Quotes from Coaches Meyer & Saban, and the players… Courtesy of SEC Sports Information Department:
Florida Head Coach Urban Meyer and QB Tim Tebow
CLAUDE FELTON: We’ll ask Coach Meyer for a couple general thoughts on the game and then we’ll take your questions.
COACH MEYER: Thank you very much, and we’re awful proud and humbled to represent the Southeastern Conference as a champion. I think you give credit where credit is due. That’s one of the best college football games I know I’ve ever been a part of. I know Alabama and Coach Saban and their staff, that was a dog fight. That was toughness. That was a check your will and come back and play in the fourth quarter, that says a lot about our team, as well.
We’ve had ridiculous amount of injuries throughout the course of the year. Watch Cornelius Ingram, Dorian Monroe were hurt before the season started. Two not just starters but potentially great players for us. And then you saw Brandon Antwine, he was coming on his own, playing extremely well, hurt his knee against FSU and then Percy Harvin, one of the best players in the college football. The reason I bring that up, I think it talks about who replaced them from Riley Cooper to Louis Murphy, Aaron Hernandez, Jeffrey Demps, of course our quarterback Tim. But I just think that’s a sign of good recruiting, a good strength program, and that’s a sign of a good team, and that’s what we are, a good team.
I love these players. You don’t hear me say that too often. I love this football team. I love the way they fight. I love what they’re made of, and this will go down as one of the great wins in Florida football history.
Q. You had a lot of passes where you didn’t have much of an opening there to get the ball in because they had pretty tight coverage. Could you just talk about some of those tough passes you competed?
TIM TEBOW: They played a lot of man coverage, and the receivers got the hard job in man coverage to get open, and I just got to put it there, and they made a lot of great catches. You come down there at the end, a lot of guys stepped up and got open and made some great catches. So I had a lot of help from our receivers.
Q. Would you talk about, you kind of took some body blows there in the third quarter and in the fourth quarter it was kind of a gut check time, and Coach Addazio says this is what you’ve been playing for all year.
COACH MEYER: Yeah, I felt like we were taking some body blows, as well, but I have great confidence in our team. To see Brandon Spikes come back you’re playing the top ranked team in America, and it kind of stuck it right down your throat, I want to say a 98 yard drive right at us, and to come back, and our offense answered. I think that was the play of the day. That might be the play of the year. That might be the drive of the year, to be able to answer it when they took it and jammed it right at us. 20 points against that outfit, we’ll take that and go.
They played very well. Kept the ball in front of them for most of the night, and once again, you’re down to four interior defensive linemen. Against that you need five or six to rotate and we’re down to four. Lawrence Marsh, Tory Davis and Jay Howard did a magnificent job hanging in there.
Q. Urban, the penalty late in the game against you
COACH MEYER: I want to research that without I probably can’t say this, and I know the commissioner is here, but I’m going to go grab him here. It’s not right.
Q. What was it for basically?
COACH MEYER: I have the best quarterback in college football, and we look forward to our next game and get back healthy and ready to go (laughter).
Q. For the best college football player in the game, did you know you had to bail your coach out with a touchdown pass?
TIM TEBOW: I was hoping we could. That penalty, it did hurt us a little bit because we were right there on the one inch line and just had a lot of momentum, ready to just stick it in, and they moved us back. But I was really happy how our team bounced back from that and guys stepped up and made a play, and that was a huge play.
Q. Can you talk a little bit about the shovel pass to Hernandez, what you saw on that play? I think you went with your left hand on that, right?
TIM TEBOW: I was actually a little bit shocked that that was the play called. I wasn’t expecting it. He threw it in there, I was like, that’s a good call. They lined up in a different defense than they had been playing, and the guy came right to me and I shoveled it, and did a great job of getting the 1st down first, and then making a great play after that. But he did a great job on it.
Q. It’s been over two months since you guys trailed in a game. What was the mood like on the bench, what was the message to the team and how did they respond?
COACH MEYER: Pretty much the way they handled things the last seven, eight games. I admired their professional. Very professional over the headsets. The defensive staff working together with our players and making adjustments and moving. Same thing on offense. You have a veteran quarterback. You have a veteran offensive line, you have three seniors managing it and you have a very good coaching staff, a great group of assistant coaches. It’s a very professional demeanor.
