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The zero on the scoreboard says a lot, but USF might have been worse Thursday night in a 31-0 loss to Rutgers. It's the first regular-season shutout in the school's 13-year history, so the only question left is this: Was it the worst the Bulls have ever looked?
Was this worse than the 41-7 loss to Pittsburgh last month? Worse than Rutgers' 49-16 win last year? Worse than the Sun Bowl loss to Oregon?
USF women's basketball coach Jose Fernandez, sidelined since Monday by severe abdominal pains, has been admitted to a Tampa hospital and will not be able to coach in Friday's season opener against Florida A&M.
Associate head coach Jeff Osterman will serve as interim coach until Fernandez is healthy enough to return to the team. He was admitted Wednesday night for tests and observation, and it's unknown how long he will be away from the team.
"Speaking on behalf of our women's basketball program, our staff and the extended USF athletics family, our thoughts and prayers are with Coach Fernandez and his recovery," Osterman said in a statement Thursday night. "Our main concern is the well-being of Coach and getting back on the sidelines healthy."
USF had planned to unveil a banner Friday commemorating the Bulls' WNIT championship last season, but that ceremony has been postponed until a later date when Fernandez is back with the team.
Yes, I went back to the grease trucks. No, I didn't really need to do that. I apologize to you and my arteries.
Four years ago, when USF first came up to play Rutgers, we did our game advance story on the silliness that is the "Fat Sandwiches" on Rutgers campus. They call them the grease trucks, with ridiculous overstuffed sandwiches that one magazine touted as "arterial cluster****s" a while ago.
I went back in 2007, and felt a nostalgiac need to stop at College and Hamilton on Rutgers' campus in New Brunswick, across the river from the stadium here in Piscataway. When I first did the story in 2005, the sandwiches were just $4.50, and now they're $5.75, but plenty of food just the same.
The menu at the "RU Hungry" truck actually has a "Fat Bulls" sandwich -- combining cheesesteak, gyro meat, French fries, lettuce and white sauce -- and it's one of the more heart-healthy options on the menu. The Fat Phillipino -- their spelling, not mine -- has the same, but with chicken fingers and mozzarella sticks piled in, too.
Weather update here in Piscataway? It's cold, just under 50 degrees, with a 15 mph wind that could be a factor on kicks and punts tonight. It hasn't rained since I've been here and the field looks sharp.
Rich Pegram, general manager at local ABC affiliate WFTS Ch. 28, said he's gotten "many e-mails" from USF fans upset that next week's game against Louisville won't be shown, with Ohio State-Michigan being shown instead.
"They're obviously very angry," Pegram said Thursday, explaining that the station was asked by ABC to carry the national Ohio State-Michigan game rather than the USF game, even though the local game would likely carry higher ratings.
"It's not a financial decision. We would make more money with USF because it'd be higher-rated," Pegram said. "It purely is a matter of supporting the network. We are an ABC affiliate, and ABC asked us to carry Ohio State-Michigan. We could pre-empt that (and run USF), but quite frankly, if we carried USF, we'd get jus as many e-mails from the Ohio State and Michigan folks."
The USF-Louisville game will be broadcast locally on Bright House Sports Network, which reached more than a million customers locally, but for fans who don't have Bright House for cable, they'll have to turn to ESPN's Game Plan pay-per-view option or elsewhere.
Pegram said he understands the frustration from USF fans, but said the decision to show the Big Ten game shouldn't be taken as any kind of disrespect for the Bulls and their fans.
"We love USF. We value the relationship we have with them and try to show them as much as possible," he said. "Am I going to be able to convince somebody it wasn't insanity or a lack of appreciation for the Bulls? I don't know. You can't pick and choose when you're an ABC affiliate, and if every local affiliate pre-empted the national game to show the local team, there would be no network game."
UPDATE: Some of you in the comments have asked me to see what Louisville's ABC affiliate is showing, given the same choice between the local team and the national ABC game.
