benefits there,” Kelly acknowledged. “We wanted to swing for the fences.”

Golesh is a grinder on a staff full of them. On midweek days during the season, he’s in the office by 6 a.m. and sometimes doesn’t leave until midnight or later. The staff “works about as hard as they can without dying,” Golesh said, perhaps only half-kidding.

He’s got the background of a grinder.

Golesh was born in Moscow, and is the son of Russian immigrants who fled the country when he was 7. The family arrived in New York with about $400 and a few suitcases and later moved to Ohio, where Alex got his start in coaching despite not playing college ball.

The 41-year-old began in the high school ranks before he reached out to then-Michigan State head coach Mark Dantonio for advice on how to crack into the college game. Dantonio connected him with then-Ohio State defensive assistant Jim Heacock. Before he knew it, Golesh was a student assistant for Jim Tressel at Ohio State; then joined Tim Beckman at Toledo and Illinois; was a recruiting coordinator for Matt Campbell at Iowa State; and finally with Josh Heupel at UCF and then Tennessee.

In Knoxville, he and Warsaw both learned firsthand how to best operate in the NIL era of compensating athletes. Tennessee’s collective, Spyre, was one of the first and more aggressive entities in the space.

“It’s not rocket science at the end of the day,” Warsaw said. “You understand the guys who carry the most value. Offensive line, quarterback, corners, pass rushers. The better players you have, the better chance you have at winning games.”

Corey Staniscia, who helped start USF’s collective in 2022, says fundraising efforts started in the five figures and, after Golesh’s hire, skyrocketed to more than $1 million. “We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to a couple of million in the end,” he said.

The fundraising afforded the staff the ability to increase players’ pay by three to five times and provide the “dudes” on the team with salaries well into the six figures, Warsaw says.

It’s been up to Golesh to use that blueprint of his to put players in the right position and motivate them in creative ways.

For instance, he’s not shy about targeting those on the team who fail to practice hard enough. After each August camp day this year, Golesh awarded some players with the distinction of being an “asset” and then branded others as “liabilities” — all in front of their teammates.

“What are we as a program?” Golesh asked. “I ultimately convinced this team that your identity has to be able to be seen on TV from the stands and on film. It’s easy to say what your identity is from the football building in the AC. You have to put it on film.”

Golesh arrived in Tampa having plenty of experience in building a program. In fact, it was his fifth first season. He joined Beckman’s staff in Year 1 at Toledo in 2009 (from five wins in Year 1 to eight the next year), then followed him to Illinois (from two wins to six in Year 3), and then joined Campbell at Iowa State in 2016 (three wins to eight). At Tennessee, the Vols won seven games and then 11 in Year 2.

What’s the secret? Hard work, high energy, establishing relationships and so on.

“I’m not a big motto or wristband guy. We have one motto: ‘Be who you say you are,’” Golesh said. “Make sure you trust the people around you and they trust you.”

Golesh’s blueprint, created on that beach in Antigua, is now unfurled across college sports for all to see.

And, maybe, as an added bonus, the Bulls might just find themselves on the right side of that demarcation line.

“We are in the first inning of what we are going to do,” Weatherford said. “We’ve made a bet and that bet is we’re going to compete at the highest levels. What happened Saturday is a sign of things to come.”

USF is America’s hottest underdog. Not bad for a program better known for parking tickets than wins

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