Our team knew going into this game it was going to be that. If you would have told us it was going to be a fourth quarter you have to come up and stand up and make a play to go win the game, we saw this thing coming down the road. All you have to do is watch on videotape who you’re playing. We’ve prepared. In the last couple weeks we’ve spent a lot of time on two minute drill. We didn’t have to go down to two minutes, but we knew it would come down to fourth quarter to win this game.
Q. Tim, do you feel like you have the ability to will your team to win like you did today in the last five minutes? And Coach, and have you ever had a player like Tim Tebow who seems to be able to impose his will on a game like he did today?
TIM TEBOW: Well, I don’t think it necessarily was just my will, I think it’s his will. I think it’s our team’s will and our relentlessness and just our attitude and our focus that we don’t want to be denied in anything we do, and so I think it was kind of that. Our off season mentality of backs against the wall type attitude, let’s just take it over here, and I think it was just not myself but everybody had that attitude, especially the offensive line had a little chip on their shoulder, and we wanted to go in there and get it done.
Q. Coach, have you ever had a player who was able to impose his will on a game the way Tim does?
COACH MEYER: I’ve had some great players and I have a bunch of good players on this team. I go with the Pounceys, I go with the offense line. I go with Brandon Spikes on defense. But to answer your question, I’ve never had one like this, and I’ve been around this game a long time. But Tim has got there’s a special something inside of him, and I’m not talking about throwing, I’m not talking about running, I’m talking about the ability to make the level of play of everyone else around him better.
That fourth quarter was vintage Tim Tebow. I don’t know the entire history of the University of Florida, but I can imagine that drive and that fourth quarter will go down as one of the greatest ever at University of Florida.
Q. Speaking of will, I’m just wondering, your statements after the Ole Miss game, how many times have you harkened back to that? Is there any opportunity in a game like today when you’re trailing to recall saying what you said that day and basically making it happen?
TIM TEBOW: Well, you know, after that game I kind of sat in the locker room for a while to think about what I wanted to say. I just didn’t want to just be so emotional, but I wanted to really be calm and speak from the heart, and I tried to do that.
Really all I was saying is that I wasn’t saying we were going to win every game or we were going to be awesome or anything like that. It was we’re going to play every play as hard as we can, and we’re going to be the hardest working team possible. That’s something that we can control. And I think that we’ve shown that. Win or lose, any games, it doesn’t matter, we were the hardest working team, I believe, and I think we put that effort in. I think we played with that. I think you see the guys out there, they play with that relentless effort, just killing themselves out there for the team and for each other.
Q. I just wanted to ask, what do you think that Alabama did really well in this game?
TIM TEBOW: I think they’re a really good team. I think they had a great game plan. Defensively they had a lot of good players, a lot of players that could match up and play man to man coverage and do that very well, and a very good front seven, two really big linebackers that were very physical, and they just weren’t going to let you go out there and make a lot of plays. You really had to earn all the plays that you made, and they had a great game plan, as well. You’ve got to give credit to them and the players and the coaches for the way they came out and played.
COACH MEYER: I thought Alabama first of all, all three phases, I’m just sitting here statistically looking at the two teams that you watched play today are very strong in all three phases, and the statistics prove that. I thought out coverage units were outstanding against a guy like Brandon James. Our longest run from scrimmage was 14 yards and we have some fast athletes that can make some plays. I thought they contained the ball.
What they did do was they forced us to throw and take some shots downfield because they were playing a lot of zero coverage when the safeties were down to stop the run. I thought they played a hell of a game, but I thought Florida played a hell of a game, as well.
Q. Tim, after you guys scored the last touchdown, the kickoff team was getting ready to go out there, you intruded into the huddle at a high rate of speed. Wondering what the message was there to the kickoff unit. And if that is symbolic of what you were talking about?
TIM TEBOW: I was saying “just finish. Finish, make a play and let’s finish this thing.” All those guys were pretty much on the same page.
COACH MEYER: We have a guy like Brandon Spikes, Louis Murphy, the Pounceys, but some very vocal leadership on our team. Last year was completely void. It was nonexistent a year ago. And this team, Brandon Spikes is the guy before a game that handles the pre game talk. I have a left handed quarterback that’s involved in defensive huddles, special team huddles, and a No. 9, my captain wide receiver that’s very involved in all phases, as well. He’s always involved in huddles on the sideline, when the defense calls time out, motivating and working together and getting this thing going.
