The School That Keeps the Rest of 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 passing glance.
Every preseason board tells two stories. The first story is the one everyone reads: who's at the top, which programs entered the offseason with the most and left it with nearly as much, which conferences claimed the most real estate. That story gets told plenty.
The second story is quieter. It lives somewhere in the thirties, in the space where the board stops being a referendum on brand equity and starts being a genuine question about football. That's where USF is sitting right now, and that's the story worth telling this morning.
The Verdict preseason board has USF at No. 32 — a Team Strength rating of 63.9 and a projected record of 10-0. They are the highest-ranked non-power program on the entire board. Not the highest-ranked Group of Five team in their region, not the highest-ranked American Athletic team in a particular bracket. The highest-ranked non-power program, full stop.
Take a moment with that.
We talk a great deal in this sport about the distance between conferences — the resource gap, the recruiting radius, the facilities arms race that never quite ends. Those are real conversations, and they deserve honest treatment. But somewhere in the middle of all that analysis, it becomes easy to forget that football is still played between the lines on a Saturday afternoon, and that a program with genuine talent and a sound scheme can earn a position on a ranking that has nothing to do with letterhead.
USF didn't get to No. 32 because of a television contract. They got there because the evidence said so.
There's something I find clarifying about that. Not comforting in a soft way — clarifying in the way a good argument clarifies a question you'd been carrying around half-formed. The Verdict system isn't sentimental. It doesn't give credit for history or stadium size or how many times a program has appeared on a noon kickoff on a major network. It measures what it can measure and tells you what the numbers say. When a non-power program lands at No. 32 on that kind of board, it means something earned it.
I've been in enough small college towns to know what this kind of number means to the people who care about a program every single day — not just when the rankings are favorable, but on the Tuesday in February when a commit flips, or the August afternoon when a starter goes down in a camp scrimmage, or the November road trip when the weather turns and the stands thin out but the ones who stayed are louder than they were in September. Those people understand what it costs to build something without the wind at your back.
There's an old argument in this sport that goes something like this: the small schools exist to fill out the schedule. I've heard it said plainly and I've heard it said in polite language that means the same thing. I don't believe it. I think the small schools exist because football exists, and football exists because communities decided it was worth gathering for. The size of the endowment didn't create that. The people did.
What USF represents on this board — right now, before a single snap of the season — is a reminder that the measuring stick doesn't always favor the expected. A Team Strength rating of 63.9 doesn't ask where you play your home games or which bowl tie-in your league negotiates. It asks whether you're good at football. The answer, apparently, is yes.
I wrote a few weeks ago about what it means when a season arrives and every program is standing at the same starting line. That's still true in August. The board is a preseason projection, not a final verdict, and the games will have their say. They always do.
But I'll tell you what I notice when I look at this board: I notice that No. 32 is held by a program that a lot of people would have skipped right past. I notice that the evidence didn't skip it.
Somewhere this morning, on a campus that doesn't carry the weight of a century of trophies and Heisman ceremonies, a coaching staff is looking at this number and feeling exactly the kind of pressure that makes a team sharp. Not comfortable. Sharp.
That's a good thing for college football. The sport needs programs that make the rest of the board answer questions it would rather not be asked.
USF is asking them. That's worth remembering.
Why Bruns wrote this
I wanted to write about what it means when an analytics system — one with no loyalty to tradition or prestige — looks at a non-power program and places it above thirty-one other teams. That's a story about fairness in a sport that doesn't always distribute it evenly, and it deserved space that wasn't just a footnote beneath a Power Four conversation. The small-school angle isn't charity here; it's the most honest thing the preseason board is saying.
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.