Could this be the year? South Florida's football program, only as old as the average fifth-grader, is a stunning success story in a sport defined by tradition. The Bulls, ranked last month for the first time in their 11-year history, are not only in the Bowl Championship Series poll for the first time but also No. 2 behind venerable Ohio State.

If USF can win its remaining six games, beginning with Big East rival Rutgers tomorrow night, the Bulls could be playing in the national title game Jan. 7.

It took 137 years for Rutgers, which played the first college football game in 1869, to reach the top 10. When Ohio State's program was in its 11th season, the year was 1900. When Boston College, No. 3 in the BCS, was in its 11th season in 1909, one of its three wins was against the College of Osteopathy.

So how did the Bulls pull this off so quickly? Many of the answers can be found in the cave-like corner office belonging to Jim Leavitt, the only head coach the program has known. With the green blinds shut tightly, the lights off, the door closed as always, the only glow illuminating the room belongs to the X's and O's projected on a big screen.

"Do you mind the dark?" Leavitt asks.

Leavitt, formerly Kansas State's defensive coordinator, is wearing a white dress shirt and a tie only because he has to go before TV cameras at his news conference. Otherwise, he might be barefoot. On the table in front of him is an ever-present gallon of orange juice to soothe his persistently hoarse throat. Struggling with a lingering cold, he completely lost his voice during last year's loss to Rutgers.

"I truly believe to this day that that affected it," Leavitt says of the game's outcome.

Despite the geographical confusion — Tampa is in the west central part of the state but the school is South Florida because it was the state's southernmost public university when founded in 1956 — Leavitt has quite literally put USF on the map. Using Kansas State's remarkable turnaround as his blueprint, Leavitt built the Bulls, who rose to Division I-A status in 2002 and joined the Big East Conference three years later.

"He loves this program probably as much as anyone has loved a program, like Knute Rockne at Notre Dame or John McKay at Southern Cal or Bear Bryant at Alabama," says defensive coordinator Wally Burnham, in his fourth decade as a college coach. "His passion for this program is one of the major reasons why it is where it is today."

Coach runs gassers, head-butts

The one word used most often to describe Leavitt is "intense."

When the team leaves the locker room on game day, Leavitt does not simply run to the sideline. He tears across the field as if his visor is on fire. Once the game begins, he runs gassers up and down the sideline, tosses the occasional visor and hugs his players as if he's delivering a sack.

At times, he has head-butted his players so hard — while they were wearing helmets and he wasn't — he "just about knocked himself out," senior linebacker Ben Moffitt says.

Once in a while, Leavitt will do his bull run during practice. "We'll look across the field and see him kicking feet as if he's a bull," sophomore quarterback Matt Grothe says. "He turns his hat backwards and starts sprinting 100 yards towards us and then slides face-first into the grass and skips about 10 yards into us. It looks pretty painful."

Defensive line coach Dan McCarney, the long-time Iowa State coach — who, with running backs coach Carl Franks, the former Duke coach, gives USF two former BCS head coaches — has known Leavitt since both were at Iowa in 1989. "In a positive way, he walks to the beat of a different drummer," McCarney says.

Leavitt, 50, allows he "can't sit still" and he's a "pretty hyped-up guy."

You think? His energy helped turn this upstart start-up into college football's version of Google, going from nothing to now in an equally short time.

"We have just built a foundation," Leavitt says.

The foundation was built completely on players from Florida, arguably the top state for talent. There are only nine out-of-state players on the roster, although Leavitt says, "That's high for us." The team's makeup is a combination of overlooked players, a few highly recruited ones who simply wanted to stay home and a handful of transfers who left big programs to return home.

"The so-called "Big Three' (Florida, Florida State and Miami) can't get 'em all," says Burnham, who also worked at Florida State for nine years.

Finding the right players

Sophomore defensive end George Selvie, who leads the nation with 11 1/2 sacks and 21 1/2 tackles for loss, was one of those overlooked players. USF was the only Division I-A school to offer Selvie, then a center, a scholarship. There was some concern Selvie, now 6-foot-4, 245, wasn't big enough to play Division I-A. When Leavitt came to visit him in Pensacola, Fla., the coach made Selvie stand up and turn around so he could take a good look.

"Why in the world would anyone think you're too small?" Leavitt told him. "Look at you. God, I want you to come to South Florida. Would you please come to South Florida?"

At USF, Selvie was converted into a defensive lineman simply because the team needed one. "I still think he'd be a great center," Leavitt says.

