BATON ROUGE, LA — Maybe Tim Tebow didn’t turn out to be a Man of Steel after all, but there is little doubt he will be remembered as a Man In Bronze —whether he wins a second Heisman Trophy or not.
Florida’s quarterback sealed his fate as some kind of a genuine super-sized super hero after coming back from a serious concussion of two weeks ago to lead his No. 1 ranked Gators past No. 4 LSU, 13-3, Saturday night.
You aren’t going to convince his fans that he’s not able to leap buildings in a single bound.
“Superman is back!” proclaimed a sign in the Florida student section. Stated another:
“C” (concussions can’t)
“B” (Break)
“S” (Superman)
To complete the prophecy, Tebow had gotten off the grass in Lexington, checked out of the medical center at Kentucky 13 days ago, gone under the care of doctors for his head injury, and after finally being cleared Saturday morning, walked on to Tiger Stadium to complete his task before the largest crowd (93,219) ever to sit is what is now known as “Death Valley.”
For those who didn’t know this before, they certainly do now: Tim Tebow fairly rocks.
After nearly two weeks of watching Tebow go down in a crumpled heap on TV over and over and over again on ESPN and all the other major sports telecasts, almost everybody was glad to see this night end. Not the least of which was Urban Meyer, who suffered some sleepless nights last week.
Ever since that Saturday night in the Lexington care facility when he first saw the clip and realized the back of his head had hit the knee of Marcus Gilbert, Tebow had been deluged with the memories of that moment, seeing that clip ad nauseum.
“You couldn’t really watch TV without seeing it,” said Tebow.
It was scary then and it was scary for days to come — so scary that his coach wasn’t sure what he was going to do until last Friday.
Turns out that Meyer had serious reservations about playing Tebow three days before the game and “almost didn’t.” He thought of his son Nate — “Tim is my son,” he said — and only after a long talk with his quarterback’s father and the final clearance from the doctors on Saturday did Urban concede to start him.
Bob Tebow told Urban he felt his son would be okay “with 40 million people praying for him.” And there had been promises made that if he didn’t feel up to it, Tim would let his coach know.
“Obviously we love each other,” Tebow said of his coach, “and he said ‘that’s like putting Nate out on the field,’ and he didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize me.”
The bumpy plane ride from Florida due to inclement weather was the first hurdle Tebow had to clear, which he joked was “worse than the concussion.” Once in Baton Rouge, Tebow was administered the final medical test on Saturday morning. Meyer walked down the hall and spied Tim with a big smile on his face, flashing the thumbs up sign. All systems were go.
This was not a classic performance by Tebow and his offensive mates, but it was a huge game in classic venue and the Gators went into the game with a “whatever it takes” mentality to extend the nation’s longest winning streak to 15.
It looked like something out of Woody Hayes’ playbook and even Meyer said it was a conservative approach.
“It’s was like two sledgehammers going at it,” said Meyer.
What it took was the dominance of Charlie Strong’s defense. And as one Gator player said, as great as Tebow is, he doesn’t play on that side of the football. It’s just tough to compete with the story line of the legend.
The night really belonged to Brandon Spikes, however, and it almost didn’t matter who was playing quarterback because LSU only posed one serious thread all night and it was quickly snuffed out. Spikes was spectacular with 11 tackles, 2-½ sacks and one forced fumble.
Playing as the nation’s best defense, Strong’s unit is almost taken for granted anymore and is somewhat being overshadowed by the bigger-than-life quarterback.
Yet even on a night when his numbers were not Heisman-like — 17 carries for 41 yards and 11 of 16 passes completed for one score and 134 yards — the plight of this college football icon was hard to ignore. Another mountain was scaled, but this one in quite a different manner for the SEC’s touchdown-scoring machine. In the second lowest scoring game since Urban Meyer has been head coach at Florida, Tebow did just enough to win the game.
The one touchdown in the game came at the end the 80-yard drive on a 24-yard pass from Tebow to roommate Riley Cooper which is all Florida every really needed.
They dumbed down the playbook for their less-than-hundred-percent quarterback as the Gators ran 48 times and passed just 16, relying on their brilliant defense and solid kicking game, but turning so conservative that they missed two scoring opportunities.
Though the offense struggled, Tebow was not making any excuses.
“We didn’t execute like we should have,” said Tebow. “We didn’t put the ball in the end zone like we should have. But you know I am very proud of our offense because we played hard, and we played for four quarters. It didn’t matter what was going to happen at the end, because we had so much confidence. We were going to get a shot and we were going to put this thing away. And I’m just so proud of my team for the effort that they had.”
It may have only been a gain of eight yards, but the play that seemed to shake the cobwebs off of Tebow came five minutes before the first half ended. This had not been vintage Tim and clearly his role was limited to mostly handoffs, pitches and a few short passes.
Tim Tebow was on the downlow.
On first down, Tebow set up to pass, didn’t see anybody open, broke contain, drifted to his right where he appeared trapped, spit the defenders and cut across the field where he took a bead on an oncoming tackler and lunged to his own 28-yard line. That seemed to pump life back into him and the offense. Meyer felt it got his quarterback going.
“That was a little bit more of me being me,” said Tebow. “I thought it definitely ignited and excited me a little bit … and it provided us a little bit of adrenalin.”
Off they went, these seemingly rejuvenated Gators, slicing their way downfield to make a statement with an 80-yard drive to close out the half. Having run the ball 17 times to that point, they ripped off six more runs and it set up the play-action touchdown pass of 24 yards from Tebow to Cooper. When last seen, the LSU defender was still searching for a certain piece of his athletic gear.
It was a brilliant call with brilliant execution and completely changed the tenor of what had been a toe-to-toe slug-a-thon.
The drive and the score put Florida up 10-3, but more importantly, the momentum shift seemed to be in the Gators’ favor as the second half began — especially with their leader back in stride – and the drive was reminiscent of the ones the Gators executed down the championship run of 2008.
The genie was out of the bottle. Despite a drive that fizzled on a trick play, the Alpha Dog Gators seemed to own the Tigers and had them backed up the whole third quarter — except Florida kept failing to convert short yardage and missed two scoring chances.
I’m still not certain why Meyer and his staff elected to take a delay-of-game penalty on fourth down and a length of the football to go at LSU 39 just to punt the ball. Unless it was a conviction that they could win with their defense. After all, the Tigers didn’t make their initial first down of the second half until there were less than two minutes to play in the third period.
They shut down Jefferson and the Bengal Tigers, thanks in no small measure to five sacks. Late in the fourth as the stodgy LSU defense struggled, Spikes put another spike in Jefferson’s plans with his second sack of the night.
“Defensively, that’s one of the best efforts I’ve ever containing athletes,” said Meyer.
As one coach had said earlier in the week, “this isn’t just one-five’s team – it’s five one’s, too.”
So it was pretty good night for anybody wearing the numbers one and five in any sequence.
And by the way, some of us aren’t so sure than Spikes couldn’t leap buildings in a single bound, too.