We played a fantastic game, and even if Leavitt had coached well we would have won by 2 scores, but wow. What a terrible coaching performance.
After the long run by B.J. Daniels that was called back because Daniels stepped out, they spent so long getting back to the line of scrimmage (Daniels was just strolling back) that USF had to burn a timeout. There was one time when the Bulls only put 9 people on the field to field a punt. There was a goal line situation (on USF's one successful drive) where USF for some strange reason decided to line up in the power I even though they are a spread team that is TERRIBLE out of that formation (they promptly false started). And most shockingly, there was one time that USF didn't even have a play called and had to take a timeout even though there was plenty of time on the play clock. Complete craziness.
I'm gonna steal some terminology from EDSBS here, but there seem to be 2 schools of thought in the mentality of head coaches. You've got "process" coaches like Nick Saban, Pete Carroll, and Urban Meyer who keep an even keel, stop their team from getting too high or too low, and stress consistency (2 of those 3 are terrible human beings, but that's another story). And then you have the fire and brimstone coaches like Houston Nutt and Les Miles who will lead their teams to tremendous upsets but sometimes just lay an egg on national TV and lose the game for their team.
Randy Shannon is a shining example of the ideal "Process" Coach. He's building the program from the bottom up with character guys. He's making great hires. He's only capable of a single emotion/facial expression



and his main focus is to keep the team from getting too high or too low. This is how you build things like USC from 2002 to 2008 (7 straight seasons of 11 or more wins, 2 national championships)
Leavitt is fire and brimstone. He headbutted a player hard enough to look like he got in a bar fight while playing Lousiville. He's done a good job building this program from literally nothing, but his teams will do things like beat FSU at Doak Campbell then lose to Rutgers on a Thursday night in the same season. In 2008, their first really good season, USF upset Kansas and ended up ranked 10 in the nation at the top of their conference with a 5-0 record before losing to a mediocre Pittsburgh. Then 2 weeks later, they dropped 3 straight Big East games. And his teams will ALWAYS do this. Forever. He's too emotional, too crazy, too irrational to ever get consistency out of his team.
Jim Leavitt has rabies.
Randy forever.