The Hangover Cure: Week 2

4-10 in Nashville before losing 24-17. The ‘Cocks have a better-than-good defense, but Spurrier’s offensive magic deserted him at some point on the long, strange trip from Gainesville to Columbia via the District, and it showed on Thursday, with the woeful 6-for-15 performance on third down and three turnovers to Vandy’s zero.

My guess is that the OBC is gone before the year’s done, or shortly after it; at this point, you can’t spell the Papajohns.com Bowl without SC, and I’m sure that’s not Spurrier’s idea of success.

Tortoise Soup

Matt Grothe looks a little bit like a turtle. He’s small, stocky, and has as much shot at the NFL as I do at winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

But he’s one of the ten best quarterbacks in the NCAA this year, and he proved it with a gorgeous pass to Taurus Johnson in overtime that put USF up for good against UCF in the day’s most exciting game.

Once more bailing out Delbert Alvarado, perhaps the most consistently erratic kicker to ever play college football, who missed a game-winner with less than a minute to go in the fourth quarter, Grothe and the Bulls ran wild over UCF, tallying 504 yards of total offense and coming through when it mattered to erase any memory of the three turnovers they committed.

Still, USF only put away a pesky Knights team that got the game of Joe Burnett’s life on returns (six returns for 206 yards) and a fantastic day from Michael Greco when it stopped a fourth-and-six scramble by Greco about three inches short in overtime. It’s fitting, I suppose: just as this rivalry really begins, it ends.

Imagine Whirled Peace/Vanilla

I couldn’t resist the pun here: no one watching the Florida-Miami game of last night could have possibly been thinking of the glory days of the ’80s in this rivalry, when Howard Schnellenberger’s Miami teams swaggered into and out of stadiums, kicking ass and forgetting the names. There was no hint, however faint, of Wayne Peace’s effort for the Gators in their last win in Gainesville against UM, in 1982, at least not outside of an ESPN flashback.

No, this was, as it has been for UF for a little more than a year, the Tim Tebow Show. And Tebow gained over 300 yards of total offense, bludgeoned the Miami front seven as the Gators’ leading rusher, and threw two excellent touchdown passes, leading an uninspired Gators offense to a victory that was never really in doubt, but never really comfortable.

For that, blame the vanilla offenses that Patrick Nix and Dan Mullen put on the field for the ‘Canes and Gators, respectively.

Nix seemed to want to run the ball every first down, and Graig Cooper must have had ten two-yard rushes in Miami’s pathetic 37-carry, 61-yard rushing “attack” that featured a long of ten yards; his passing game was almost as bad, with Robert Marve and Jacory Harris combining for 3.6 yards per attempt. Nix’s ‘Canes, blessed with some athleticism in the backfield and on the fringes, rang up just 140 yards of total offense in a performance that had Ken Dorsey rolling in his grave. (Ken Dorsey’s not dead? Oh.)

Meanwhile, the Gators’ offense, invariably described as high-octane, was perhaps running on leftover Billy Donovan hair gel. Dan Mullen strayed from the running game early, as the Tebow smash accounted for half of UF’s carries, and he refused to challenge the ‘Canes downfield for much of the game, opting for a series of dinks and dunks that only succeeded when Aaron Hernandez broke free, then late-game pyrotechnics that gave Carl Moore a chance to break every bone in his body to get an elbow down in bounds.

Certainly, there’s a little of the Gator Nation hunger for the bombs of yesteryear in this analysis, but there was also a sea change from the opening win against Hawaii, in which UF’s cruise missles were deployed to great effect; against Miami, the Percy Harvin model was used surgically, and the Chris Rainey and Jeff Demps ones sparingly.

When Demps, an Olympic-level sprinter, makes his best play of the night on a punt block, there is perhaps a misuse of some substantial speed on offense.

(I’m cheating a little bit for these two.)

Straight Talk Crunch

If you’re Pete Carroll, you must not show any footage from this week’s Ohio State game to your players. Show them the Buckeyes’ opening victory, or clips of Beanie Wells running roughshod in the fall of 2007.

The Men of Troy will lose the titanic game of next Saturday if they come out flat, because Ohio State, you can rest assured, will return to the field with a fire that did not burn against Ohio.

Whirl of Change

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