TAMPA, Fla. — USF coach Alex Golesh repeated the same thing after both of his team’s first two wins — a stunning blowout in the season opener against Boise State, and another shocker last weekend against Florida — “This ain’t the same ol’ South Florida, my brother!”

The 2-0 Bulls are ranked for the first time since 2018, notched the first win in school history over the Gators and are an early favorite to win the Group of 5 automatic berth into the College Football Playoff.

But there is more meaning behind those words, more than just a statement about big nonconference wins. Those nine words are a nod to one of Golesh’s close friends.

On the side of his headset, Golesh has the initials AAR, for the late USF men’s basketball coach Amir Abdur-Rahim.

Golesh and Abdur-Rahim were hired within three months of each other, similar coaches with similar beliefs, tasked with the same goal: Get USF to shed its underachiever status. Abdur-Rahim had done it at his previous stop at Kennesaw State, developing the Owls from being a one-win team to reaching the NCAA tournament.

Golesh had inherited a one-win football program and looked to Abdur-Rahim for advice. A few days after Abdur-Rahim was hired, Golesh went to see him in his office.

“They had literally just done at Kennesaw what we were trying to do, build it the right way,” Golesh said.

The two hit it off immediately. Their kids went to the same schools. Their wives became friends. That first spring they were together, in 2023, Abdur-Rahim would come out to practice and quickly became a fixture around the football program.

He would text Golesh after games that first season and offered his thoughts on a four-year plan for success. Golesh and his son, Barrett, would go to basketball games as Abdur-Rahim led USF to its best season ever in 2023-24, winning its first conference title and a school-record 25 games. It was during that run that Abdur-Rahim went viral for saying, “This ain’t the same ol’ South Florida, my brother!”

As the Bulls finished off their 34-7 win over Boise State on Aug. 28, Golesh felt a presence around him. He thought back to what Abdur-Rahim told him from the very beginning: Year 3 is when the players stop hoping they can win. Now, they start believing they can win.

“Amir used to always say, ‘They ain’t gonna believe until they see it,” Golesh told ESPN. “I felt like, ‘All right. They believe.'”

That belief is why USF is 2-0. The question is: How did Golesh get them to believe?

When Golesh met with then-USF athletic director Michael Kelly to discuss the open head coaching job in December 2022, he had questions. USF had moments of success in its short football history — including back-to-back 10-win seasons in 2016 and 2017 — but its more recent record was abysmal. The Bulls finished 2022 with a 1-11 record and four total victories over a three-year span. And the program had never won a conference title.

Golesh wanted to know right away — Would USF provide the resources required to win? Would they give him time to turn the program around? The answer to both was a resounding yes.

“His experience at other places showed what he felt he needed,” Kelly told ESPN. “I never felt it was unreasonable. It was just, ‘This is the way it is if we’re going to win this league.'”

Kelly said the staff size increased, and an additional $1.5 million was added to the assistant coach salary pool. The recruiting budget increased. Golesh also had the entire nutrition, strength and conditioning program and athletic training staff revamped.

Under the previous staff, for example, players got breakfast and lunch but no dinner at the facility. But now, they get three meals a day and have access to a nutrition bar in the weight room. Plus, there are fully stocked mini-fridges and snack baskets in every team meeting room.

There was no bigger sign of commitment to football than the approval of an on-campus $349 million football stadium, set to open in 2027, an idea that had been decades in the making. Most days, USF players practice to the sound of steel pillars going into the ground, just beyond the practice fields.

“It just goes together with what we’re doing on the football field, building a foundation,” quarterback Byrum Brown says. “We put the dirt down. We’re putting up poles. We’re seeing what this program can really be for years to come.”

Resources are one thing. Buy-in and belief are another. Center Cole Best remembers a meeting Golesh had with returning players during his second day on the job.

“He said, ‘I just need a little blind faith,'” Best said. “And I said, ‘I’m going to give it to him, and I’m going to buy into whatever this is. It was difficult at times, but I knew within his first couple of days here that, ‘This is the guy.'”

