5 hours ago 1

Mike Bianchi: Admit it, UCF fans, you miss hating USF

I’m just going to come right out and say it, even if many UCF fans will wag their finger and accuse me of sleeping with the enemy.

I feel sorry for the USF Bulls.

And I miss them.

I miss them desperately.

I miss their fans.

I miss their arrogance.

I miss their banter and their buildup to the War on I-4.

The reason I bring this up today is because USF just lost its highly respected athletic director Michael Kelly, who accepted the AD job at Navy earlier this week. Kelly was one of the program’s biggest assets. He stabilized an athletic department that was in flux when he arrived and he was the driving force behind finally getting an on-campus football stadium approved and underway — something Bulls fans had been dreaming about for decades.

Losing Kelly in the midst of the debt-heavy stadium project is yet another major blow for an athletic program that is already struggling to stay relevant — both financially and competitively. Here’s all you need to know: UCF will make $45 million in Big 12 TV money next season while USF will make $7 million in the American Athletic Conference. In other words, the Knights will make nearly $400 million more over the next decade than will the Bulls.

I know, I know.

I know what you UCF fans are thinking.

You’re thinking: “All those years of arrogance bought them exactly what they deserve: a front-row seat to our payday. Maybe we should start a GoFundMe for them — NOT!”

I get it. We all know the history. For years, USF was UCF’s arch-rival — not just on the field, but in boardrooms and conference calls, in the politics of college football realignment, in the back channels of the old Big East and Conference USA. The Bulls tried desperately to keep UCF from joining them at college football’s big-boy table.

The Bulls got their big break first in 2005 when they were invited into the Big East — a league that still had automatic BCS bowl status and enough brand-name cachet to feel “big time.”

Meanwhile, UCF — even though its program was older — sat stuck in the mid-major muck, banging on the glass like a frantic Christmas Eve shopper who shows up at the department store just as it has closed and locked its doors.

USF was like a typical trust-fund kid who was born on third base and acted like he hit a triple. USF’s leadership — led by former president Judy Genshaft, head coach Jim Leavitt and the school’s cocky fan base — made no secret of how they viewed UCF at the time: as an afterthought that didn’t belong in their stratosphere.

The Bulls dropped UCF from the schedule and their message was clear: “We don’t need UCF. We don’t want UCF. We’ll do whatever we can to keep UCF out of the Big East.”

USF had its 15 minutes of fame, rising quickly under Leavitt, briefly ascending as high as No. 2 in the national polls in 2007, and thinking it was poised to become Florida’s next football powerhouse.

Then — poof! — it was gone.

In the years since, the Big East crumbled under the weight of realignment. USF lost its seat at the big kids’ table. UCF kept grinding, kept building, kept winning — culminating in a move to the Big 12 that USF fans once would have considered unthinkable.

Which brings me back to my original point:

I can’t help it. I feel sorry for USF.

Not because I think UCF owes them anything, but because I always believed UCF and USF were better together than they are apart. There’s no denying UCF’s ascendance has left the Knights without a natural rival and feeling somewhat adrift in the Big 12.

All the Big 12 teams are a thousand miles away. The shared history is thin. The hate, frankly, has to be manufactured.

USF was the game where everything mattered except the records.

USF was the game where fans could talk-trash all year long, and nobody had to Google where the other school was located.

I’ll never forget the 2013 game, the first “War on I-4” after UCF joined USF in the new American Athletic Conference. The stakes were massive for UCF with a potential Fiesta Bowl bid on the line. Even though UCF was 10-1 at the time and USF was 2-8, the Knights had to score on a long pass from Blake Bortles to Breshad Perriman with less than five minutes left to eke out a 23-20 win in front of a frenzied crowd at the Bounce House.

Or what about the 2017 thriller on Black Friday when undefeated UCF beat 9-win USF 49-42 on a last-minutes 95-yard kickoff return from Mike Hughes? It was one of the most dramatic college football games I’ve ever seen and had everybody — including Dale Earnhardt Jr. — raving about it on social media.

Those games mattered.

And part of what made them matter was the mutual disdain.

Now? UCF fans get to travel to Lubbock, Texas, and Ames, Iowa — fine places, I’m sure, but they don’t exactly stir the emotions the same way Tampa did.

And USF? They’re trying to rebuild under promising coach Alex Golesh, fighting to regain relevance in a sport that has increasingly locked out programs without a Power 4 label.

Here’s the hard truth:

The Bulls are now where UCF once was — noses pressed against the glass, watching their old rival dine on surf and turf while they eat beans and weenies.

I understand how many UCF fans delight in USF’s demise, but as an Orlandoan who used to love to watch this rivalry simmer and boil, I’d rather see the Bulls back to their swaggering, peacocking ways, pounding their chests and acting as if they invented college football.

I’d rather see them in the Big 12, where the War on I-4 could be an annual high-stakes affair again.

In this era of college sports, where geography is ignored and tradition is sold off for media rights, rivalries are one of the few things that still feel real.

And I miss this one.

I miss the jabs on social media.

I miss the War on I-4.

I miss the green-and-gold invasion of Orlando.

I miss UCF fans packing Raymond James Stadium and taking over the parking lots.

Even if UCF has blown by USF in national cachet, that doesn’t mean the Knights should root for the Bulls to fail.

In fact, it’s in UCF’s long-term interest for USF to get back up, dust itself off and rejoin the big stage.

For all the bitterness that once defined this rivalry, here’s the truth that no Knights fan wants to say out loud:

UCF football was more fun when USF mattered enough to hate.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on X (formerly Twitter) @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen