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Slicing Florida's fruits By J. BRADY McCOLLOUGH Every summer, just before the start of football season, the sports editor of the Tampa Tribune hosted a brunch. The goal was to bring Florida’s college football coaches together with the movers and shakers of the community for some preseason hubbub. This was the mid-1990s, so that meant Florida State coach Bobby Bowden and his archrival, Florida coach Steve Spurrier, were the main attractions. Naturally, the talking drifted to the Seminoles’ and Gators’ top-five rankings and the probability that Saint Bobby and the Ol’ Ball Coach would meet again in late November with a national championship on the line. The people would nod their heads, and all would be right with the world. That is, until one year, another coach showed up to the party and interrupted the conversation. “Well,” South Florida coach Jim Leavitt would say, “I selected the colors for our helmets last week.” The three coaches stood in a group that day, in different stratospheres. Since Florida State began playing in 1947, football in the Sunshine State had been a three-horse race, with Florida, Miami and Florida State lording over the state. It seemed odd that the nation’s fourth-largest state, one dripping with football talent, had only three Division I-A programs, the same number as Mississippi or Colorado. The Big Three certainly never lost any sleep over the discrepancy. When Bowden and Spurrier heard Leavitt’s comment, they shared a laugh and wished the new guy luck. Lord knows he’d need it. “I don’t think they ever envisioned that these programs would explode the way they have,” says former South Florida president Betty Castor, who was at the gathering. “Explode” is a good word. As Florida International — the seventh and most-recent Florida school to go Division I-A — travels to play Kansas on Saturday, the state of Florida is building momentum as a college football hotbed like never before. A decade after playing its first game, South Florida is in the Big East Conference, fresh off an upset of Auburn. Central Florida, the first of the newcomers to make the jump to I-A in ’96, won at North Carolina State and took Texas down to the wire. Little-known Florida Atlantic even joined in, beating Minnesota and marking the first time a Sun Belt team won against a Big Ten opponent. The landscape sure has changed since that brunch. Who would have thought there’d be a time when the new guy’s team would be in the top 25 and Bowden’s, along with Miami, would be left out? “Looks funny, don’t it?” Bowden says. “Well, not to us. They deserve it. Our goal now is to get back up there.” ••• Palm trees, six-month summers and no state income tax. That was all post-World War II America needed to hear to turn Florida from a state of 2.7 million people in 1950 to 4.9 million a decade later. If you’re curious as to why Florida was so far behind Texas, California and Ohio in I-A options, the answer is in those numbers. In 1950, Florida was the 20th-largest state. For instance, Orange County, which houses much of the Orlando area, had only 114,000 residents. “That was pre-Disney,” says Central Florida president John Hitt. “Orlando was a sleepy little Citrus town.” But as soon as it became apparent that Florida’s population was about to double, state legislators knew they’d need more schools. The idea was to set up commuter campuses in the growing areas of the state like Tampa Bay and Orlando. Kids wouldn’t live on campus, and there would be no college athletics, especially football. Why set up campuses that aren’t really campuses? A theory exists that the majority of the state legislators were Florida and Florida State grads who didn’t want their schools to have true competition in the classroom or on the field. “That meant the state would have to split some of the pie,” says Billy Turner, a longtime football coach at Chamberlain High in Tampa. South Florida was the first to be established, in 1956. Central Florida, Florida Atlantic and Florida International followed in the mid-’60s. Still, football programs were not even a pipedream then, which greatly affected Florida’s burgeoning high-school football programs. Kids that didn’t cut the mustard at the big three had to leave the state unless they wanted to play I-AA ball at Florida A&M or Bethune-Cookman. “There were fewer college football opportunities per capita in the state of Florida than any other in the continental United States,” says former South Florida athletic director Paul Griffin. The issue for the new Florida schools, of course, was money. They had very small alumni bases and therefore no old-money boosters. But eventually, even for skeptical regents all over the state, the evidence for success in football was too hard to ignore. When the early 1990s arrived, Florida, Florida State and Miami were all competing for national titles. Every year, more than 300 Florida kids signed to play for I-A schools, which meant 200-plus were going out of state. Central Florida, which started a I-AA program in 1979, made the jump in 1996 with future NFL quarterback Daunte Culpepper at the helm. South Florida began playing in ’97 and was up to I-A by 2001. Howard Schnellenberger returned to his Miami roots and built the Florida Atlantic program in Boca Raton from scratch starting in ’98. Florida International, which began playing in 2002, was practically begged by the Sun Belt to transition to I-A in 2005, even though the program clearly wasn’t ready. In 50 years, Florida’s population had grown to more than 18 million, and its college football programs had finally taken the hint. All of a sudden, the big three started to feel a bit … overcrowded. ••• These days, Jim Leavitt bristles when he hears South Florida grouped with the three other newbies. “Don’t categorize us with those schools,” Leavitt says. “There are four BCS schools in the state of Florida: Florida, South Florida, Florida State and Miami. Nobody else is in that room.” It wasn’t so long ago that Leavitt was outside, working out of a trailer because his university couldn’t afford a football facility. The Bulls didn’t have any money, but they had something more important: speedy Florida talent all around them. Leavitt’s staff recruited only in Florida at first, and still, today, only nine Bulls are from out of state. It’s the same at Florida Atlantic and Florida International. While the new schools are cleaning up in-state recruits, they are not — aside from South Florida — stealing kids from the big three yet. Florida State and Miami may be struggling, but it’s not because their would-be recruits will be suiting up for Florida International on Saturday night in Lawrence. “We haven’t beaten them on anyone yet,” Schnellenberger said, “but we’re at the point now where we’re going to start recruiting the same kids. If we get one out of 10 that they want, we just have to recruit 100 of them to get 10.” Schnellenberger talks as if Florida Atlantic is a few years from playing with anybody. Part of his optimism is the new, on-campus stadium that the Owls will take over in 2010. In case you missed it, Central Florida just showcased its new 42,000-seat home last Saturday on ESPN2 against Texas. As the population of Florida continues to soar, who knows how many more schools will start programs? Schnellenberger has heard rumblings that North Florida in Jacksonville and Florida Gulf Coast in Fort Myers are next. “We’re not happy to give them a piece of the pie,”
Miami athletic director Paul Dee says. “We just want a bigger
pie. The population of this state is increasing rapidly. As the
pie gets bigger, it’s better for everybody.”
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J. Brady McCollough - jbrady@coveringsports.com (email) - 816-868-2621 (cell) |
