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New SMU defensive coordinator Jim Leavitt built USF program the same way the Mustangs are trying to build in Dallas

Leavitt was the inaugural head coach at South Florida starting in 1997. His unique recruiting strategy saw the school take the “fast track” to success.

When the first-time head coach Jim Leavitt took over at South Florida in 1996, he had a bold recruiting strategy that he implemented right away. He instructed his assistant coaches to go out and recruit all the best area players. The best players in Tampa and the state.

USF then isn’t what it is now. In 1996 it was a Division I-AA independent that had never played a football game. Much of the team’s operations took place out of a trailer. It was the very start of the football program’s existence, and it was not a large operation.

Still, the plan was the plan.

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“He said, ‘Go out and recruit all these four- and five-star guys,’” recalled then-offensive coordinator Matt Canales. “’And let them know, if they aren’t happy — they aren’t happy with their program wherever they go, if they want to come back, they have a home with us.’

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“We recruited everybody. We didn’t care if they were going to Georgia, Tennessee, Michigan, we didn’t care. We were going to recruit those kids.”

Leavitt was hired as the SMU’s defensive coordinator Wednesday morning, filling the vacancy left by Kevin Kane’s departure to Illinois last week. While Leavitt is someone without obvious connections to the Mustangs, he has at least one tie-in. And that’s recruiting strategy.

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South Florida went on to join Division I-A, now known as the FBS, the Football Bowl Subdivision. It went 17-5 in the two years as an independent. Then, in 2007, the whole thing came together when the Bulls reached the ranking of No. 2 in the nation. They beat a ranked Auburn team on the road and then a ranked West Virginia team at home. It was something out of a storybook.

And it happened because USF created a culture where at first the big-time recruits would transfer back when they were unhappy at other schools. Then it turned into an effort to keep big-time players at home out of high school. It’s very similar to the model that SMU has adapted.

“His first vision was that nobody in the Tampa Bay area or within a 50-mile radius of that place didn’t know about us and didn’t know they had a place to play,” said then-defensive coordinator Rick Kravitz. “Jim had a unique plan. We never planned like we were going to be I-AA. We always planned everything as if we were going to be Division I. So we were never satisfied until we got to that.”

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Leavitt went to work with some of his coaches in 1996, even though the first games weren’t played until 1997. They were given two trailers as offices next to the baseball stadium. They had a television and VHS tapes of recruits. But there was no remote. So Leavitt sat and watched the recruits while Kravitz was in charge of manually pressing stop and start on the VCR.

Leavitt, Kravitz said, told his staff they needed to know every available player in the area. One of the big names who came back home and gave the program credibility as a transfer destination was Kawika Mitchell. He played one year at Georgia before transferring to the Bulls and recording 367 tackles. He was one of the best linebackers in the country and won a Super Bowl with the Giants.

By capturing the interest of talented local players, USF was able to expedite its rise in college football quickly.

“That was the portal back then,” said former USF defensive coordinator Wally Burnham, who took over in 2000. “The backbone of our program was those kinds of kids.”

This might have actually been a harder strategy to employ pre-transfer portal, a mechanism for athletes to change schools that started just three years ago. It’s something that is the basis of SMU’s successful 10-2 season, with Shane Buechele, Reggie Roberson Jr., Brandon Stephens and many others entering the portal to come back home.

There was no portal back then, so the relationship had to be made on the front end, even if there was almost no chance of signing the player out of high school.

“That would have been so much easier,” Kravitz said of having a portal. “We got beat by Purdue, Georgia and some really good schools with good kids. But we had the relationship. Now they’re coming to you almost and giving you players of that caliber.”

Leavitt doesn’t make for an obvious fit on the SMU coaching staff. He’s 64 years old, but last year the Mustangs had likely the youngest coaching staff in the country. While he is from Texas, he didn’t grow up in the state and has never coached in the state. He’s never overlapped at any spots with Mustangs head coach Sonny Dykes — they only briefly overlapped in the Pac-12.

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But in another way, there is an obvious fit. And the evidence is in those first 10 years in Tampa. Leavitt was a first-time head coach then, but by all accounts from his assistant coaches, he knew exactly what he wanted to do when he started a program that had never played a game. At SMU, 24 years later, the strategy isn’t all that different.

“He was able to foresee how this thing was going to play out, and he had a plan to do it,” Canales said. “We got on the fast track.”

Find more SMU coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.