Whenever he's in his car seat, riding around Tampa, my 3-year-old son Riley's absolute favorite game is to look for specialty license plates on passing cars. He knows the Bulls, the Gators, the "ibis" and all the animal plates -- his mom has a sea turtle plate, and he likes the whale-tail, the Florida panther, any animal he can find. We both get annoyed when we hit a run of regular run-of-the-mill Florida tags, saying "Orange, orange, orange, orange" and so on.

So it's fun for me to plug a USF drive to get more Bulls "U" specialty license plates on the highways. USF's alumni association is offering to pay the initial $25 annual fee if you're willing to switch to the Bulls tag. Here's a link to the promotion. Again, after the first year, it's up to you to pay the extra $25 -- last year, those tags generated more than $200,000 for USF.

And to be fair, I've looked up the totals for the state schools and local pro teams, just so you get a better sense as to how far the Bulls have to catch up to the "Big Three" on the state's roads. I should know how to tab these charts by now, but I'm left to just space-space-space-space-space.

School/Team    Current Valid Registrations

Florida   85,214

Florida State    71,258

Miami      27,721

Florida A&M     19.672

Central Florida     11,935

USF    9,029

Bethune-Cookman    6,319

Florida Int'l     2,347

Florida Atl.     2,207

Pro teams

Bucs     40.245

Lightning     4,657

Rays     1,267

Absolute last on the list of specialty plates? Congrats to Clearwater Christian College, which has a total of 73 on the roads. Now Riley and I have something to really look for ...