Play by Play

by Verne Lundquist

  My broadcast partner was going to be Todd Blackledge, another in my succession of quarterback analysts. Todd had worked with McDonough so he was familiar with the SEC and that made me feel comfortable working with him. Todd had been an outstanding college quarterback at Penn State. He helped the Nittany Lions win the national championship in 1982, the same year he won the Davey O’Brien Award as the nation’s best quarterback. Todd was the seventh pick of the first round of the 1983 draft, going to the Kansas City Chiefs. You may have heard a thing or two about that year’s NFL draft. Todd was part of a class that had six quarterbacks drafted in the first round. John Elway, Jim Kelly, and Dan Marino were among them. I used to kid Todd that he’d not kept up with those guys given their many Super Bowl appearances and later induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Todd took the ribbing well and we remain good friends today, long after our six-year partnership ended when he moved on to work at ESPN.

  We started the 2000 campaign in Knoxville, Tennessee. I’d been around the country a lot but had never been to Neyland Stadium before. I’d seen it on television a bunch of times, but you can’t appreciate what a bowl full to its 105,000-seat capacity looks and sounds like until you’re there in person, perched among that full-throated throng. The Volunteers were taking on the Florida Gators.

  Steve Spurrier brought his sixth-ranked Gators into Nyland with a 2-0 record. Phil Fulmer’s squad had won its only game and was ranked No. 11 in the country. The two teams were in the Eastern Division and one or the other was regularly in the SEC Championship Game. The first half ended with the Volunteers leading, 12–7. They had rolled up nearly 200 yards of offense on their four field goal drives. Their failures to convert in the red zone would haunt them.

  Florida took the lead near the midpoint of the third quarter. Lito Sheppard of Florida intercepted an A. J. Suggs pass and returned it 19 yards for a touchdown. Neyland went quiet, but not for long. Travis Henry, who still holds the record for most yards rushing, attempts, and 100-yard-plus games, scored from the one and a field goal put them up 23–17 early in the fourth. I felt like the sound of the fight song “Rocky Top” could cause an avalanche. The Gators got a field goal to bring them within three points. A fine punt pinned the Gators back on their own nine-yard line with 2:14 to go in the game.

  Jesse Palmer, who later went on to fame as television’s Bachelor and now works for ESPN, was the Florida quarterback. He quickly got them to fine scoring position inside a minute to play. He hit Reche Caldwell on a touchdown pass, but a flag was thrown. Florida was penalized for an illegal man downfield. On second and goal with only 14 ticks left, Palmer dropped back and threw to a well-covered Jabar Gaffney. The ball and Tennessee’s Willie Miles arrived simultaneously. The defensive back slapped the ball away. After a brief conference, the officials ruled that Gaffney had held on to the ball long enough for it to be ruled a completion. The Gators won, 27–23, and that game has gone down in history with its own version of “the Catch.”

  Tennessee fans, and rightly so, were incensed by the call. They’d dodged one touchdown bullet as a result of the Florida penalty, but they believed that they’d just been robbed by the same officials. It was a thrilling and controversial finish to my first game as the voice of the SEC.

  When we got off the air, I looked at Todd and asked, “Are they all like this?”

  Grinning, he said, “Well, enough of them are.”

  I had no way of knowing this then, but making the move to the SEC was the most significant assignment in my career. More than anything else I’ve done, I believe folks will remember me for having covered the SEC. Some of that has to do with the fact that I went on to enjoy seventeen years of life in the Southeast. The football was always competitive in the SEC but I think the regular national exposure that CBS gave it enhanced its reputation, made recruiting outside the region easier—though most rosters are dominated by players from within the Southeast—and exposed the rest of the country to what had been going on below the Mason-Dixon Line for all those years. Some have pointed out the National Hockey League has been influenced by the SEC’s success and traditions—chant-cheers in Nashville and Vegas in the ’18 Stanley Cup finals were a new twist for an old league.

  While I’ve lived in Texas most of my life, I’ve been all around the country, and the passion for college football in the Southeast is unequaled by any other passion for the sport in any part of the country. That includes in the Big 10, the Big 12, and every other major conference or independent. Allegiance runs deep. When I meet people, no matter the circumstance, the first thing after the introduction is made—if they’re from the Southeast—is their loyalty to whichever program. I don’t hear that from people from other parts of the country who may identify themselves as Patriot loyalists, Bear fans, or adherents to some other professional sports team. You have to have strong ties if you’re going to be in Neyland and hear “Rocky Top” thirty-eight times a game. My dear friend and statistician Chuck Gardner made a study of the song’s frequency for three years and he arrived at that figure as an average. Similarly, I can’t go anywhere in my travels and not hear someone say to me, “Roll Tide,” or “War Eagle,” or “How ’Bout Them Dawgs.”

