The non-conference portion of USF men's basketball schedule will end in what should be a win over Division II Georgia College & State University at 4:30 p.m. on Monday at the Yuengling Center. Interestingly, the Bobcats schedule page refers to this as an exhibition game.
As far as the Bulls are concerned, however, every game counts -- no matter the opponent.
"I've said it a million times -- our standard is our standard. I don't care what the score is. We play USF Bulls basketball no matter what. I don't ever want to change what we're doing or who we are based on the scoreboard. That's a recipe for failure down the road," first-year USF coach Bryan Hodgson said following his team's 94-69 win over UMBC in its last outing.
"I don't care if we're up 50. We're in an era in college basketball where at the end of the year where, Lord willing, we're in a position to be waiting for our name on Selection Sunday. They look at every single one of those metrics, right? Our defensive efficiency, our offensive efficiency, obviously our schedule, which we check the box there. But we're not going to just get sloppy because we feel like we're in a good position on the scoreboard."
Speaking of metrics, two years ago, under the late Amir Abdur-Rahim, even though USF finished 25-8 and was the regular-season conference champion, damaging early losses dropped the Bulls' critical NET ranking to 78th. Their non-conference RPI was 144th. There was no way they could get into the NCAA Tournament with those numbers.
This year, the Bulls are 7-5 but don't any "bad" losses. They handed Utah State (No. 18 NET) its only loss and gave Alabama (No. 19) a decent scrap on the road. When USF opens conference play on January 4 at home against UAB, the Bulls are 65th in NET and 46th in strength of schedule.
They can feel encouraged by where they are, especially given that the Bulls have a new coaching staff and 13 of their 15 players are new to the program.
"I think one of the good things would probably be our growth and how far we've came in that time. You look back to Florida A&M opening night or back to our exhibition against St. Leo or even further back to our closed scrimmage with Miami, we've gotten so much better in that time," Hodgson said.
"I think one of the other positives are our freshmen are starting to play like sophomores, right? And as a coach, that's what you want. You want your freshmen to be playing like sophomores by the time you hit second semester. You want your sophomores to be playing like juniors and so on and so forth. I think we have that."