USF's challenge at Tulane is to put together a complete game against a good team

USF is where most people believed the Bulls would be when this football season began. They handled their business against Bethune-Cookman and Southern Miss, and the business end in games against Top 10 opponents Alabama and Miami.

We can all think of many programs that would have a 2-2 record after a stretch like that.

That’s why Saturday’s game at Tulane should give us the first glimpse of how good the Bulls can actually be. It’s the first American Athletic Conference game for both teams, and Tulane will be a tough out for the Bulls. The challenge will be to sustain the fight for 60 minutes against a top-shelf conference opponent on the road.

Tough? Yes.

Impossible? No.

We saw the Bulls hang tough for long stretches against 'Bama and Miami but couldn't keep it up for 60 minutes. Of course, the quality of those two teams had everything to do with that. That’s the standard USF is shooting for, as head coach Alex Golesh repeatedly stresses that he and his staff are building a program, not just a team.

“I'm incredibly encouraged, and I love who we are. We play really hard. We're locked in throughout the week. We push through little injuries,” he said.

“From an accountability standpoint, we're continuing to get better, and guys are holding each other accountable. I think guys are understanding what it takes to actually win on Saturday. I think our biggest challenge when you're building a culture of winning is the doing it every day, over and over and over and over, and as it starts to pile up and the days become weeks and weeks become months, just the grind. That would be the word, I guess.”

Tulane is a great example of program-building.

In 2021, the Green Wave finished 2-10 and had only one win against an FBS school. Take a guess which one. (Spoiler alert: It was coached by Jeff Scott). A year later they were conference champions, finishing 12-2 with a win over Southern Cal in the Cotton Bowl.

The Green Wave also has a 10-game regular-season winning streak in AAC play. year. They are 25-7 overall over the last two-plus seasons, including victories in 11 of their last 12 road games.

Beating this team on its home turf would be a major milepost in the kind of program USF wants to become.

“We're getting closer. We're certainly way closer than probably I even thought we would be at this point, but it's fragile, and the margins are really small, and when you're playing really big teams, those margins get exposed, and the depth gets exposed, the margins get exposed,” Golesh said.

“And now you're you line back up, and you're playing another really, really good team, and a team that has been where we where we were, and has been able to flip it around” and become a program that expects to win every time it steps on the field.

He added, “What you're building towards, is getting to that point where, man, that's just the expectation, and that's just the standard of what it is. The next step for us is to go in and be able to four quarter put together four quarters of really, really good football against a really, really good football team.”