  I’ve been lucky. I’ve done the Texas–Oklahoma game probably eight times. I thought that was the greatest rivalry in college football I’d ever seen. But, in my view now, as a guy who is still loyal to the state of Texas, it doesn’t compare with Alabama–Auburn. It just doesn’t. The passion in that state for that game is unequaled in the country. Georgia–Florida is something else, too. The rivalries are just amazing.

  That said, I really don’t pull for a single team. I never have. My wish is always that good people win, and so I’m loyal to men and women I’ve met in sports whom I consider to be loyal, honest, and who play within the rules. The last of those can get me in trouble and greater minds than mine will have to figure out a way in all of college sports to sort through its many challenges.

  One of the challenges I faced in my first ten years of doing SEC games was commuting from Steamboat to Atlanta and then on to wherever the game I was assigned was being held. I kept thinking of Frank Chirkinian chastising and threatening me for the move and issuing a dire warning about what would happen to me if I missed or arrived late for an event. In 2009, while at Augusta, Sean McManus, who was the chairman of the Sports Division by then, asked me to join him for a ride in his golf cart. He told me that he could see that travel was taking a bit of a toll on Nancy and me during the SEC season. I was told to find a place in Atlanta to rent, as well as a car, and CBS would pick up the tab for both. Spending that much time in Atlanta gave me a real appreciation for life in the South. For one thing, reading the Sunday college football section in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was a real treat. I can now say that it is unrivaled in my estimation, even better than the one in the Dallas Morning News. How’s that for a switch of allegiance?

  Living in Atlanta and being immersed in the culture of college football in the South gave me a greater appreciation of how important it was to so many people. I didn’t know this before we moved down to Atlanta. Georgia–Georgia Tech is a really big deal. And it never had been to me. But in Atlanta, the Georgia Tech people are as fervent about their team and as anti-Georgia as can be. In Baton Rouge, the Saints have a very fervent fan base. But I don’t think it equates at all with how people feel about LSU football. That’s the loudest stadium I’ve ever heard anywhere, when they’ve got 93,000 in there and they’ve been drinking all day. And they especially hate us if we do an afternoon game in there because it cuts into their enjoyment of adult beverages. But when we do a night game, it’s some kind of experience.

  One of my top five favorite SEC contests ever was the 2007 Florida–LSU game. That first Saturday in October, Les Miles had the number one team in the country, sitting atop the polls with a 6-0 record. They were the preseason number two and had traded places with the preseason favorite, the University of Southern California, despite the Trojans
also being undefeated at that point. The 2007 season would go down in many people’s minds as the Year of the Upset—a moniker that could be applied to nearly every Division I season in my memory. But that year it was particularly apt. Fifty-nine times it would see an unranked or lower-ranked team knock off a favorite. More significant, 13 of those upsets occurred to teams in the top five.

  Florida was among those thirteen victims. The week before taking on LSU, they lost, 20–17, to unranked Auburn in Gainesville. Urban Meyer was in his third year at Florida and had named Tim Tebow his starting quarterback when the latter was a sophomore. To that point in the season, it looked like a very wise decision: Tebow came in with 1,300 yards passing, 11 passing touchdowns, 2 interceptions, 433 yards rushing, 8 rushing touchdowns. Talk of him winning the Heisman Trophy had already begun. Despite Tebow’s gaudy numbers, Florida’s offense couldn’t generate much against Auburn.

  In my time covering SEC games and college football generally, I was the play-by-play man for twenty-three of Tebow’s games. I first heard about him when he was an eighth grader. Gary Danielson saw tape of him as a youth league player and noticed how the lefthander dipped his elbow when he threw. That flaw in his delivery, as well as some footwork issues when throwing, would plague him throughout his career. Later, Gary said that we shouldn’t dwell on that fact. The kid was as competitive as anyone I’d ever seen, and he overcame those technical flaws.

