TAMPA -- Ask Ralph Wilcox if he's surprised that Mike Tomlin has led the Pittsburgh Steelers to the Super Bowl, and USF's provost and senior vice president for academic affairs will tell you he remembers Tomlin  as a bright, inquisitive mind and a role model for football players.

Nothing new, right? Wilcox saw that in Tomlin in 1996, when he was a 24-year-old graduate assistant at Memphis, taking a weekly three-hour seminar that Wilcox taught, called "Sociocultural Dimensions of Sport in Contemporary Society."

"The irony is that we studied the Super Bowl as a spectacle," Wilcox said Monday, excited to think Tomlin is now centrally engaged in something he once merely debated as a student.

In class, Tomlin was active in discussion, and less likely than most students to blindly accept traditional beliefs about societal tendencies.

"He was a very bright student, one of the best I've had the chance to work with," Wilcox said. "Just an absolute pleasure to have in class. Well-prepared, always did his research, and wouldn't take for granted that what he read was the truth."

Wilcox has followed Tomlin since his days as a Bucs assistant, and said his only regret is that Tomlin didn't stick around long enough at Memphis to complete his postgraduate degree, taking a full-time position at Tennessee-Martin, then Arkansas State.

"He's made some very good decisions since then," Wilcox said.