Turning points in the USF football transformation under Alex Golesh

TAMPA — Donovan Jennings spent the past six years living the highs and lows of USF football.

The Gaither High alumnus’ signing was announced the same 2017 day the Bulls completed their second season with 10 or more wins ever. Jennings won the first seven games of his Bulls career, lost 37 of the next 45 and turned things around with a 7-6 farewell campaign. He was a starting offensive tackle before ground broke on the indoor practice facility and stuck around long enough to hold his recent pro day inside it.

“I’ve definitely seen the ups and downs of this program, but it was definitely good last year to build the foundation of the new USF coming,” Jennings said. “I can’t wait to see what they’ve got the next couple years.”

That’s being built on the practice fields and, yes, indoor facility as USF continues working through Alex Golesh’s second spring. But exit interviews with Jennings and other outgoing Bulls explain how that foundation rose.

And, more specifically, when.

“When Coach Golesh got here…” said Daquan Evans, the defensive MVP of the Boca Raton Bowl blowout. “Just changing our process, getting our preparation right and just being a man on and off the field and being an accountable person in life. When I saw that and just saw the progress throughout the season — as y’all probably saw — I knew this program was headed in the right direction.”

Jennings felt the same turn last spring. The coaching change from Jeff Scott wasn’t the only cause, but the turnover refreshed the locker room.

“You could just feel a different energy in the air,” Jennings said. “Guys were expecting to win the day and win the practice each and every day. That’s kind of when I’ve seen the flip and just the shift of the dynamic in the culture.”

Cornerback Braxton Clark noticed the shift later, a few weeks after he transferred from Nebraska. As summer workouts turned toward preseason camp, the Orlando native saw an increase in accountability. Players stopped showing up late or skipping things entirely.

“We just tightened up on all the little things,” Clark said, “and the little things led to the bigger things, which was us winning games.”

The biggest turning point of all, however, was a game USF did not win.

“The Alabama game, I’d say, turned our program around,” Evans said.

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Clark described the closer-than-the-score-indicates 17-3 loss as “heartbreaking.” And that might be why the game was so monumental.

It would have been easy to accept the result as a moral victory — a down-to-the-wire game against a playoff-bound team led by the greatest coach in college football history. Golesh didn’t see it that way.

“Moral victories are for losers,” Golesh said publicly afterward. “Winners win.”

Golesh’s message, Clark said, was the same behind closed doors. The takeaway wasn’t that USF almost won; it’s that USF should have won. And if the Bulls should have beaten a premier program, why couldn’t they handle the rest of their schedule?

“It was at that point when we realized, we’ve actually got a decent team, we can do something this year,” said Clark, an NFL hopeful who’s training at Tampa’s Athlete Innovations. “You could tell people were just on a different motivation, determination at that point in time.”

That newfound determination played out the rest of the season that ended a four-year bowl drought. Though it accomplished one of Jennings’ goals, he and his outgoing teammates see that as merely a nice starting point for what’s next.

“They made it to a bowl game,” Clark said, “so why can’t they win a conference championship?”

USF spring football game

When: 2 p.m. April 13

Where: Corbett Stadium, USF campus

More information: gousfbulls.com

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