When Leavitt recruited Grothe, from nearby Lakeland, he wasn't sure if he would be a quarterback or a defensive back. "Everyone said he was short, but all I kept seeing was a guy who moved the chains," Leavitt says.

Grothe, listed at 6-0, 200, says: "All that three-star, four-star stuff in recruiting is kind of overrated. Not to diss on him, but (Notre Dame's) Jimmy Clausen was supposed to be one of the best quarterbacks ever, and he's struggling this year. It's just a matter of what kind of coaching you have."

Grothe committed early to USF, but he also considered South Carolina, Central Florida and Wake Forest. Now Grothe is one of the best dual-purpose quarterbacks in the country, rushing for at least 100 yards in the last two games.

"He is incredibly mobile, and he throws the ball accurately on the run," Rutgers coach Greg Schiano says.

But what Schiano likes most about Grothe is his moxie. Last year, when Grothe was scrambling near the Rutgers sideline as he threw a pass, Schiano yelled out to the officials, "He's over the line!" Without breaking stride, Grothe turned to Schiano and said, "No, I wasn't!" and kept running.

"That's my kind of guy," Schiano says. "He looks like he just loves being out there. He's a big part of why they're playing so well now."

The defense, which has forced three or more turnovers four times this season and hasn't allowed a 100-yard rusher in 14 consecutive games, is led by Moffitt in the middle. Moffitt, 6-2, 240, was a highly regarded recruit who wanted to go to Florida, but the Gators didn't have a spot for him.

Moffitt makes a 110-mile round trip every day from his home in Bushnell to Tampa so he can be with his wife, who works as a data specialist, and two young children. On a typical Monday, for instance, he rises at 6 a.m., takes his children to school, drives to Tampa for his 9:30 class, goes to his second class, lifts weights, goes to meetings and attends evening practices, which end at 9 p.m.

"A lot of times I don't get to tuck the kids in but when I get home I kiss them and pray over them and make sure they're OK," Moffitt says.

Carping on academics

When South Florida became the fastest team in the modern era to go from Division I-AA to a top 10 ranking in Division I-A, the criticism began to surface. Alabama coach Nick Saban, who lost two players to USF he initially signed, chimed in about USF's admission policies.

"The distribution of players is not the same for everybody," Saban told The Birmingham (Ala.) News. "There's a significant amount of players who don't qualify (at some schools) and they end up being pretty good players at some other schools. I think there are six guys starting on South Florida's defense who probably could have gone to Florida or Florida State, but Florida and Florida State couldn't take them. And if you do a good job of recruiting that way ... "

The perception that USF is full of players who wouldn't qualify at other places is wrong, says Leavitt, who resents the suggestion his program has taken shortcuts.

"You can't do something because you've worked hard?" he asks. "Let's be honest, (some of his players) didn't go to Florida or Florida State not because of academics. They didn't have the ability (according to those schools). They could have gotten in. No doubt. If they were recruited."

USF director of undergraduate admissions J. Robert Spatig recently worked at Georgia and is familiar with the Southeastern Conference. "There's not a football player on our team that Nick Saban couldn't get admitted to the University of Alabama if he wanted that player," Spatig says.

In the NCAA Academic Progress Rate data released last spring, USF posted a 910, lowest among the Big East's football teams, which Leavitt attributes to the transition that took place as the program prepared to join the league. With an enrollment of more than 45,000, the largest in the league, last year's median SAT scores for all students was 1,110, above only West Virginia among the football-playing schools in the Big East.

When the Bulls began play in the Big East in 2005, possibilities opened for the team that once seemed farfetched, including an automatic BCS berth and a shot at the national title.

"When I researched them, people said to me they are no different than what Miami and Florida State were early in their histories," Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese says.

Tranghese saw that USF had everything in place for the Bulls to be successful — a strong recruiting base, a large stadium (Raymond James, where the NFL's Tampa Bay Bucs play) and a good market. Now USF is the top-ranked football school in the state.

"It probably happened sooner than some people thought, but I'm not terribly surprised by it, to be honest," Tranghese says. "I've seen basketball programs do it (so quickly), but I don't know if I've seen a football program."

The one trophy case that is filled in USF's Hall of Fame contains landmark moments in the program's nanosecond history. There's the picture of the day Leavitt was hired. There's a photo of the trailers which housed the program until three years ago. There's the first game ball from Sept. 6, 1997, a win.

"Hopefully," Grothe says while scanning the lobby, "I'll see these stacked full with trophies when I come back 10, 15 years from now."