BATON ROUGE, La. – This football season is getting more difficult to understand than Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, with the nation’s Top Ten teams going up and down every week like an Empire State Building elevator.
Sometimes those teams dodge the bullets, as LSU did against Florida, and sometimes they take a direct hit, as Southern Cal did from lowly Stanford.
It leaves football coaches scratching their heads and looking for reasons for a lack of consistency. The good news for Urban Meyer, after two excruciating losses to SEC opponents, is that he thinks he’s found his answers.
Meet Urban Meyer, philosopher and football coach.
For two weeks in a row, Florida’s football coach has dug deep in analyzing lreasons why his fuzzy-faced Gators have come up short in close games.
Last week they took what Meyer called “a frontal assault” in the loss to Auburn on a field goal by Wes Bynum as the gun sounded and challenged his players to find their souls after the 20-17 defeat.
After a second straight loss on an LSU touchdown with 69 seconds left, there was nothing to do but “feel the sting” of defeat. That’s what Meyer told his team following Saturday night’s 28-24 loss, after his Florida Gators took the No. 1 team to the mat and couldn’t keep their opponent pinned.
These were particularly bitter pills to swallow, given that both games were so close and so win-able. After rallying from a 14-0 deficit, the Gators had possession of the ball with five minutes left against Auburn and couldn’t convert a scoring drive. And against LSU, they dominated the nation’s No. 1 defense, only to have their hopes destroyed by two second half turnovers.
Painful as it was, Meyer found a silver lining.
“I made a comment about the soul of a man and found out we have some pretty good men on our football team with strong souls,” Meyer said in this post-game press conference Saturday night.
Remember, it was two years ago in his first season that Meyer even shed tears after losing to LSU. This time he was composed and emphatic about the fact that his team wasn’t out of the conference race. The tears he cried were inside.
“Every team in the (SEC) East has at least one loss and some have two,” said Meyer. He said he felt his team wasn’t out of the race.
And he even went a step further, saying that his team was better than it was earlier in the season and that it would use the open date to improve.
“The future of Florida football is terrific, it really is,” he said. “I guarantee we’ll be back. The Florida Gators will be back. Smokin’.”
It just doesn’t feel that way right now.
The Gators are playing at a high level now, but not getting much return for their efforts. It seems that they are losing the battle of inches and, as a result, it is costing them miles.
Every time LSU needed a first down – even if it was on fourth – the Tigers seemed to come up with it. Five times they almost stopped LSU and five times the Tigers converted fourth downs, the final one the most critical.
I’m not so sure LSU didn’t benefit from the referee’s generosity on the last one.
With just over two minutes to play and Florida ahead 24-21, LSU had fourth and one at the Gator seven when Hester took the handoff and appeared to be stopped short. Had that been the case, the game was over. The official, however, seemed to give the Tigers somewhat of a generous spot – enough so that Dan Mullen remarked over the headset to Meyer that it looked suspicious.
The chain gain measured it as a first down by perhaps an inch. I asked Meyer if he thought of challenging the spot, but he said he thought they were supposed to “buzz it in from upstairs” on a call by the replay booth. There was no buzz, no call and no challenge.
Maybe it was a bad spot, maybe not, because it’s tough to tell without the benefit of the replay. Yet the officials did replay Jacob Hester’s winning touchdown when it didn’t even look close.
This was just another night of coming out on the wrong end of the close calls. Yet the Gators played some of the best football they have ever played under Meyer – so much so that the opposing coach heaped praise on them.
“I thought Florida was as talented a football team as we have played in my time here,” said LSU’s Les Miles. “Their receiving corps was big, strong and fast. Their running backs and Tebow played well.”
Indeed “their running backs” was actually Kestahn Moore, who ran harder in picking up 79 yards that he probably ever has run as a Gator. Too bad that on his best night he had to cough up the football with his team ahead 24-10 and moving with momentum at midfield. Although it didn’t result in any points when LSU missed the field goal, the fumble may have precluded the Gators from scoring and putting the game away.
Tebow was his spectacular self, especially on his 9-yard touchdown scramble. His one major miscue was throwing a fourth quarter interception. Although it goes in the records as a pick, the ball actually bounded off the helmet of Cornelius Ingram and caromed backwards into the hands of Darry Beckwith.
One more bounce of the ball, or flip of the coin, gone bad for Urban Meyer’s team. It takes luck to win a national championship and it appears that after winning all the close ones last year, the Florida Gators are running out of four-leaf clovers and horse shoes.
Tebow saw it as a case of playing well, but not finishing strong.
“We came out here and we played, in my opinion, the No. 1 team in the country,” said Tebow. “We played ‘em, we should have beat ‘em. We played well and if we play four quarters, we know we can beat anybody. So that’s what we have to take from it. This team’s young and we can get better. The sky’s the limit and we just have to keep improving. We can’t have lapses, because we’ve lost two in a row now. We’ve just got to bounce back and play.”
So it’s back to the drawing board – don’t you always wonder where they put that proverbial “drawing board”? – for the 4-2 Gators, who have two weeks before going on the road to Kentucky.
But how do you coach a team to be luckier?