TAMPA – There might be a time when South Florida Coach Brian Hartline would be willing to discuss the future of college football and what that means for the Bulls, or whether or not we are moving away from up-tempo offenses. But now is not that time.
Hartline briefed the media last week as USF began fall practice, and it was a brief briefing. Because right now, right then, it didn’t matter that much to Hartline.
He has a particular way of compartmentalizing things in his mind, of deciding what’s important at a particular time and place and then running with it. And right now, making sure his football team knows exactly what’s expected of it every day, every practice, has his full attention. The media doesn’t figure into that.
So, he deflects questions he doesn’t consider important. For example, what will USF’s offense look like? Is there a trend now to get back to more basic football? Have defenses forced change because they’re catching up with the up-tempo offenses?
“Well, we’re gonna do what we’re gonna do,” Hartline responded. “I think that our track record is pretty well defined. So what they’ve done in the past year, I’m really not concerned about. We’re just going to do things that we know of winning football teams.”
Okay, but what does that even mean? When he answers, Hartline sometimes sounds a little bit dismissive of questions that don’t fit his football framework, the things that are foremost in his mind.
“The guys that win championships, you’ll find a lot of similarities in the types of offenses,” Hartline continued. “Whoever won the conference championship here (in the American Conference) and whoever won on a national level, it was a pretty consistent M.O.
“We’ll do a good job of of identifying what our guys do best and we’ll really lean into that. To really label us in a certain way is not how my mind works,” Hartline added. “We’ll continue to do what our guys do best and continue to enhance from there.”
Hartline is not anti-media. He was extremely expressive and engaging at the American Conference media days. His mind was obviously geared to working with the media at that particular event. That was their time.
Now though, his focus is not on press conferences. It’s on what his team needs to accomplish in that day’s practice and how he can build on that the next day. Explaining his offense to the media is not relevant.
Hartline has put himself in a rather difficult position as he begins his first season as USF’s head coach and his first season as a head coach anywhere.
In July, as reported on On3, he insinuated that his predecessor, Alex Golesh, had fallen short at USF. “There was some success here the last couple of years, but nowhere near where it should be,” Hartline said on On3.
“The expectation should be to win – the floor here should be a constant chase for the American Conference championship.”
In reality, Golesh kept USF football from disintegrating. Like Hartline, it was his first job as a head coach. And again like Hartline, he had been the offensive coordinator at a Power Four powerhouse (Tennessee, Hartline had been the offensive coordinator at Ohio State) and had a solid background in the sport.
But when Golesh took over, the USF program was in total disarray. USF was coming off a 1-11 season. It had only won four games in the previous three years.
Golesh’s fast paced, up-tempo offense immediately changed that. In his first two years, Golesh’s teams compiled 7-6 records and went to bowls. Last season, Golesh finished 9-3 and was arguably one win away from making the College Football Playoffs.
So, there’s pressure on Hartline to take the next step. Clearly, he is confident the can do that.
In college football now, there is little carryover from one year to the next.
With the transfer portal and NIL, rosters turn over every year, particularly in the Group of Six. So Hartline has a new team. His team. And he must win. He must contend for the American Conference championship quickly, and he must win it. That’s the bar he has set for himself.
He has said USF has everything it needs to make its mark at the sport’s highest levels. Failure is not an option, not for him, or this program. If he can’t get it done, USF will become irrelevant in the big scheme of things. And so will he.
