By Pete Williams

Tony Dungy spoke to USF’s embattled football team Monday at the request of athletic director Doug Woolard.

You have to figure Woolard placed a call to Dungy last week and it went something like this:

“Coach, Doug Woolard here. I was wondering if you’d be willing to come speak to the football team.”

“Sure, happy to. How about 3 o’clock on Monday?”

“Great!…Um, while I have you, I don’t suppose you’d be interested in coaching the team?”

(Laughs) “No, but I appreciate the offer. I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Alrighty then!”

Has there ever been a better fit for a football coaching vacancy? Right now, USF needs the exact opposite of Jim Leavitt. The school needs a gregarious, respected, accomplished, humble, people-person coach who, by the way, also is the man least likely in the entire coaching profession to strike a player.

They need a guy who can step in just weeks before signing day and retain all of the recruits Leavitt has landed and convince a few undecided blue chippers to come to USF. They need a guy with ties to Tampa who can start yesterday, a guy who can raise the profile of a commuter school, putting the geographically challenged South Florida on the map. They need a guy with the best record in Raymond James Stadium history, a guy who never coached in the building when it had empty seats.

They need a guy who would embrace the challenge of working with young people while delivering tough love to the knuckleheads who get in trouble off the field. They need a man so respected that he could land any job in the state – governor, U.S. Senator – but a man so modest he’d have no delusions of power like so many college coaches.

They need a man who could run a squeaky-clean program and not need to operate, like many BCS programs, in the shady underground of boosters, shoe company middlemen, and other charlatans to land players. They need a man who single-handedly could clean up college football.

They need a man who places family first, a coach who would attract assistants who know they will have to work hard, but not 100-hour weeks as they would for people like Leavitt.

Best of all, they need a man who is worth a $5 million annual salary who would be willing to give a hometown discount and work for the USF going rate of $2.5 million or so.

Is this idea so preposterous? Yes, Dungy retired from NFL coaching so he could spend more time in Tampa with his family. But his son, Eric, already is considering playing football at USF next fall. The Dungy family’s longtime home is only a 15-minute drive from the USF campus.

No matter what people like Urban Meyer say, coaching college is not as stressful and is less time-consuming than the NFL. Why else do college coaches routinely flop in the NFL? Steve Spurrier found he no longer could play golf four times a week in the NFL. Bobby Bowden, meanwhile, never let coaching get in the way of his afternoon nap.

Dungy would inherit a program in terrific shape. If he took the job this week, he could make a flurry of phone calls and end up with one of the better recruiting classes in the nation, if not the best. Who could possibly compete with Dungy on the recruiting front?

The worst part about college coaching is recruiting, but USF already gets 95 percent of its roster from the Sunshine State. Dungy no doubt could land recruits from around the country, but he’d find most of what he needs within a two-hour drive.

Other programs would suffer from Dungy’s presence. If Dungy joined USF, Jimbo Fisher might give the FSU job back to Bowden, Lane Kiffin would finally shut up, and Meyer might literally have a heart attack.

Dungy would not want to be perceived as one of those flip-flop coaches who retire to spend time with family only to resurface a year later. But would anyone blame him for taking the opportunity to coach his son just 15 minutes from home?

As Buccaneers coach, Dungy drove his kids to school and often was home for dinner. Heck, he’s probably going to spend as much time out of town as an NBC analyst than he would as a USF coach.

In recent years, the Big East has become a powerhouse. It owns Thursday nights and, not surprisingly, lands a lot of national recruits who watch the conference on ESPN. Yet, the Big East is wide open enough that Dungy could dominate quickly – and for a long time.

Imagine the staff Dungy could assemble. Herm Edwards finally could be a defensive coordinator, reprising the bad-cop, sergeant-at-arms role he played effectively for Dungy’s late ‘90s Buccaneers. Derrick Brooks could be linebackers coach, assuming he could get over working for a school other than his beloved Florida State. Heck, Lovie Smith might be available, if not this month than a year from now.

Tim Ruskell, the former Buccaneers assistant general manager, was just fired as president of the Seahawks. He’s a USF alum and looking for work.

Dungy could put the entire band back together!

On Monday, Dungy told USF players how the Buccaneers won the Super Bowl a year after making a coaching change. Just as Jon Gruden credited Dungy for putting all of the pieces in place, it’s easy to see Dungy winning a national title and thanking Leavitt.

Dungy is not a guy who would use a term like “unfinished business.” His legacy in Tampa is secure. Even though Gruden won the Super Bowl, Dungy is the Buccaneers most popular coach ever. But how cool would it be to dominate college football in the same stadium, bringing a national title to a town long overshadowed in the college ranks by Gainesville, Tallahassee and Coral Gables?

Dungy came to Tampa in 1996 at a time when Leavitt was preparing USF for the Bulls’ first-ever football season in 1997. Both performed sports miracles, with Dungy turning around the hapless Buccaneers and Leavitt taking a team from start-up to a No.2 BCS ranking in 2007.

As Dungy spoke to USF players on Monday, they had to be wondering what it might be like if he was there next coach. Dungy, who probably had never been in USF’s new football facilities, must have at least been intrigued.

Why not?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 11:18 am and is filed under Sports Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.