ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — For anyone who thought it might be difficult for Matt Grothe and South Florida to get excited about playing what amounted to an extra home game, the Bulls and their dual-threat quarterback answered with a dominating performance in the first St. Petersburg Bowl.

Grothe moved ahead of West Virginia's Pat White as the Big East's career total offense leader, throwing for 236 yards and three touchdowns to on the way to a 41-14 victory over Memphis today.

Grothe and White, a senior who will finish his season in the Meineke Bowl on Dec. 27, are the only players in league history to amass more than 10,000 yards total offense. White has 10,142 in 49 games, and Grothe, who also rushed for 82 yards on 15 carries Saturday, finished the night with 10,214 in 39 games.

USF (8-5) scored on four of its first five possessions to build a 24-14 halftime lead, forcing Memphis (6-7) to play catch-up and essentially taking 1,000-yard rusher Curtis Steele out of the Tigers' game plan.

Memphis' Arkelon Hall threw for one TD and ran for another. But Steele was held to 48 yards rushing on 12 attempts by a stout run defense determined to redeem itself this postseason after giving up 253 yards to Oregon's Jonathan Stewart during a lopsided loss in last year's Sun Bowl.

Grothe threw TD passes of 26 yards to Taurus Johnson, 13 to Ben Busbee and 24 to Dontavia Bogan before being replaced by Grant Gregory with USF leading 34-14 late in the third quarter.

Hall was 15-of-30 for 154 yards and no interceptions for Memphis, with much of that coming on a swing pass that Steele turned into a 50-yard gain early in the second half. He ran 3 yards for a first-quarter touchdown, then threw 2 yards to Duke Calhoun for the Tigers' other TD just before halftime.

It was the first meeting between the former Conference USA rivals since USF left that league for the Big East in 2005. The teams split four games between 2001 and 2004, and Memphis relished the challenge of facing an opponent from a BCS conference for the first time in five bowl appearances under coach Tommy West.

The Tigers, who won six of nine games to become bowl eligible after an 0-3 start, viewed Saturday as an opportunity to gauge how much they've progressed toward a goal of having a BCS-caliber program.

On this day, they were nowhere close to a South Florida team that began the season with high expectations after being ranked as high as No. 2 in 2007. The Bulls won their first five before stumbling badly in the Big East and winding up in a bowl game just 32 miles from USF's main campus in Tampa.

Downtown St. Petersburg is close enough that coach Jim Leavitt and his players bused from the team hotel back to campus for practice all week, truly making it seem like an extra home game rather than a bowl trip.

The announced crowd at Tropicana Field, the domed home of baseball's Tampa Bay Rays, was 25,202.