Sixth-year linebacker Mac Harris, who was on those three USF teams that won four total games before Golesh arrived, said those teams often found ways to cut corners, or avoided doing what was hard and uncomfortable.

Golesh’s Bulls don’t take the easy way out.

“AG says it all the time, leave no rock unturned. Check every detail, go through every obstacle you have to go through the right way,” Harris says. “Some people call them cliches, but they mean something, and they hold weight. I think doing that each and every day, and holding your teammates accountable to it, and them holding you accountable to it, created an expectation to win.”

In his first season as head coach, USF went 7-6, the second-best win improvement among all FBS programs in 2023. Then last season, USF showed glimpses of its potential, playing Alabama close for three quarters before losing, and then playing Miami close for a half before losing. Brown missed the final seven games of the season with a lower leg injury and USF still finished 7-6 and made it to another bowl game.

With a healthy Brown and 15 other starters back, Golesh and his team felt optimistic about the possibilities for this season.

Yes, the start to the 2025 season came up during his job interview, as Golesh was looking at future schedules with Kelly. He looked down and saw a three-game nonconference doozy: Boise State, at Florida, at Miami. There was initial skepticism. Not because Golesh wanted to shy away from playing those teams. But playing all three in a row, in the same season, seemed, well, “kinda crazy.”

“The initial conversation was, ‘We’ll handle that as we get there, but it won’t look like that,” Golesh said. “We got to last January, and it still looked like that, and I’m like, ‘You know what? Let’s go play them.”

Last June, when Kelly was getting ready to leave USF to take the athletic director job at Navy, Golesh told him, “We’re going to go win those games, and you’re going to tell me, ‘I told you so.'”

If the win over Boise State had people across the country take notice, the win over Florida legitimized USF in a bigger way. For decades, there has been the “Big Three” in the state of Florida: Miami, Florida State and Florida. UCF made it into a Power 4 conference when it joined the Big 12, leaving USF fighting for national relevance in the Group of 5.

That helps explain why Golesh had 500 text messages waiting for him after the 18-16 come-from-behind win over the Gators.

Best said he had eight former teammates call him after that win to congratulate him. “It brings tears to my eyes,” Best says. “I took a step back and let it all soak in. It hasn’t been easy. It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and to see it pay off, it just means the world.”

The process is the process, so there was no time this week for USF to celebrate a 2-0 start. Not with a trip to No. 5 Miami on deck. Golesh came into the office last Sunday and says he “ripped apart” the game tape with his staff.

“We haven’t arrived,” Golesh says. “We have two really good wins. We have another really good game, and then we’ve been really average in this conference for the last two years. We have so much left to do.

“As Amir used to say, ‘Headphones on. Hear nothing.”

There is a sadness in his voice as he recalls those conversations with Abdur-Rahim. They were supposed to be doing this together, celebrating each other’s wins as if they were their own. After Abdur-Rahim got sick last fall, he stopped coming around to practice but refused to tell Golesh what was wrong.

Then Golesh got a long text from Abdur-Rahim. He still has it saved in his phone. Abdur-Rahim wrote, in part, he was ready to fight what was ailing him, but seemed unsure whether doctors had any answers.

Abdur-Rahim died Oct. 24, 2024, at age 43, from complications that arose during a medical procedure related to his undisclosed illness. The loss was felt across the entire USF community, including the football team. As a lasting tribute to his friend, Golesh had a picture of Abdur-Rahim speaking to the team one day at practice enlarged and placed in the hallway of the football facility.

“Coach Golesh giving us a reminder of what a great human being he was, and what a great coach he was, and the lessons and advice that he instilled in us, it means a lot,” Brown says.

Golesh may not have responded to every single one of the hundreds of text messages he has received over the past two weeks. But there are two that he will never forget. Arianne Abdur-Rahim, Amir’s widow, texted Golesh after the Boise State win and again after the Florida win.

“Amir is looking out for you.”