It is the official opinion of this blog that recruiting and MSNBC’s To Catch a Predator are somewhat interchangeable. I think less about the fine professionals like Tom Lemming and Andy Staples during this annual ritual and more about Chris Hansen. "Oh, hey guy clicking refresh on his Internet browser at work all day waiting to see where young men you've never met decide to go to college..."

Fixating on the potential decisions of 17 and 18-year-olds that are wrestling with what is already one of society's most difficult decisions is at best awkward. But instead of bringing wine coolers and Natty Light, recruitniks carry Rivals rankings and ESPNU150 lists like they are the gold standard of determining success, even though Boise State and TCU have been doing pretty well with rosters have less star power than Celebrity Rehab.

You have to have talent to win at the highest levels of college football, that is indisputable. And there is a correlation between rankings and on-field success in the BCS conferences. But the type of talent that fits your system might not translate to YouTube clips and freakish bench press numbers. Of course I’d want Jadeveon Clowney to attend USF this fall. But if I’m following the rules as a booster of my institution and of the NCAA, since I have no prior relationship with Clowney I cannot affect his decision in any way, shape, or form. So if I’m really into recruiting, I’m either participating in the world’s largest high school gossip ring, or I’m cheating.

How to fix it all, after the jump.

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This is a difficult piece to write without sounding bitter or jealous. Let's face it, our neighbors to the north have been the standard for intercollegiate athletic success for a long time now. On the field, they've won three football national championships, two more in men's basketball, and enough Olympic sport and SEC titles that Jeremy Foley should probably put an in-house jeweler on staff for the rings. Their fundraising arm, the University Athletic Association, donated over $8.5 million last year to the general scholarship fund of the university. UF is one of the few major programs where athletics truly does benefit academics directly. And their student athletic fee is a minute fraction of what USF's is, so the right people (donors, TV contracts, ticket sales) are paying the freight for their nine-figure athletics budget.

They've also done it without the taint of scandal. Despite being the most successful school in terms of revenue sports championships over the last 15 years, they've managed to mostly steer clear of the NCAA so far. And unless Chris Rainey is allowed to give a press conference every day, they'll probably stay wide of that for a while.

Is there some little brother syndrome involved in my dislike? Absolutely. It's hard to admit that, but it's true. In 2002 I went to the O'Connell Center three times in three days, as USF Volleyball was in the NCAA Tournament Friday and Saturday, and men's basketball played the Gators on Sunday. We beat FSU on Friday in volleyball, but lost a four setter to end a great season to an eventual Final Four UF volleyball team. We then got worked by Billy Donovan the next day, with our USF allocated seats far in the upper deck. But what doesn't stand out was the end of a great season and a great match, but what happened in the stands during that volleyball loss.

As we're down two sets to none on Saturday night, we noticed something the Gator student section had written on a whiteboard. They were writing random things on it throughout the match to bait our fans and players, doing what good fan bases do. But the one that stood out, and still rips at my soul, was this one:

"RIVALS WIN SOMETIMES."

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(Author's Note: We would have been happy to let this position paper wait for awhile. Or forever, for that matter. But I want to write something about USF's rivalries to help pass the time this summer, and that won't make any sense unless we explain our feelings on this topic. So here we go.)

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On sports talk radio where I live, the hosts are usually rational people with well thought out opinions. (I know that's a novel concept to those of you stuck listening to blowhards, failed gamblers, axe-grinders, and screamers all day long in Tampa, but I promise that this is true.) Sometimes, though, a certain topic or issue bends them out of shape and they react emotionally to it on the air. They call that "getting drawn offside."

No group of fans is better at drawing USF fans offside than UCF fans. They are the Steve Beuerlein of fan bases. They have little-brother syndrome, but instead of pointing their inferiority complex towards, say, the Gators or Seminoles, they've decided to make USF the target of their unending hatred. It's a completely unhealthy, sometimes dangerous relationship, and I can't believe how many Bulls fans get sucked into it.

All this scorn might stem from the early days of our football program. Before there was football at USF, the two schools played each other in just about every sport, and we don't recall there being any real animosity. But once the Bulls started playing football, that all changed. UCF thought that they had set themselves up as the gatekeepers. They would be the team USF would have to go through before they could have any thought of challenging Florida, FSU, and Miami. Unfortunately for UCF, the Bulls went right around them. Paul Griffin, Lee Roy Selmon, and Jim Leavitt wisely avoided the temptation of playing them for almost a decade, for two reasons. One, they were aiming higher than UCF. And two, they knew losing to the Knights in their formative years would cement the pecking order in everyone's minds.

They waited until 2005 to start a series, and USF ended up winning all four games. Only two of the games were competitive, and one of those two was because Leavitt, Wally Burnham, and Greg Gregory lost their collective minds with a two-touchdown lead late in the 2008 game and let the Knights back in it. In combination with their other landmark wins against Louisville, Auburn, West Virginia, Florida State, and others, USF is now widely recognized as being somewhere near the level of the "Big Three" in the state.

Every time the Knights lost to USF on the football field, it seemed to multiply their hatred. Maybe the all-time low was in 2007, when the Bulls came into the game with a #5 ranking. George O'Leary pretended not to know which conference USF played in, then tried to claim there would be 30,000 UCF fans at the game in Tampa. (He was off by about 25,000 fans.) Knights fans "poked" Matt Grothe incessantly on his Facebook page. Some people made fun of Shauna Moffitt (former wife of linebacker Ben Moffitt) and her appearance on a UCF message board. Finally, in one of the truly boneheaded moves by an opposing team or media outlet in our history, former Orlando Sentinel columnist David Whitley decided to wander around the USF campus in some kind of hat with UCF car flags sticking out of it. He posed on the iron bull statue in the athletics complex while wearing the hat, wrote his usual snarky and snide column, then ran the whole thing in the Sentinel two days before the game.

Needless to say this was all brought to the Bulls' attention in the locker room. The final score was 64-12, and it might not have even been that close. Late in the game, the Bulls threw deep and hit a 75-yard touchdown pass, then added a 28-yard touchdown pass on 4th and 14. Leavitt was obviously running up the score and taking extra delight in rubbing their noses in it, as if every unnecessary touchdown was responding to a specific jab that UCF had taken during the week. While it was fun to watch, it also proved that whatever grudge match exists between the two schools is more like a quicksand trap that both sides constantly sink into.

Here's the bottom line: This is a USF blog. We're going to talk about our school. If UCF does something right, we won't mention it. If they do something wrong, or if they have some stroke of bad luck or whatever, we won't mention that either. The only time we will bring up UCF is if our teams are playing each other, if we're both going after the same recruits, or as part of various Conference Realignment Rumors of the Week when they come out. We're going to do our thing, and they can do theirs.

We realize that at some point we may have to accept UCF as a conference mate. Whatever you think of the quality of their investments, you can't deny that they have put a huge emphasis on their athletic program over the last few years, and it's nearly impossible to find a BIG EAST expansion/replacement-team scenario that doesn't include them. Even if that does happen, though, we are not going to get caught up in the name-calling and mud-slinging that any discussion involving them seems to devolve into.

If you're a Bulls fan and you have the overrunning desire to trash talk UCF fans, you're going to need to find somewhere else to do it, because it won't be allowed here. And if you're a UCF fan and you want to rip into our program, you're going to need to find somewhere else to do it, too.

Voodoo Five will not have hidden agendas. As we build up our community, we will sometimes share our official stan ces on Bulls-related topics for the understanding of our readers. These stances are called Position Papers.

Our first Position Paper is on Lou Holtz, also known as Dr. Lou. We didn't want to do this one first, but he kind of forced our hand when he showed up to spring practice today and gave a pep talk to the baseball team while he was at it.

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Lou Holtz is, of course, a College Football Hall of Famer and the former football coach at schools such as Arkansas, Minnesota, Notre Dame (where he won the 1988 national championship), and South Carolina. He is also a source of nearly endless amusement through his quotes, public speaking engagements, and especially his role on ESPN, where he analyzes college football games and sometimes plays a psychiatrist helping various celebrities with their problems. Hence the nickname Dr. Lou.

Here's a sample of Dr. Lou's fine work.

Having Lou Holtz around the USF programs will undoubtedly be a good thing. We all like Dr. Lou, as a person and as a source of comedy. Obviously there's a lot of great stuff in that segment. (And I think we all eventually figured out how Tiger was keeping an even keel.) But we must remember that he is also the father of our head coach, Skip Holtz. It may be potentially damaging to the blog to poke fun at Lou Holtz in mean-spirited and personal ways.

So our position is: Jokes about the things Lou Holtz says are all fair game. If he issues one of his renowned Holtzisms, or if he goes off on some crazy tangent in the broadcast booth, or if he jumps the rails at halftime and says something that makes no sense at all, knock yourself out. But we're drawing the line at jokes about age-related issues (including speech impediments). We're not going there, and we'd like you to abide by this rule as well.

In closing, here is an inspiring pep talk. Now let's get out there and blog like champions today.