I'm reading our free daily, tbt*, and see a story on specialty license plates, showing how area teams rank locally in license-plate sales. The Bucs dominate Pinellas, Hillsborough and Pasco county registrations, and Florida is the only college to rank among the top five overall plate sales in all three counties. Here's the top five specialty plates for Hillsborough County:

1. Bucs 8,399

2. UF   4,996

3. FSU 3,205

4. "Protect the Panther" 2,997

5. USF   2,966

Now, back in November, I wrote about how USF was ranked sixth among state colleges in specialty-plate registrations. The current rankings only show sales through Sept. 1 -- and obviously the Bulls have had a nice month since then -- but things were already going well for Bulls plates. Here are the registrations since November for each of the state's top nine football programs.

1. Florida    11,489

2. USF            1,505

3. Central Fla.    715

4. Florida State   492

5. Miami            331

6. Florida Int'l      254

7. Florida A&M    248

8. Florida Atlantic      90

9. Bethune-Cookman   53

So nobody's going anywhere near the Gators, but in the last 10 months, USF has more plates sold than FSU, Miami and the bottom five schools combined. And USF is moving closer to passing UCF for fifth place on the total registrations list -- UCF has 12,650, USF 10,634. We'll have to come back and update the overall totals in another month or so.