WHAS, Louisville's ABC affiliate, will be showing USF-Louisville, with the Ohio State-Michigan game airing on a partner station, WBKI, the local CW affiliate. WHAS won't be showing the 3:30 p.m. ABC national game (Penn State-Michigan State) either, instead showing Louisville men's basketball against East Tennessee State, with the ABC national game again going to WBKI.
Tampa-St. Petersburg is a considerably larger market than Louisville, with 1.82-million TV homes, as opposed to 668,000 for Louisville, so ABC national would logically have a greater interest in influencing Tampa's programming as a result.
Greetings from New Jersey, where it's about 50 degrees and drizzly in Newark, a hazy gray that could give way to a cold, wet night in Piscataway tonight when USF and Rutgers meet on ESPN.
We will live-blog from the game tonight, as we have all season, so be sure to check back here at 7:15 or so to get the last updates before kickoff.
Lots of good links to share -- the more I read on this game, the more I wonder if getting Rutgers freshman QB Tom Savage to make mistakes is the key to the game. Savage only has one interception all season, and Rutgers has just seven turnovers in eight games -- fourth-lowest total in I-A football. It's the same challenge USF faced against Cincinnati, which still has just four turnovers this season. The Bulls have to force mistakes from a team that doesn't make many of them -- that's the first step toward a USF win tonight. Links ...
-- SI.com has a good Kion Wilson feature from Aditi Kinkhabwala, including a nugget of news that the man who shot and killed Wilson's brother Herbie was sentenced to life in prison this week.
-- Weird to link to myself on another site, but the Star-Ledger's Brendan Prunty e-mailed me five questions about USF and he's kindly posted my answers. Same kind of things you'd read here, if I were to e-mail myself five questions and then answer them, but less awkward.
-- We'll have more on this week's signees for USF, but softball picked up a big local signing in Pinellas Park lefty Sara Nevins, who committed to the Bulls two years ago. Here's our story from Times writer Bryan Burns.
-- We've had lots of fun stories with families split between USF and its opponents this season, and there's another one tonight -- Rutgers sophomore cornerback David Rowe is the brother of USF baseball player James Rowe, as the Asbury Park Press wrote this week.
-- Will Louisville coach Steve Kragthorpe make it to next week's USF game? The consensus from Rivals.com is that he's the next head coach to be fired, following two guys who lost to USF in the past year at Memphis and Western Kentucky.
-- ESPN.com blogger Brian Bennett's mailbag this week has some good information about Notre Dame and the Gator Bowl.
-- Here's the game-day report from the Star-Ledger from the Rutgers side of the game.
-- Voting ends Friday as fans can make their pick for the Lowe's Senior Class Award, for which USF's Zak Boggs is a finalist in men's soccer. Boggs has the lead with 25 percent of the vote, but his lead is only 1 percent with one day remaining ...
I don't fly out to New Jersey until early in the morning, but we already have a link to our preview story for Thursday's newspaper, looking at the feud between USF and Rutgers that goes back to before the two teams played their first game. Here's our scouting report, too.
From billboards to poaching opponents off the other team's schedule, there's been no shortage of sparks back and forth between the two teams, not to mention three big losses for the Bulls against the Scarlet Knights.
Now the Bulls return to the field where they fell from No. 2 in the national rankings two years ago, with another Thursday night game on ESPN that affords USF a chance at avenging that loss, as well as a 49-16 shellacking in Tampa last season. Does all that motivation add up to a win for USF, or another disappointing loss?
USF's Nov. 21 home football game against Louisville will not be broadcast locally on WFTS Ch. 28, as originally announced Monday. The local ABC affiliate has opted to show the Ohio State-Michigan game at noon instead, which means the USF game will be shown locally on Bright House Sports Network.
It's bad news for local Bulls fans who don't get their cable from Bright House -- the game should be available as part of ESPN's GamePlan premium package, but Ch. 28's decision puts USF in fewer households in the Tampa market.
It could just be that Ch. 28 simply doesn't like Louisville -- they opted not to show USF-Louisville last season, choosing to air the Florida State-Virginia Tech game in the same window instead.