So those are three guys that some people are gifted with that ability to raise the level of play and let everybody know we’re in this all together. Brandon Spikes is tremendous. You’ve got Tim Tebow running the offense along with Murph, and then you’ve got Brandon, what he does for this team on defense is phenomenal.
Q. You mentioned Louis Murphy several times. He was your leading receiver tonight. I don’t know if you saw that. You shared a moment with him in your end zone afterward, and I was wondering if you could tell us what you said to him, and also speak to what all he meant not just this game but throughout the year.
COACH MEYER: Louis Murphy has come a long way. He lost his mom in the spring, and I lost my mom nine years ago, so we share that. We share a lot more than that. I’ll keep some of that private. Louis Murphy is a very deep person, very strong person, strong in his faith and has a terrific family. We were just sharing some thoughts about that because I know she’s watching him right now.
Q. Tim, I think you were 0 5 in your career going into fourth quarters when you were behind. I think this is your first comeback. Can you talk about doing that. For all you’ve accomplished that was kind of one hole in your résumé. And Urban, on a different topic, talk about what Cunningham did at the end of the third and fourth quarter, kind of stopped three drives.
TIM TEBOW: That was really never in my head. How do you know that? I just wanted to find some way that this team could get a victory today and that was really all I was focused on.
COACH MEYER: Jermaine Cunningham played great, and I think he certainly has the ability level to be a difference maker at defensive end, and when his number was called and we had to have a play, I think when you say “Cunningham,” I also throw Dunlap and Trattou in there, as well, because they feed off each other. We’re just much better defensively than we were a year ago, and Jermaine is a big part of that.
Q. Going back to the fourth quarter, you had mentioned a little bit earlier, you made some adjustments going into the quarter. What adjustments did you make to go from having the ball for less than four minutes in the third quarter to having it for more than 12?
COACH MEYER: Well, we put it in our quarterback’s hand for one thing. We’re a team that believes in the run, and we have some talented tailbacks. I don’t want to say we’re stubborn, but we all wanted to get that thing going as far as running the ball, but also our receivers, we have a lot of receivers and they always tell us how bad they’re beating guys and you watch the film and they’re not. That’s typical receiver communication on the sideline (laughter). So we said Tim can win us the game with the receivers, and we had to do that, and they did. They made some plays down the field, Louis Murphy and Riley Cooper, and then Aaron Hernandez had a couple plays great.
We put the ball in the hands of our quarterback and let him make some plays with his arm.
Q. I’m wondering, after you’ve played in a game like that, how do you have the energy to go three quarters of the way around the stadium slapping hands?
TIM TEBOW: That was practically the hardest part of the day. I was getting so tired. These fans have supported us through everything, and they’re great fans. I’m with them because I’m a Florida fan. I just wanted to give back as much as I could by going and shaking a hand. That’s a pretty easy thing for me to do to give back, and they appreciate it. It’s just something that I can do to say thank you for everything that they do.
Q. Billy told me that they used four guys in Percy’s spot, X wide receiver, whatever that is. Can you tell me anything you did extra with those wide receivers to motivate or extra time?
COACH MEYER: Billy Gonzales did a terrific job, and when you take you don’t replace Percy Harvin. You don’t replace a Percy Harvin, Tim Tebow, Brandon Spikes. You just don’t replace them. What you do is you manage around them and you try to develop the guys that you have. Riley Cooper is a tremendously talented guy. Had his best week of practice. He’s been dealing with injuries since he’s been at Florida. We call it competitive excellence when your number is called, go win the game. And the shallow stutter bender, the last touchdown pass that Tim threw, that’s against a good corner, a guy that’s worked that pattern for seven, eight weeks, and it was a very well executed play.
There was extra motivation because they knew someone had to step up. David Nelson was collecting scholarship checks around here for two and a half years, and he should be writing a check back to the University of Florida. But his payback is done. We’ll call it even now (laughter). He did a hell of a job. He comes from a great family, very hard worker, and made some plays to help us win this game.
Q. Do you feel Tim Tebow deserves to win another Heisman Trophy?
COACH MEYER: I do now. I on purpose have tried to watch. No disrespect at all because I think the Big 12 quarterbacks, all three of them, are tremendous players. I have a responsibility, and that’s my quarterback. I think he’s the best in college football. I think he’s the best football player in America. Once again, without any disrespect to those other players, because I think they’re terrific, as well.
