MOFFITT or LEAVITT: To accept the heroizing of carbon footprints and bloody headbutts

Do standards of journalism drop sharply when you reach the New York Times Sports section?

This is a question I've never pondered more than I did during the last week. And so I post this at the risk of being bitched out like Jenni Carlson by Mike Gundy on an Oklahoma Saturday night. See bolded article excerpts for the parts I'd like to emphasize as most whack.

September 22, 2007
Linebacker and South Florida Make Long Commute to Success
By PETE THAMEL

BUSHNELL, Fla., Sept. 17 — As the morning sun burns through the last traces of predawn darkness, Ben Moffitt contorts his oversized frame into his economy car.

It is not long after 7 a.m. when Moffitt, a senior linebacker for the South Florida football team, hums down County Road 629 here in his itsy-bitsy Toyota Yaris.

It is the first leg of his 55-mile trip to Tampa. By living so far away, Moffitt has assured a more comfortable, family-oriented life for his wife and two children. But that sacrifice means a 110-mile round trip every day. He leaves as early as 3:30 a.m. for winter workouts and arrives home as late as 7 a.m. after a road game. Moffitt has driven a Kia into the ground (“It didn’t scream linebacker,” he joked of the car), has compiled about $200 in U.S.F. parking tickets and has traveled well over 100,000 miles.

Along the way, a country kid has evolved into one of college football’s top linebackers, and a commuter university that started football 11 years ago has found a spot alongside the nation’s elite.

“I can’t imagine what he’s gone through, the sacrifices he’s made,” the defensive coordinator Wally Burnham said. “But he’s totally committed to both his family and football. He’s always put his family first.”

Family is what prompted Moffitt to move back to Bushnell after he and his wife, Shauna, lived in Tampa during his freshman season. Shauna — with son Trevor, now 5, in tow — drove to Bushnell every day that year so she could work as a data specialist at the Sumter County Property Appraiser’s Office.

Shauna and Ben also returned on weekends to spend time with family and go to church.

“That was a hard eight months,” Shauna said. “It was such a culture shock, it was so different.”

The Moffitts missed walking into Wal-Mart and Winn-Dixie and seeing familiar faces. They decided to move back after Ben’s freshman year and soon welcomed a daughter, Rylan, now 3. They rented for a while before building a house, where Ben proudly showed a visitor that he had hand-built the shed and the wooden garbage can holders.

Moffitt, who has helped U.S.F. grow into a power, acknowledges his most important teammate.

“She’s an awesome woman,” he said of Shauna. “She helps me so much. If I didn’t have someone like her to support me, it would be hard to do what I do.”

Moffitt, 22, began working for his stepfather’s tree company when he was 8, hauling brush before graduating to chipping. He was eventually cutting limbs while being supported by a tree strap or standing in a cherry picker. When Moffitt wanted to buy a $300 hunting rifle at age 9, his stepfather made him earn the money.

“Child-labor laws didn’t apply to me,” he said with a smile. “It taught me very good life lessons, like how to work. If you want something, you have to go work for it.”

Inman Sherman, who coached Moffitt at Sumter High School, said: “Ben has always had a bullheaded determination to get done what he wanted to get done. He’s never wavered.”

Moffitt found the perfect football program and coach to match his work ethic, signing with South Florida and Coach Jim Leavitt without really looking anywhere else.

Leavitt’s first impression of Moffitt came early on in his freshman season when U.S.F. was going through summer workouts. Moffitt had arrived out of shape, and Leavitt saw him struggling in a conditioning exercise and yelled, “Moffitt, you’re lazy.”

Moffitt glared back at him and said confidently but politely, “One thing I am not, Coach, is lazy.”

Leavitt laughs at the story now. “Ever since then, he’s certainly convinced me of that,” he said.

No one will accuse Leavitt of being lazy either. Becoming the first head coach at South Florida, a commuter university built on a practice bombing range, in 1996 was not exactly a prototype move after being Bill Snyder’s defensive coordinator at Kansas State.

But Leavitt’s old-school, intense demeanor, which belies his youthful looks and spiky hair, has helped him build a powerhouse. Leavitt is so fiery that Moffitt recalled him once busting open his nose and bleeding profusely after head-butting a player’s helmet trying to get his team fired up in pregame warm-ups.

“It about knocked him out,” Moffitt said.

Leavitt is known to run each set of wind sprints with the players during practice and to stay in his office well past midnight, guzzling Pepsi in 20-ounce bottles.

“He’s crazy,” said the former South Florida linebacker Kawika Mitchell, now with the Giants. Mitchell recalled the U.S.F. football offices being in trailers and team meetings taking place in dormitories. U.S.F. now has a multimillion-dollar athletic facility. And a program that 11 years ago did not have a tee for the kickoff of its opening home game reached the top 25 for the first time last week.

“It’s amazing,” Mitchell said.

Moffitt committed to U.S.F. during Mitchell’s last season, 2002, when the team went 9-2 but did not reach a bowl game because it did not have conference affiliation.

The Bulls played in Conference USA in 2003 and 2004 before moving to the Big East in 2005. They blew out Louisville in their Big East debut. The program’s signature moment, though, came from a victory at No. 17 Auburn in overtime two weeks ago.

“I said in the first interviews I even did that I wanted to take the program where it’s never been before,” Moffitt said. “It’s pretty surreal, it’s pretty awesome.”

Moffitt has started 32 consecutive games and is fast enough that he chased down West Virginia quarterback Pat White from behind last season.

But what really impresses those who know Moffitt, who has a 2.5 grade point average, is how he balances football, classes and family.

“He carries himself on the field and off with the maturity of a guy who is 40 years old,” the U.S.F. assistant Dan McCarney said.

On Monday, Moffitt dressed Trevor and Rylan before slipping out to U.S.F. He then made the drive before attending two communication classes, which included a discussion of the difference between Wal-Mart and Target.

“Knowing how far he has to come and how much else he has on his plate, it was always almost amazing to see him there every day,” said Michael LeVan, one of Moffitt’s former communication instructors. “He was always there, awake and alert.”

Moffitt then rushed off to buy a sandwich at Subway, but had time to eat only half. That was because an hour of weight lifting and 90 minutes of film work awaited him. After a two-hour practice, Moffitt showered and got in his Yaris, a 2007 with more than 25,000 miles, for the ride home around 6:30 p.m. It was an easy day compared with most Mondays, when he returns home at 10:30 p.m.

Moffitt does not think what he is doing is a particularly big deal because his classes at U.S.F., a university where most of the 45,000 students are commuters, are filled with students who juggle families, jobs and class work.

“People ask me how you do it with a family,” he said. “Well, a lot of these people have families. Everyone has to get to that point in their life sooner or later when you have a family and a job. You get used to it, it becomes second nature.”

And after a while, Moffitt and U.S.F. have found that long rides can help them reach unexpected destinations.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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By the way, the day that sports story was published this metro news soundbite should've been the NYT Quote of the Day:

QUOTE OF THE DAY
"They’re not from here. They come here for a better life, and they died. But now that they changed the windows, everything is O.K.”
-- A touched witness to urban bird deaths outside the midtown Manhattan postal depot