A re-energized USF is chasing championships

Rob Higgins, dressed in his alma mater’s garb, took the podium at USF’s graduation and remembered his first Bulls basketball game.

It was an overtime win. The kind of game, he told the crowd packed inside the same arena, that “draws you in and never lets you go.” He remembered how he approached one of the assistant coaches the next morning at church, and how that landed him a job as a ball kid. He’d clean the locker room, wash uniforms and edit video — all privileges, from his perspective — before earning a job in athletics administration after he graduated.

He didn’t say it then, but while standing on that stage he remembered a lifelong aspiration, too. Higgins had long dreamed of leading the university’s athletic department. Even after two decades directing the Tampa Bay Sports Commission — and bringing just about every major sporting event to the region — USF still had him drawn in and wasn’t letting go.

Months before his speech, Higgins had beaten cancer. He previously had thought he’d return to the university in about a decade, but his battle made him realize he ought to stop waiting.

“You just learn so much about time,” Higgins, 47, told the Tampa Bay Times.

The job he wanted wasn’t open, but he left that graduation in May 2025 with a clear conviction.

“I’m not going to put this off for longer than I have to,” he said.

A month after his speech, Michael Kelly, USF’s athletic director at the time, announced he was leaving to accept the same job at Navy. Higgins was inducted into the Sports Club of Tampa Bay Hall of Fame alongside Jon Cooper, Evan Longoria and Dick Vitale on the same day.

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Chief Operating Officer Derrick Brooks told Rob Higgins before officially accepting the USF job: “Let’s map out the vision for the next 10 years. With the spirit of Lee Roy Selmon on us every single day, where are going to take USF?”

By September, Higgins was named the school’s first CEO of Athletics, a nod to the transforming college sports landscape, where entrepreneurial ingenuity is now essential. Higgins needed a chief operating officer to join him, and he had someone in mind, even if that candidate didn’t realize it at first.

He had spent 15 years working for Vinik Sports Group and had helped the Sports Commission secure sporting events. He’s earned a sterling reputation in the community, and he’s a friend to Higgins. He was pretty good at football, too.

Derrick Brooks, an NFL Hall of Famer and a Super Bowl champion with the Bucs, remembers speaking with Higgins for hours at a time as he helped him transition into his role at USF. Then, Higgins took him to lunch and asked Brooks to join him.

“I didn’t know he was actually interviewing me,” Brooks said with his signature wide smirk.

Leaving the organization established by the former majority owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning, Brooks said, was a difficult decision. He worked for Jeff Vinik longer than he played for the Bucs, but the opportunity to work with student-athletes was a major draw. He now shares a campus with his daughter DaNia, who plays softball for USF, and his son Darius, who works at the College of Education. And he’s continuing to walk a path first forged by one of his most cherished mentors.

“Let’s map out the vision for the next 10 years,” Brooks told Higgins before he formally accepted the job. “With the spirit of Lee Roy Selmon on us every single day, where are we going to take USF?”

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USF’s 35,000-seat football stadium, pictured here under construction in February, remains on track for a 2027 opening.

The goal, Higgins and Brooks say, is to take USF where it has never managed to go before.

“I think the University of South Florida has had an inferiority complex over the years,” Higgins told the Times. “It’s no disrespect to anybody, but I think at times we have settled. This place deserves the absolute best, and we will not settle.”

There is, as there has long been, potential. USF is a large school recognized as a leading research institution in a major metropolitan area and a massive media market. The rest of the schools in Florida that share at least some of those similarities — Central Florida, Miami, Florida, Florida State — all play in a Power Four conference.

It is no secret that USF, a member of the American Conference, aspires to join them. As the next phase of conference realignment looms, the university is taking steps to strengthen its promise.

Rising on the horizon of the school’s athletic village is a $350 million, 35,000-seat football stadium and a $60 million accompanying facility slated to open in 2027. Higgins called it a “game changer” for a university that “has fought the stigma of being a commuter school.”

USF announced a full revenue-sharing commitment of $21.3 million, meaning that revenue money will be shared directly with student-athletes and aid roster construction. The teams are performing better, too. The men’s basketball team made its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2012 after winning the American, and the women’s volleyball team reached the tournament last year for the first time since 2002.

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Rob Higgins, left, greets new USF women’s basketball coach Kristy Curry during her introductory news conference in March. Curry left Alabama and the SEC to join the Bulls.