At the end of the day when you evaluate what “player” means, not just how many yards and statistics because we’ve seen what he can do statistically, but to manage a game against the defenses he’s faced in the last two months, I think someone should do that study, today’s defense, FSU, South Carolina, Kentucky, and you can go down the board. When we played them they were either top ten I want to say the last few were top ten, and someone gave me the stat four of the last six were top ten defenses that our quarterbacks faced, and put up fairly ridiculous numbers. Tonight wasn’t ridiculous, but he managed the game and won it.
Q. Did y’all say anything to Percy before the game?
COACH MEYER: Percy?
Q. Yeah. Did you say, we’ll go out and win it for you?
COACH MEYER: I think a lot of the players did. I gave him a big hug and he’s extremely competitive young guy. He wouldn’t let us he was so convinced he was going to play, and we locked him down until Friday, and it just wasn’t right for him. A very emotional time for Percy because two years ago he was the MVP. He was a big part of our offense obviously and a big part of this team.
Q. You gave us your thoughts yesterday on how deserving the winner of this game, the SEC Championship game, is in getting a spot in the National Championship game. Tim, do you think that the winner of this game, Florida, deserves a spot in the National Championship game?
TIM TEBOW: I think so. I think there’s a lot of great teams out there, but I think the SEC is a very good conference, and I think the winner deserves a chance to play for it.
Q. For Coach and Tim, you’re ahead 24 20, you stop Alabama, you have a huddle on the sideline, and your offensive team doesn’t trot on the field, they sprinted on the field. Would you talk about that? What went on in the huddle, and talk about that.
TIM TEBOW: We just gathered all the offense up and said, “We have a chance to go win it here.” We were very excited and we had a lot of momentum, and we said, “Let’s just go win it here. No reason not to. Throw it on our shoulders and let’s go get it.” We were able to put that drive in and it kind of sealed the game a little bit.
It was a great drive, but it all started with the offensive line and everybody around them. I think you look at that drive and we probably had six or seven guys touch the ball, which is great, and all those guys were involved, and all those guys stepped up and made plays. So it was a total team effort.
COACH MEYER: Our team, we use any form of motivation we get our hands on, and when your toughness is questioned, white collar versus blue collar, old versus new and all this other stuff, from day one the foundation of our program is built on toughness, and obviously Alabama is a very tough football team, but University of Florida, I would like to say when people talk about Florida, I know we’re fast and all this other stuff, but we’re very tough. Our strength Coach Mickey Morotti, I could go on and on, and I should, because I’m so proud of our assistant coaches and our strength staff to develop the toughness on our team. It starts with mat drills in February, with starts with fourth quarter wins in the SEC Championship game. We are a very tough program.
Q. What do you think of a potential Oklahoma or Texas match up?
COACH MEYER: I’m going to enjoy this win. I’m very good friends with those two coaches. Two very good friends, and I’m going to enjoy my quarterback, my family, my team, and get the hell out of here, and we’ll hopefully get to watch some of that game.
Florida Junior LB Brandon Spikes
“Alabama ran at us some. They came off the ball early and well with a great offensive line. But we started to play better, hitting our gaps and forcing them to throw. Then we started coming off the edge with our rush and put a lot of pressure on the quarterback.”
Alabama Head Coach Nick Saban
CLAUDE FELTON: We’ll begin and ask Coach Saban just for a general thought or two on the game, and then we’ll go to your questions.
COACH SABAN: First of all, I’m very proud of what our football team was able to accomplish this year. The only team that plays in a real BCS conference that went 12 0, which is very difficult to do, and I’m very proud of the way our players played, with consistency all year, the way they competed.
You know, football is a lot like life; you know, you get what you expect, and these guys had a high standard for how they competed and how they played, and they certainly played hard and played with a lot of toughness and tenacity in this game tonight.
I’d like to congratulate Florida. They’ve got a fine team and played outstanding, and every time that they needed to make a play, Tim Tebow made plays in the game that made a difference in the game. A couple big plays that they hit on us made a really big difference.
The challenge for our team is every great team every team in the country has lost a game, and the teams that are going to play in the National Championship game have lost a game, too, but sometimes when you lose them at the end, it has a greater consequence in terms of your chances of being able to do that, and that’s certainly the circumstance for us.
