TAMPA – Brian Hartline didn’t mince words. It was August, and he was just preparing to start his first season as South Florida’s new coach, replacing Alex Golesh, who had fled to Auburn. “They’ve had some success here the last couple of years, but nowhere near what it should be,” he told On3’s Pete Nakos.
Now Golesh, although he never won an American Conference championship (nobody has ever won a conference championship outright at USF, at least not in football, although the team has tied for a division title) was coming off a 9-3 season that included wins over nationally ranked Boise State, probably the best team in the Group of Six, and Florida in Gainesville. All of a sudden, the Bulls were relevant in the world of college football.
And when Golesh departed for Auburn, he had the second-best winning percentage of any coach in USF history with the exception of Jim Leavitt, who got the program started and had some supercharged seasons along the way, once getting the Bulls as high as No. 2 in the AP poll.
So taking a shot at Golesh, which, for all intents and purposes, is what Hartline did, puts him out on a limb. “The expectation should be to win,” he told Nakos. “The floor here should be a constant chase for the American Conference championship.”
Fast forward to now, this week, when Hartline’s Bulls return to action here against UAB, the first of five straight conference games that will, essentially, determine whether Hartline goes boom or bust. All the games are winable, but none of them are easy with a road game at FAU and a home game against perennial power Memphis looming large.
Hartline still has a path to a conference championship, but it has a lot of twists and turns along the way and USF’s first seven games, which produced a 5-2 record and were, for the most part, uninspiring have done little to instill confidence.
Furthermore, USF has two teams, UTSA and North Texas, above it with no conference losses and four with only one, and UTSA has already beaten the Bulls. So at this point, contending for a title with two conference losses seems to be a ‘What are you smoking?’ kind of thing.
Taking the next step, starting to muscle his way to prominence in the American, Group of Six and beyond, may be more than this team can handle right now. By the end of the season, Golesh’s 9-3 might look pretty good. None of this really bothers Hartline, who continues going about his business and doing his thing, confident the results will come.
“I think to take the next step requires more than, you know, having a successful first year,” Hartline commented. “Like if we go 12-0 in this year I wouldn’t say we took the next step,” Hartline said. “I think taking the next step is, you know, the results matching the expectation. I think the next step is developing something you can sustain over time.
“It’s not a, you know, flash or bust kind of thing,” Hartline remarked. “So I don’t think you can really identify that (when you’ve taken the next step) without consistency over time. But, I mean, obviously, if we want to get where we want to go, we’d love to maximize that first year. And I’m not minimizing that in any way. But I don’t think either way it’s going to be like you check that box.”
Getting to 10 wins, which has only happened twice before in USF history, would be a significant achievement for Hartline given what he has left in front of him. For that to happen, the offense, ranked 84th nationally and eighth in the conference in scoring and 124th in the nation and 13th in the conference in total offense, will have to take a giant leap forward.
And while the defense has been very good, ranking 10th nationally and first in the conference against scoring, it has had a tendency to break down at some inopportune times. “If we take care of business we can still achieve our goals,” Hartline said. “The reality is we’ve got to do a better job.
“In our opinion, we own our own destiny,” Hartline continued. “So, you know, a lot of teams that we’re going to see are above us in the conference, and we have an opportunity to change that. It comes down to getting better each week, like we’ve been saying for the last seven weeks. If we haven’t gotten better, we’re never going to be ready for week seven, week eight, week nine,” Hartline declared.
It definitely won’t be easy. UAB. East Carolina. Memphis. FAU. Tulane. Ready or not, here they come.