One hot ticket: Bradenton Herald

[SouthFLBully]

http://www.bradenton.com/roger_mooney/story/155192.html

This is a great read!

One hot ticket: Tampa's Raymond James Stadium sells out for USF-WVU game

By ROGER MOONEY

rmooney@bradenton.com

Howard Schnellenberger showed up unannounced one morning a few years back. Just found his way to the University of South Florida campus and to the trailer with the leaky roof and faulty phone lines that served as headquarters for the football team.

Schnellenberger knocked on the door and interrupted a football coach who clearly didn't want to be interrupted.

"Yeah," Jim Leavitt growled.

"I'd like to talk to you if you have a minute," was Schnellenberger's reply in that slow, Southern voice of his that always seems to grab your attention.

Schnellenberger, author of the University of Miami's ascent to the top of the college football world in the early 1980s and coach of the Hurricanes' first national title, asking Leavitt for advice.

"Come in. Come in."

It should have been the other way around except Leavitt was in the process of breathing life into the crazy notion that USF could field a top-flight Division I-A football program, and Schnellenberger was fixing to do the same thing at Florida Atlantic.

The old coach wanted to know the young coach's secrets.

Here it is: Never stop believing.

On Friday there will be another knock at Leavitt's door.

It will be the moment Leavitt has been waiting for since the days he cleaned the Bulls uniforms in the washers and dryers he bought.

It will be West Virginia, the No. 5 football team in the country. Behind them will be ESPN2 and its national television audience.

Waiting will be Leavitt's 18th-ranked Bulls and a full house at Raymond James Stadium that will include 12,501 students, many of whom spent Sunday night in tents and sleeping bags outside the university's ticket office.

It will be the biggest game in the young history of the program, the chance for the Bulls to take an undisputed place among the elite programs in the nation, to sit for the first time at the same table as Florida, Miami and Florida State.

All that with a win, of course.

It's a hot ticket among the students, and the swath they cut along campus that stretched, by some estimates, nearly a quarter-mile, was dubbed Leavitt-Town after the man who delivered on his promise.

And that man emerged Sunday night out of his office in the state-of-the-art football building not far from the ticket office wearing a T-shirt and shorts and walked barefoot among the students, wiggling his toes in the damp grass as he went.

"Kind of neat," Leavitt said.

He meant the river of students.

Why 12,501 student tickets? Because the record for student tickets at a Big East football game is 12,500, which was accomplished at West Virginia.

Why not just beat them on the field, right?

The Bulls grabbed everyone's attention with the overtime victory Sept. 8 at Auburn. It was the biggest win in school history, to some, because of where the game was played and because of where the victory fell in the season. It set the Bulls up for so much.

It set up Friday's game.

No opponent has ever been ranked this high.

No USF team has ever been ranked 18th.

No home game has ever drawn this much attention or as many fans.

"I never played in front of a sold-out crowd here," quarterback Matt Grothe said. "I don't know what to expect. I know it is going to be loud after last (Saturday) when North Carolina's quarterback looked spastic trying to get the play off. That was with only 38,000, I can't imagine how loud it will be with 65,000."

In Morgantown, W. Va., crowd noise and rock music is being blasted across the practice field to better prepare the Mountaineers for what they should expect come Friday.

Raymond James Stadium can get awfully loud for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Now it's going to be rocking for the Bulls.

"Am I surprised that we're getting a sellout crowd? No, I thought the day would come some day," Leavitt said.

And it took only 11 years.

No. 5 vs. No. 18.

Some day is Friday when big time college football finally knocks on Leavitt's door.

Come in. Come in.

Roger Mooney, sports writer, can be reached at 745-7080, ext. 2112.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL ROGER MOONEY x

rmooney@bradenton.com

READ MORE:

The Bulls are a top 20 team for the first time. Find the story in Sports, 1D.

Please delete if already posted.

[WWMJD]

"I never played in front of a sold-out crowd here," quarterback Matt Grothe said. "I don't know what to expect. I know it is going to be loud after last (Saturday) when North Carolina's quarterback looked spastic trying to get the play off. That was with only 38,000, I can't imagine how loud it will be with 65,000."

That was US, boys.  Go Bulls!