But in each case for every one of these teams, they prove that they’re a great team when they come back and play good football after they lose, and that’s a challenge for our team. We’re going to have an opportunity to play another game someplace, and that’s exactly what our expectations will be for what we’d like to get our team to do.
You know, we didn’t get the result that we hoped for today. I’m very, very proud of the way our guys competed in the game and the way they’ve played all year. We kind of run out of gas in the fourth quarter a little bit in what was a very tough, physical game. I think both teams played extremely well in this game. There weren’t a lot of penalties.
Probably one of the critical things in the game for us I thought was in the second quarter when we lost Leigh Tiffin. We made two errors on special teams that really changed field position. We had the ball on the 30 yard line or something, and we didn’t think this was in the guy’s range, but we were going to try to kick a field goal anyway and take the points.
But when we called the fake, the fake is based on the look. They weren’t in the right look for us to run the fake, so we should have kicked the field goal.
Now, it would have been tough for the guy to make it probably. It was probably the limit of his range, but it was a little bit too close in there to be punting. We have another way that we can punt the ball, but we weren’t sure the freshman could do that, either. So we got kind of stuck there.
When they scored on that drive, we get the ball on the 40 yard line, if we just let the ball go out of bounds and we put ourselves in bad field position and they stop us, we don’t change the field position and they get good field position to go down and score again. Those two special team errors in the second quarter I think were critical in the game, and it is in all games, and I always tell our players this.
I want our players not to hang their head. They’ve got a lot to be proud of in terms of what they accomplished, but it’s going to be about what we did. When we sit down and watch the film, we’re going to see the mistakes that we made and what we didn’t do correctly and how that affected the outcome of the game.
It’s all about execution. When you play great teams the premium is on execution, and Florida is a great team, and we absolutely wish them the best of luck in representing our league and hope they win the National Championship.
Q. Two things: First of all, you touched on the fake field goal. You had about three opportunities in Florida territory where you either got a field goal or no points. Could you talk about the significance of that in trying to win this game? And also, the way y’all played on defense, held Florida to the fewest points that they’ve scored, and just thoughts on how your defense played overall.
COACH SABAN: Well, first of all, I think that it’s important to have good red zone efficiency, and I think when you play a team like Florida, you definitely need to be scoring touchdowns when you get down there.
I think it would have been a big, big, big momentum deal in the game if we would have scored a touchdown the last time we were down there instead of kicking a field goal to go ahead 20 17, to get 24 17. That would have been huge. But we were down there twice and didn’t and didn’t have our kicker a third time to kick another. That’s the difference in the game if you add it up.
Second question, the defense. Our defense, I thought our defense really played well, and they handled the adjustments in the game well. But we gave up big plays. One of the big things that we harped on, corners, you’ve got to keep them cut off. If they kept short passes, we’ve got to have because the way we’re going to have to play them to stop the run, we’re going to be in three deep zone or cover one a lot, and you’ve got to keep them cut off, and we can’t get the ball thrown over our head. I think we got the ball thrown over our head three times, which were big plays and they changed field position. I think they scored in every one of those circumstances, some kind of points.
So that was probably the difference in the game. The red area and the big plays.
Q. You’ve mentioned Tebow’s ability when they needed plays to kind of make plays. Just elaborate on how he just seems to come up time after time with something that makes it happen.
COACH SABAN: Well, he’s a great competitor, no doubt. I think he takes his team on his shoulders a lot. I think his leadership is something that really affects his teammates and they respect him tremendously. They have a lot of confidence that he’s going to make plays, and they played that way.
They scored two touchdowns, man, we had them covered about as well as you can cover them, and that ball is in a small space that they made good catches on. They have a great team. They believe in each other. I thought we did a good job in the game, we just didn’t make the plays at the end of the game that we needed to make. When the score is 20 17, we didn’t finish like we needed to, and they did. That’s the difference in the game, and he made a lot of those plays.
Q. You had the ball for over ten minutes in the third quarter and you outscored them 10 0. Looked like you had things going your way, and then in the fourth quarter they had it for more than 12 minutes. Is there something you would pinpoint how things got away from you?
COACH SABAN: We had a couple 3rd down opportunities to get off the field on defense. You know, the penalty, the facemask penalty, was big in terms of field position and having an opportunity to stop them, because that would have been another 3rd andshort situation, I think. They do a really good job when you get in those 3rd down and 2, 3 and 4 situations because of their ability to run the ball with the quarterback out of empty and out of reload from empty, and they made those plays.
