SNY.tv: Online Home of All Things Sports

Progress presumed that the following season should have been the season when USF made its first Big East Tournament. The league was down, with plenty of weak teams for the Bulls to get one of the necessary six wins for a conference tourney berth. But while the USF returned enough talent to compete with the bottom half of the league, it couldn't win enough of those games. USF did have five more total wins than in its first Big East season and earned its third league win in its ninth conference game, but the season went straight downhill from there.

Five of the Bulls' last seven games were against teams that USF should have competed well against. But the Bulls came within 10 points just twice in that stretch — a four-point loss at St. John's and a five-point home defeat to Providence — en route to losing their last seven games to finish 3-13 in league play.

That seven-game losing streak spelled the end of Robert McCollum's four-year stay on the Gulf Coast. With an athletic department on the rise and a potentially top-25 football team this fall, AD Doug Woolard was no longer willing to tolerate anymore of the bull that McCollum was tossing out on the floor 30 nights each winter. He bought out the last two years of his deal and brought in Stan Heath, recently fired from Arkansas. Heath was let go by the Razorbacks after never getting past the first round of the NCAA Tournament despite fielding teams far more talented than any he will be able to assemble in Tampa.

Heath will bring a defensive toughness that should fit nicely in the Big East, but it's on offense where USF has short-circuited in its nominal Big East stay. The departures of Melvin Buckley and McHugh Mattis aren't especially troubling on offense since neither was much of an asset there. Still, everything's relative, and it doesn't appear Heath has anything of substance with which to replace them.

The one player Heath will build around this winter is senior Kentrell Gransberry. A mid-year transfer from LSU through San Jacinto (Texas) College, the 6-foot-9 Gransberry became a dominant force on the glass and in the post. He led the nation is offensive rebounding rate and proved adept with the ball around the rim. Gransberry finished his season with 25 points and 14 rebounds against Providence and then 26 and 23 at DePaul.

But this post isn't about the inner-workings of Heath's 2007-08 rotation. We know that USF is going to struggle this winter. The question is, what's the long-term outlook for USF men's hoops under this new coach?

South Florida basketball is bad, but the program is in better shape with Heath at the helm. For this season, though, there's not much to get excited about. The league is better than last year's and the Bulls are worse. Besides Gransberry, there isn't another player on this roster than any major programs showed much interest in coming out of high school, and while a good coach can use under-the-radar recruits to successfully fill roles in a defined system, most of these guys weren't brought in to play in Heath's system.

Once the new coach gets on his feet at USF, the team should be competitive, a threat to make the Big East Tournament and the occasional NIT, but the road ahead is far more daunting that what the football program faced. Despite being just a decade old, USF football has used the depth of talent in Florida to turn USF into a contender in the Big East. But Big East football is different than Big East basketball. Almost all of the 16 Big East schools are committed to success in basketball over and above every other sport. Only West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame could be termed football schools, and each has shown significant financial commitment to basketball. Moreover, each of those schools has had a lot more success on the hardwood than USF.

My point is this: South Florida's ceiling in Big East basketball is much lower than in football just because the basketball league is so competitive, but there's obviously room for improvement. Keep in mind that USF hasn't always been this bad at basketball and won't always be. From 1997-2003, Seth Greenberg's USF Bulls never had a losing record in the Conference USA. With B.B. Waldon and Altron Jackson, the Bulls were consistently competitive. They never made the NCAA Tournament, but they were a tough out, and that's the first step on USF's road to respectability: become a team that opponents don't relish playing. And that hasn't been the case since the Bulls joined the league.

I don't see USF as the "sleeping giant" that others call them. But with the right mix of coach and talent, the Bulls could do damage. Consider their ceiling something like Leonard Hamilton's Miami Hurricanes, which is a pretty high level of basketball. I don't know that Stan Heath can squeeze that much out of USF, but he just needs to worry about getting to the Big East Tournament first. Don't expect that to happen until at least 2010.

Comment on this blog and give your thoughts on college basketball on SNY.tv's college sports message board.