I think I know how the decision will be received here, but does it concern Bulls fans that a local TV station might specifically choose not to show the local team's home game? USF's biggest fans will be at Raymond James Stadium, but some fans who were planning to watch at home are now left to watch a Big Ten game instead.
-- USF basketball has made two commitments official on the first day of the fall signing period: Guard LaVonte Dority and center Waverly Austin have signed with the Bulls, as expected.
Tragic news today from Orlando, where photographer Chris Livingston, a 36-year-old USF alum who was a regular at Bulls sporting events, died Tuesday morning after his bike was hit by a car.
Photographer Kyle Jeffries, a good friend of the blog who knew Livingston well, was kind enough to pass along this link to a story in Wednesday's Orlando Sentinel.
If you visit Livingston's personal photography site at ChrisLivingston.com, you'll see the first image is a portrait of USF defensive end George Selvie, with a memorable action shot of cornerback Mike Jenkins knocking the helmet off a Cincinnati receiver included as well. When the Times ran a story on linebacker Ben Moffitt in January 2007, Livingston took the pictures we used -- pictures that had also appeared in the New York Times.
Livingston shot USF's football game against Cincinnati last month, and Jeffries points out that a photo he took of Cincinnati quarterback Zach Collaros was used on ESPN.com just this morning. Livingston was active on Twitter.com, and his allegiance to USF could be seen there -- as recently as Sunday, he tweeted: "Glad to see my Bulls back on the AP poll at No. 23."
Thoughts and prayers go out to Livington's family, to his wife, Cathy, and their 2-year-old son, Benjamin. The Sentinel story mentions that in lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Benjamin's college fund.
Our weekly USF notebook in Wednesday's Times led off with women's basketball coach Jose Fernandez missing two days of practice with severe abdominal pains, and the possibility he might not be able to coach the Bulls in their season opener Friday against Florida A&M.
USF is taking that possibility seriously enough that they've postponed the scheduled ceremony Friday to unveil a banner in the Sun Dome commemorating USF's WNIT championship last season. It only makes sense that Fernandez be there to enjoy that moment, and USF says they will reschedule the ceremonies to a later date.
"It’s extremely unfortunate that Coach Fernandez is not feeling well," USF assistant athletic director for marketing Ayo Taylor-Dixon said in a statement. "Our primary concern is that he get better and back with his program as soon as he can. We will re-schedule the banner unveiling at that time."
Fernandez remained at home resting Wednesday and was not with the team for practice, with associate head coach Jeff Osterman running drills for the third day in a row.
Lots of links to share with follow-ups on stories we've posted here on the blog. Most deal with Thursday's USF-Rutgers football game in New Jersey, but we'll start by linking to a cool video on GoUSFbulls.com. Joel Godett has more on USF freshman volleyball player Caitlyn Breen, whose father Matt is following her breakout season online as he finishes a stint working on a military contract in Afghanistan. It's one of those stories that's better heard and seen than simply read, and you can hear it from Caitlyn, her mother Lisa and USF volleyball coach Claire Lessinger.
-- The Big East's offfical site is doing "16 Teams in 16 Days" to preview men's basketball season, and today's USF's day, with a preview and video clips from Stan Heath, Dominique Jones and Chris Howard.
-- Some aftermath to USF linebacker Kion Wilson's comments about Rutgers' offensive line and how they've given up the second-most sacks in the Big East this season. The Star-Ledger's Brendan Prunty bounced Wilson's comments off Rutgers center Ryan Blaszczyk, but he downplayed them as "just words." The Bigeastsportsblog.com's story shows that Wilson isn't regretting his comments at all.
-- I keep asking to do more video for the blog and Tampabay.com, and NJ.com does a good job, with Prunty and fellow Star-Ledger writer Tom Luicci talking about USF-Rutgers.
 Times sportswriter Greg Auman, who covers USF, will post news and thoughts on the Bulletin and we invite your participation in the comments area.
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