“The new and improved version of this is championships,” Brooks said. “I’m not afraid to talk about it.

“Yes, I expect us to have national championships here.”

It’s a mission they’re chasing feverishly. Brooks says he’s as competitive as he’s ever been, and Higgins appears adverse to vacation days, weekends and even a full night’s sleep. “This is truly like a race against time on a lot of different levels,” he said. “We don’t have a day off we can take right now.”

He abides by the motto “All Gas, No Brakes,” and often checks in to work with a pre-dawn picture, a series he calls “Sunrise from the Selmon.” Sometimes he shares a picture of the pink-colored sky, and sometimes he posts himself, suited up and smiling while many are still in a slumber.

“It doesn’t make me a martyr or a saint or anything else,” Higgins said. “This is what I love doing.”

His work, he says, is in service to the student-athletes who have chosen to join the community he treasures.

“They’ve dreamed of what it would be like to play at this level their whole life and put in the work to be able to do it,” Higgins said.

“The dorky guy in the green tie? Here in the trenches with them at 6 a.m.? I want them to know. They’re working hard, I’m working hard.”

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New USF football Brian Hartline comes over from Ohio State and the Big Ten. Can he help push the Bulls to a Power Four conference?

Higgins and Brooks arrived at an inflection point early in their tenure: About 12 hours after USF routed Rice in its regular-season football finale, Alex Golesh announced he was leaving for Auburn. The SEC sirens, steadily strengthening as the season progressed, grew too strong to ignore.

Golesh was highly sought after, understandably so. He inherited a program mired in a 8-37 freefall and lifted it to a 23-15 mark. He took the Bulls from bottom feeding to beating ranked teams, highlighted by a 9-4 2025.

The Bulls beat Boise State, a College Football Playoff team the year prior, for their first ranked win in nearly a decade. The next week, they beat Florida in Gainesville — their first-ever victory against the Gators and first road win against a ranked opponent since 2011. They scored 54, 55 and 63 points against conference opponents and their quarterback, Byrum Brown, shined as a fringe Heisman Trophy candidate.

Two conference slip-ups — a 31-34 loss to Memphis and a 38-41 loss to Navy — cost USF a spot in the conference championship and a chance at a playoff bid. Still, the season was emboldening, a major step forward.

Could Higgins and Brooks maintain the momentum, even as much of their roster and staff left for Auburn or elsewhere? It’s a question months, if not years, from being fairly answered. But their early efforts are impressive, evidence they might just be able to succeed at assuring USF’s ascent is, as they like to say, a movement, not a moment in time.

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USF is chasing its first conference win in football, and perhaps bigger conference rewards in the future.

The same Sunday Golesh announced his departure, Higgins phoned Brian Hartline, Ohio State’s offensive coordinator and wide receiver training guru at the time. Hartline, a highly-coveted head coaching candidate, was fresh off a victory over rival Michigan, preparing for the postseason and initially “didn’t really think much” of the call. He had been courted before.

But the call turned into a video conference the next day, and by Tuesday, Higgins, along with several high-ranking Bulls — Mike Griffin, Jay Stroman and Will Weatherford — was on a flight to meet Hartline and his family in Columbus. Higgins’ thinking, he said, was simple: “We gotta convince this guy to come back on the plane with us.”

Effectively, they did. As their plane was landing in Tampa at nearly midnight, Hartline texted he was “a thousand percent in,” Higgins said. The four men shared high-fives and snapped a selfie once off the plane. After the hire was announced, Higgins posted the picture and deemed them “the four happiest dudes in Tampa.”

They had their football coach, and he was arguably the cycle’s most intriguing candidate: a former NFL standout and a recent national champion with a sterling reputation for recruiting and developing talent. Not at a Power Four school as had been speculated, but at USF.

“A lot of people did not think we could get him. Some of my colleagues told me, ‘Derrick, you have lost your mind, man,'” Brooks said.

They wished him well in his pursuit anyways, but Brooks wasn’t interested in the skeptical support.

“Don’t wish me luck,” he said. “Be ready to applaud me.”

Hartline remembers sensing an urgency and tone in his conversations with USF that separated it from other schools, and ultimately, “the people really sold it.”

“Getting to know Rob and Derrick, you kind of know that once they make their mind up, that’s kind of the way it’s gonna go,” Hartline said.