MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — After all the penalties, interceptions and missed opportunities in the aesthetically unappealing Bowl Championship Series title game between Oklahoma and Florida on Thursday night, things started to look familiar.
There was Florida quarterback Tim Tebow taking a shotgun snap, lowering his shoulder and simply plowing his way into college football lore. There was Tebow leaping in the air with just over three minutes remaining and delivering a trademark jump pass to David Nelson that clinched the game.
And there was Tebow taunting Oklahoma’s Nic Harris with a Gator chomp, the most recognizable player in college football adding more indelible moments to his career.
Tebow led the Gators to a 24-14 victory against
the Sooners on Thursday night, and his familiar image resulted in a familiar spectacle: Florida fans, celebrating their third national title and second in the past three seasons, unleashed the haunting sing-song that has become so familiar to college sports fans: “Its great, to be, a Florida Gator.” The chants rang through the pro-Gator crowd at
Dolphin Stadium as if it were a Saturday afternoon at The Swamp.
“I’m just so proud of my teammates because they kept fighting for four quarters and that’s how we were able to pull it out,” Tebow said.
The title is the Gators’ second under Coach Urban Meyer, who became the first coach in the Bowl Championship Series era to win two titles. Florida received 48 first-place votes out of 65 in the Associated Press poll released early Friday morning; undefeated Utah finished second (16 first-place votes), followed by U.S.C. (one first-place vote), Texas and Oklahoma.
There will be an off-season filled with talk of a burgeoning dynasty in Gainesville.
“This is one of the best teams in college football history,” Meyer said. “I love these guys.”
He added, “It never gets old, I promise you that.”
While Meyer affirmed his spot atop the collegiate coaching profession, Oklahoma Coach
Bob Stoops’s inability to win B.C.S. games is becoming notable.
The Sooners have lost the last five B.C.S. games they have played in, and have dropped the last three B.C.S. title games they have appeared in. This latest defeat will almost certainly retire the nickname Big Game Bob, which was attached to Stoops for the better part of a decade.
Among the gaffes that will hound the Sooners in the off-season were two second-quarter trips inside the Gators’ 10-yard line that resulted in no points.
The Sooners’ explosive offense, which had scored more than 60 points in five consecutive games, looked dismal outside of two two-minute spurts, one in the first half and one in the second.
Sam Bradford, the Heisman Trophy winner, threw two interceptions, the most critical coming in the fourth quarter when Ahmad Black ripped the ball out of the hands of Oklahoma’s Juaquin Iglesias, essentially sealing the game.
“The turnovers were the difference,” Meyer said.
Tebow’s numbers were not imposing either; his two interceptions equaled the amount he had thrown all season. But he took over on Florida’s two second-half touchdown drives, much as he did during the Southeastern Conference title game against Alabama.
Tebow finished 18 of 30 passing for two touchdowns with two interceptions, but he began tilting the game in Florida’s favor with the run. He told Dan Mullen, the Florida offensive coordinator, at halftime that he wanted more carries, and he delivered when he called his own number time and time again on a touchdown drive in the third quarter.
“Tim’s game is when the chips are down and he’s going to out-tough people,” Mullen said. “He kind of did that. That’s Tim Tebow.”
Tebow ran the ball seven times for 52 yards on that third-quarter drive, bringing Florida to the doorstep before lining up at H-back and setting up a Percy Harvin touchdown rush on a direct snap.
Harvin, who had been questionable with a high-ankle sprain entering the game, also set up what proved to be the clinching field goal with a 52-yard run from the backfield in the fourth quarter.
But this game may be remembered as much for what it wasn’t as for what it was. Neither Tebow nor Bradford was impressive wire to wire. The game had been billed as an exhibition of offense, but the first half became a quagmire of turnovers, penalties and red-zone ineptitude by Oklahoma.
Much of the credit for slowing Oklahoma goes to Charlie Strong, the Florida defensive coordinator. Long a bridesmaid for head-coaching jobs, Strong faced the ultimate test: stop the highest-scoring offense in modern college football. The Gators succeeded with gusto, holding the Sooners to 14 points, a testament to Strong’s game planning.
“Charlie does an unbelievable job,” Mullen said. “I don’t know if there’s a better defensive coordinator in the country. If there is, I’d like to find him and have him come out here and hold the Heisman Trophy winner and Oklahoma to 14 points.”
The key moments for Strong’s defense came in the first half, in which the Sooners outplayed the Gators and had little to show for it. Oklahoma went into halftime tied at 7-7 after having the ball inside the 10-yard line twice in the second quarter and failing to score any points thanks to a pair of baffling sequences.
The first gaffe came when tailback Chris Brown failed to punch in the ball on fourth-and-1, as he got corralled behind the line of scrimmage by Florida’s Torrey Davis.
It was a questionable play call — an off-tackle run — on a sequence of calls that appeared shaky. Oklahoma had first-and-goal from the 9-yard line and ran all four times to Brown, never giving Bradford a chance to pick apart the Gator defense.
The second Oklahoma blunder came when Bradford threw an interception at the goal line with three seconds left. Florida’s Major Wright came away with the interception, but not before Joe Haden, Ahmad Black and Ryan Stamper all deflected it.
Stoops called Oklahoma’s final timeout with the clock already stopped on a first down before the interception. That meant that even if Manuel Johnson had caught the ball, he was short of the goal line and time would have expired.
“We stalled in the red zone, we gave up a play or two in the second half defensively, and it doesn’t take much to lose a tight game like it was,” Stoops said.
All those Sooner missteps set the stage for Tebow, who with that final jump pass secured another moment that reverberated in college football history.
“You can’t script it better,” Nelson said. “It was the perfect ending to a perfect season.”