You know, we stopped them on 3rd down a lot when it was 3rd and 6 or more. He scrambled a couple times in the first half and kept drives alive. But we did a good job on those down and distances. The short ones, we didn’t get it done. We didn’t get it done on 3rd and 5 at the 5 when they scored on us a couple times, 3rd downs. So that was the difference in the game. We didn’t make the plays that we needed to make.
We had a bad series after they scored and went 3 and out, and then they turn around and score again. That was the most critical series for us offensively in the game. He tried a long pass and didn’t hit it. Didn’t run it well on 2nd down. Don’t make it on 3rd down. It was critical for us to respond right there and move the ball, change the field position, and we didn’t do that.
Q. What was your message to the team after the game?
COACH SABAN: I pretty much said it in the beginning of my statement here of how proud I am of what they accomplished this year, that every team in the BCS leagues have lost a game this year except them. They accomplished a lot. They played with a lot of consistency. That’s a very tough thing to do and I’m very proud of them. I was proud of the way they played in the game today, but I said, as always, we’ll look at the film and we’ll say there’s a lot of things that we could have done better, with better execution, that would have probably helped us have a chance to get the result that we wanted in the game. But because we didn’t do that and they did, they got the result that they wanted.
And I also told them that all great teams have a loss, and it’s how you come back from a loss that really makes you a great team. And that’s the challenge for you in whatever game we play in next.
Q. This is the first time you’ve come not only to this building but into this game and not walked away a winner. What emotions are you feeling right now?
COACH SABAN: That doesn’t matter to me. I mean, I’m upset for I’m proud of what our team has accomplished. I feel badly that I could not have done more to affect our players to be able to play with more consistency, play better, not make some of those mistakes. They wanted to do it correctly, you know, coach the corners better so they wouldn’t have got beat. You know, help the offense be able to do the right thing so we wouldn’t have gone three and out in the fourth quarter, done something to help Javi not catch the ball when it would have went out of bounds and it would have given us the ball on the 40 yard line.
I feel responsible for everything that didn’t go right, and I only wish that I could have done more to help all those players, coaches and people do more to help make it right, and that’s my feelings and that’s my emotion. I’m responsible for it, and I just wish that I could have done more to help them because our players really wanted to win the game, there’s no doubt about that. They worked hard. They accomplished a lot to have the opportunity to do it, and I feel badly for them and our fans who have been great all year long in supporting this team.
My feelings, it’s not about me. My feelings are about everybody else. I serve them in what I do, and I feel like I failed them by not doing enough to help them get what they really wanted.
Q. What exactly happened to Leigh Tiffin, and obviously you were able to get him back eventually?
COACH SABAN: Right. He got hit on the kickoff that they broke out to about the 50 yard line. He’s a safety. And I didn’t see him get hurt. He just got a slight concussion, and they would not clear him at that time. He was not capable of he cleared up and was okay at halftime, so he was able to kick. But that was a tough management situation. I probably didn’t manage it very well because it didn’t work. We didn’t execute it correctly. We should have kicked the ball. If we would have missed, it would have got it there anyway. The look they were in, we should not have run a fake, and that’s what we practice all the time.
We made a mental error, and because it didn’t work it was a bad call. They all are, whether they did it right or not.
Q. It’s been a tremendous year so far. Is there one thing you want your fans to remember about this season?
COACH SABAN: I think all the things that I talked about our team, and I also think that this team should be remembered as, and have a legacy as, a team. The seniors on this team should have a legacy on this team and be remembered by they were the team that brought a lot of pride back to the University of Alabama, to the football program and to the people of the state of Alabama who support it. And I think that should be their legacy, that they went undefeated in the regular season, which is a very difficult thing to do.
I just wish that there was more that I could have done to help them win the championship, which I know was certainly their goal and expectations.
CLAUDE FELTON: Thank you very much.
Alabama Senior QB John Parker Wilson
“We played tough all game long. It was a hard game and there was no give-up. Florida played well, but we struggled in the second quarter – really sputtered on offense. We played well in the second half, fell behind and gave it all we had.”
Alabama Senior DB Rashad Johnson
“It was a hard fought game. Florida played a great game and they made the plays to win.”