Once-promising season quickly fading away

Column

You can pick apart the decisions made Saturday by Skip Holtz, whose University of South Florida Bulls lost a lollapalooza of a football game, 37-34, to the Cincinnati Bearcats.

He's a big boy and fair game. The best calls are those that work and not all of Holtz's did. The unfortunate reality is that USF is 0-3 in the Big East and losers of three in a row.

Developments like that raise questions. You see 109 yards in penalties by the Bulls and wonder if they're disciplined enough. That's 19 penalties in the last two games. We used to pillory Jim Leavitt for that kind of stuff.

This was especially maddening, though. Holding penalties cost B.J. Daniels two potential touchdown runs on the same drive, forcing USF to settle for a field goal. A facemask penalty on a punt kept a Cincy drive alive, resulting in a field goal for the Bearcats.

Um, what was the margin of victory again?

The Bulls also lost three points when the snap went through holder Justin Brockhaus-Kann's hands on what would have been a chip-shot field goal try for Maikon Bonani. Three points.

Sigh.

We haven't even mentioned how the Bulls took the lead with 1:21 to play, only to have Cincinnati drive 70 yards on the road for the winning touchdown – a 2-yard run by quarterback Zach Collaros. So I guess we can pick apart the defense at crunch time, too.

And there was that killer deal at the end of the first half. USF trailed 10-7 but reached Cincinnati's 2-yard line with 28 seconds remaining and one timeout left. Daniels was supposed to pass but saw an opening and tried to run. He didn't make it. Daniels was buried under Bearcats' defensive lineman Dan Giordano, who wasn't in a hurry to get up.

"Yes," Bulls offensive coordinator Todd Fitch said when asked if the officials could have stopped the clock until the Daniels could be excavated from the pile, but time kept rolling and Holtz let it roll until just 3 seconds were left. Instead of a touchdown, the Bulls took a field goal.

Holtz said he was afraid a sack or some other calamity that would have left the Bulls with no points if he had called time earlier to run another play.

Decisions have consequences, as this one did. Instead of a potential touchdown, the Bulls got a field goal. They left a possible four points on the field and lost by three. Oh wait, we already mentioned that.

Everything I mentioned until now is public record, undeniable fact. It's time to interject some opinion.

It won't make disappointed Bulls' fans feel any better, but I saw a team that busted its backside for 60 minutes and came within 12 seconds of beating a pretty good opponent. I saw a young USF team nearly win a game that, with all those mistakes, it could have lost by 30.

I saw Daniels throw for 409 yards and three touchdowns, even though his best receiver, Sterling Griffin, missed the last 18 minutes after injuring his ankle. Griffin had eight catches for 73 yards and a touchdown before he left.

Seven games into this maddening season, you can't say the Bulls aren't capable of winning. But you can say USF isn't good enough to win consistently.

Some of that should have been expected. The Bulls have four seniors on their two-deep offensive chart, while the Bearcats started six seniors on offense and seven on defense. It does make a difference, maybe just enough in a tight game.

"We've had our opportunities. There are a lot of growing pains right now," Holtz said. "As I told the team, when we are tired enough of losing and we are willing to correct some of the mistakes we're making, then we have a great opportunity to win."

They had a great opportunity in this game but couldn't pull it off. And another promising season has faded before it could get really interesting.

This is "Team Groundhog" – starting fast, fading faster, and doing so with maddening consistency, year after year. Is anyone getting a little twitchy yet about finishing with enough wins to become bowl eligible?

It's possible that treadmill will stop one day. It just wasn't this day. Once again, the Bulls are waiting for a future that hasn't quite arrived.