The School That Keeps the Board Honest
USF sits at No. 32 on the Verdict preseason board — the highest-ranked non-power program in the country — and that number deserves more than a footnote.
Every preseason board tells two stories. The first one everybody reads: which blue bloods landed where, which conferences stacked the top ten, who the algorithms favor before a single snap. The second story is quieter, and most people skip past it on the way to the names they already know.
This year, the second story lives at No. 32.
USF comes into the season as the highest-ranked non-power program on the Verdict preseason board, sitting with a Team Strength rating of 63.9 and a projected record that would make most programs in any conference pause and take notice. That's not a participation ribbon. That's a number the system earned by looking at the evidence without caring which stadium holds the most people or which network owns the broadcast window.
I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think it matters more than it first appears.
There is a version of college football that exists entirely in conversations about a handful of programs — the ones with the biggest alumni bases, the tallest trophy cases, the most Saturdays on national television. That version of the sport is real, and it is genuinely compelling. But it is not the whole sport. It never has been.
The whole sport includes the programs that built their identity without the structural advantages. The ones playing in cities where the university is woven into the daily fabric of the place — not just on game day, but on a Tuesday in October when the coach is in the community and the players are in the classrooms and the athletic department is doing the quiet, unglamorous work of building something worth caring about. Tampa is that kind of city for USF. The program didn't inherit a century of tradition. It has been building one.
That's a different kind of ambition, and I think it deserves a different kind of respect.
Somewhere this morning, on a campus that doesn't make the marquee matchup lists, a coaching staff is reviewing film on a team they have scouted more carefully than anyone in the power conferences bothered to. A walk-on is in the weight room before anyone asked him to be. A season-ticket holder is planning the same tailgate they've planned every year, the one the grandkids have started showing up to. These are not lesser versions of the college football story. They are the original version of it.
What the Verdict board does — when it's working the way it should — is refuse to let prestige substitute for performance. A Team Strength number doesn't know what conference a school plays in. It doesn't know how many times that program has appeared on a network's flagship broadcast. It looks at what the evidence says about how good a team actually is, and it renders a judgment accordingly.
At No. 32, USF is the answer to a question worth asking every preseason: who is making this board honest? Who is proof that the sport is bigger than the brands that dominate it?
I've written recently about the weight of conference muscle — about what it means when one league can place eleven programs in the top tier of a preseason ranking. That structural reality is worth understanding. But so is its counterweight. So is the program that arrives in that same conversation without the tailwind, without the recruiting pipeline fed by decades of national championships, without the automatic assumption of relevance.
USF earned No. 32. The board said so.
Now comes the part where the games get played, and the numbers either hold or they don't. That's true for everyone. The preseason board is a conversation opener, not a verdict — even on a platform called Verdict. What happens between now and December is the actual story.
But before all of that, it seems right to notice that a program without a power conference affiliation is standing in a place most people assumed was reserved for someone else. That the algorithm looked at the evidence and said: this team belongs in this conversation.
College football has always been bigger than its most famous programs. USF, sitting at No. 32, is one reminder of that this year.
That's worth remembering.
Why Bruns wrote this
The Verdict board handed me a fact that most preseason coverage will walk right past — a non-power program sitting inside the top 35 based purely on evidence, not prestige. That's exactly the kind of story this column exists to tell: the one that gets skipped on the way to the bigger names. I wanted to write about USF not as an underdog narrative but as a structural argument — that honest evaluation produces honest results, and that college football is a richer sport when we pay attention to those results wherever they appear.
This column was inspired by real events and data from Verdict — context, not justification. The evidence is impartial; the perspective is Bruns Cole's.
Earlier columns about the same team and rivalry.