It is Happening Again
And this time, I have much less to say.
- Many of us have been here for decades now. I was in middle school when USF lost to Rutgers in 2007; I was in high school when they got their doors blown off by Pitt in 2011. I was in college when they went 13-3 in conference over the span of two years and didn’t even win a division title because they lost when it mattered; I am unsure where I was for the 2017 War on I-4 because my spirit left my physical form entirely that evening and only recently found its way home after a series of Odyssean quests. And that’s not to mention other various USF failures and boogeymen: Voodoo Five, LeSean McCoy, Zach Collaros, Plies tailgates.
- It’s a loose count, but from what I can tell, there have now been seven games over the course of USF football history where a win would have either won the Bulls a conference title, division title, or berth in a conference championship game. They are 0-7 in these games. They were favored in over half of them.
- I don’t mean to suggest that USF’s brand of misery is particularly unique. There are a lot of teams playing FBS level college football, and very few trophies to win. Almost necessarily, there are going to be a lot of sad fans and empty trophy cases at the end of the season. There are a number of teams with conference title droughts lasting longer than USF’s 28-year existence as a program: whenever I feel like experiencing a deep, existential dread, I remind myself that Iowa State last won a conference title in 1912.
- But perhaps that’s the thing. I have been writing about USF football for far too long now, and after each of this program’s notable failures, I have been able to drum up some sort of universal optimism, a belief that every devastating loss is merely a hurdle on the way to the Bulls’ inevitable Grand Triumph–as if absorbing these failures was just a means to make our eventual eternal glory feel that much better. We are earning it!
- I still think that’s true, to some extent. I think this program is very much on the right track, and has the right people in charge such that it’s almost certainly just a matter of time before they win that elusive championship. But I’m not willing to make those guarantees anymore. The sport is just far too unpredictable these days, with coaches and players shuttling off en masse across constantly-shifting teams and conferences. What if the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice is just something we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night?
- What’s to do? I suppose I just remind myself that viewing the sport as purely about the destination rather than the journey is a particularly joyless way to look at things. The early-season Boise State and Florida wins now have an unpleasant sheen to them, as if they’re tokens of a simpler time when I believed that more things were possible than I do now, but that’s unfair—they happened, and the joy that they brought us was real, and USF football’s resurgence into a program contending for championships and ten-win seasons is real. And of course, the players and coaches that created those moments are still real and deserve our support. This sport is about the communities it creates and the people it brings together and the communal joy they experience, and the rest is really just gravy.
- Also it’s just football lmao