The American is finally forcing voters in the Associated Press and USA Today football polls to take notice.
Memphis, Temple and Houston are all 5-0 and have proved that there is good Division I football being played everywhere in this country.
Memphis is ranked 22nd in this week’s coaches’ poll while Houston and Temple are the top two teams that received votes, but did not make the top 25.
Houston is ranked 24th in the AP poll, ahead of Temple and Memphis, which are the first two teams that just missed the cut.
But The American’s early success this season has as much to do with its teams outside the top-25 periphery as it does its unbeatens. Teams that had struggled in recent years have shown marked improvement in 2015 – particularly UConn and USF, which face each other Saturday at Pratt & Whitney Stadium in East Hartford, Connecticut.
“We have a couple of teams in league who can beat anybody in country,” UConn coach Bob Diaco claimed. ”But now, top to bottom, we’ve got teams who are winning and playing off their feet against any opponent.”
“I said a couple months ago this league was going to be better than people thought,” USF coach Willie Taggart said. “And now the outside is starting to see it too.”
If last weekend was any indication, are UConn and USF are moving in the right direction.
USF dropped the boom on Syracuse, unleashing its young skill-position players to defeat the Orange, 45-24, at Raymond James Stadium. Quarterback Quinton Flowers threw for a career-high 253 yards and two touchdowns and also scored on a 2-yard run for the Bulls, who piled up 519 yards in an up-tempo spread offense.
Sophomore Marlon Mack, last year’s American Athletic Conference Rookie of the Year, and one of the best running backs in this league, rushed for 184 yards in 20 carries and scored on bursts of 25 and 45 yards while averaging 9.2 yards per carry as USF is starting to come to life.
“I thought our young pups took a big step for our program,” third year coach Willie Taggart said.
Taggart pulled out all the stops for this one, using a wide open playbook filled with trick plays, including a 42-yard TD pass to Ryeshene Bronson on a flea-flicker that began with a handoff to Mack, who pitched the ball to Rodney Adams before the receiver lateraled back to Flowers.
“I told all of them, ‘We’re not going to leave anything on the play call sheet. We’re going to run it all and you guys take care of business,’” Taggart said. “We were going to let it rip. They did that. They went out, executed on a high level and they finished the game.”
Flowers, a sophomore who only threw 20 passes last season, is a survivor from Miami who is easy to root for. Last November after he had been named the starting quarterback for the Bulls’ game at SMU, Flowers phoned home and learned that his stepbrother, Bradley Holt, was throwing the football with neighborhood children when he was murdered in a drive-by shooting in the Liberty City section of the city.
Taggart told Flowers that he didn’t have to go to Dallas, but Flowers opted to play anyway, exhibiting the same kind of mental toughness he showed when he was 7 and his father was killed outside the family’s home or in high school when his mother passed away after battling cancer.
“He’s an electric, dynamic player,” Diaco said of Flowers. ”And they are a team that is on fire.”
Mack, who hails from Sarasota, Florida, was considered one of the top 15 prospects in the state when he chose USF over Nebraska.
“We needed a difference-maker and he’s made a huge difference for us,” Taggart said. “To be truthful, when he first came in, we thought we was going to be an All-American safety for us. But after the first couple days of practice, he changed our mind. He’s just running through people this year.”
Mack already has seven career 100-yard rushing games and 1,618 career rushing yards.
USF’s “Bull Sharks” defense stepped up with two of the team’s three takeaways while totaling 10.0 tackles for loss, two forced fumbles and giving up just two plays over 20 yards against Syracuse.
UConn (3-3, 1-1) also made a bold statement when the Huskies defeated UCF, 40-13, at Bright House Networks Stadium in Orlando.
Last year during the offseason, Diaco attempted to motivate his team by establishing a tangible rivalry between his team and a school located more than 1,200 miles away, creating a trophy called “The ConFLiCT” that sat on the Huskies sidelines.
Diaco was looking for juice to kick start his program and if that meant manufacturing a grudge match against UCF, so be it. After all, the Huskies became the first team in The American to hand the Knights a conference loss as UCF won the outright conference title in 2013 and shared the crown in 2014.
Through six weeks of the 2015 season, UCF is 15-3 all-time in The American. Two of the three losses have been to UConn.
Diaco simply wanted to raise the bar for his team, which had been 5-19 the last two years -- to the level of UCF. And, in a year where the injury prone Knights had to replace 14 starters, he succeeded.
“We kept tapping at the rock and eventually, it’s going to crack,” Diaco said after the win against the Knights. Afterwards, the UConn players playfully hoisted the trophy.
Quarterback Bryant Shirrefs threw for 256 yards and rushing for another score while Arkeel Newsome scored twice as the Huskies snapped a three game losing streak with an offensive explosion. Shirrefs posted his fourth 200-yard passing game in his first six career starts despite being sacked five times.
UConn avoided mistakes and forced four turnovers in what amounted to a runaway win.
“That’s a vastly improved football team,” Taggart warned.
The teams meet Saturday in what amounts to a key game in The American’s East Division. The losing team will pick up a second conference loss, which doesn’t bode well for hopes of hosting the American Football Championship Dec. 5.
The UConn-USF series has been a good one since the teams first made acquaintances in 2000. The Bulls hold a 7-5 series lead and has won the last three, but each of the last eight meetings has been decided by seven points or fewer.
The 2007 meeting was a matchup of two 6-1 teams as UConn scored a 22-15 win against the Bulls, who were ranked No. 11 nationally. The win propelled the Huskies into the top 25 for the first time in program history as UConn was ranked No. 16 the following day.
The Huskies also won back-to-back matchups in 2009 and 2010 on Dave Teggart field goals in the final minute. Teggart was good from 42 yards out at the final gun to give UConn a 29-27 win in 2009, and he hit from 52 yards out with 17 seconds left the following year to give UConn a 19-16 win and a share of the Big East title.
Last year, USF held UConn to six first downs and 132 yards of offense, allowing two early touchdowns to hold up in a 17-14 win in the rain in Tampa. The Bulls were 13-10 winners in 2013 on a defensive touchdown and two Marvin Kloss field goals.
This year’s game features two of the better defenses nationally as both UConn and USF rank among the top three in The American in just about every defensive category. Their respective wins from last week aside, UConn’s defense gave the Huskies a chance in a 9-6 loss at Missouri earlier this year, while the Bulls bottled up Memphis’ explosive offense in a 24-17 setback two weeks ago and played Florida State to a 7-7 tie at halftime in Week 2.
They are both in contention for bowl bids this season and are both emblematic of The American’s competitiveness in 2015.