  As a person, Tim was hard to find fault with. I first met him when he was a high school senior on an official recruiting visit to the Alabama campus. Mike Shula was the head coach back then and was hoping to bring Tebow there. He was a very gracious, very assured young man even then. His faith in God plays an enormous role in his life, and at one point when we were speaking with him on campus before one SEC contest or another, Gary asked if his stated favorite thing to do, going to prison to preach to convicts, had produced any results.

  Tebow looked very thoughtful and then said it hadn’t. He added, “But I’m going to keep on trying.”

  The previous year, when Florida won the national championship and Tebow was the quarterback, he impressed the heck out of me in the Tennessee game. On fourth and two with two to go in the fourth quarter, out of shotgun formation, he ran the ball and I swear he moved the entire pile backward to get the first down in a demonstration of brute strength. I also recalled him throwing a few old school jump passes that brought me back to my days as a kid watching the University of Washington’s Don Heinreich doing the same thing.

  I also loved his attitude when LSU fans somehow got ahold of his cell phone number, had it published in the school newspaper, and inundated him with calls. Tim was not pleased. He scored the game’s first touchdown, set the ball down, and then pretended to punch in the numbers on an imaginary cell phone and hold it up to his helmet’s earhole. He got a big laugh from the LSU crowd for that one, deservedly so.

  Entering that 2007 game, Florida was the defending national champion. They were riding an 11-game winning streak before a last-second Wes Byrum field goal as time expired split the uprights for the 20–17 victory. Auburn had been an 18-point underdog and the loss reverberated throughout the league and the country. Auburn didn’t have much success against the Gators in Florida at that time, but they had knocked them off the number one spot in 1994. We would have loved to have featured two undefeated teams going at one another, but Florida’s loss didn’t take much of the shine off what we expected to be a terrific competition.

  The game didn’t disappoint. LSU hadn’t been the top team in the Associated Press poll since 1959, and it seemed for much of the game that they weren’t going to stay there much longer. With runs of his own and passes, Tebow led the Gators to a field goal on their first possession. LSU’s tough defense prevented Florida from capitalizing on a Matt Flynn interception, but on their third possession, covering 77 yards in 12 plays, Tebow threw a two-yard touchdown pass. The play before, he’d been stuffed on a run, and the short pass caught LSU’s defense by surprise.

  Five different LSU runners gained 49 yards on their touchdown drive that pulled them within seven. Setting the tone for the rest of the game, Les Miles rolled the dice on fourth down and goal to go from the one with backup quarterback Ryan Perilloux sneaking into the end zone with 6:08 left in the half. Florida scored again before the intermission to lead, 17–7. Colt David missed a 43-yard field goal inside a minute to go that could have brought the Tigers closer. If LSU was going to maintain their footing then they were going to have “geaux” all out in the second half.

  Just as the LSU fight song takes a while to build in tempo, so did its football team. The Tigers scored on a long drive to open the second half chewing up more than seven minutes. On fourth-and-5 from the Florida 25, Matt Flynn managed to gain 8 yards on a run to keep the drive alive and the fans in a delirium.

  The Gators came back in just 2:33 with Tim Tebow hitting Cornelius Ingram for a 33-yard touchdown pass to go up 24–14. Those were the last points they would score. Two turnovers in the third quarter, a Kestahn Moore fumble that LSU failed to convert on a second missed field goal, and a Tebow interception that they did capitalize on for a touchdown saw the game enter the fourth quarter with the score 24–21. During that postinterception scoring drive, Les Miles went for it again on fourth down to score. This time it was a four-yard Matt Flynn throw that brought the crowd noise to a crescendo.

  Todd and I both questioned the wisdom of those fourth-down calls, but in a postgame interview, Miles indicated that he’d gone into the game thinking that he’d have his Tigers going for it on fourth down. He believed that the Gators’ offense was a ball-possession offense, thus limiting the amount of time that his offense would have. His players certainly appreciated the trust he placed in them and the fans loved the gambles—especially since they paid off. This fourth-down trend continued when the Tigers took over on their own 40 with 9:10 to go in the game.

  On second down with three yards to go for the first down, Matt Flynn dropped back to pass. The play resulted in a fifteen-yard penalty against the Tigers’ Jared Mitchell for offensive pass interference. What could have been a backbreaker of a penalty instead was forgotten in what followed. Following a two-yard run, a hobbled Flynn managed to gain 15 crucial yards on a third-down run. Facing fourth-and-1 from their own 49-yard line, Miles kept his offense on the field. Jacob Hester moved the chains with a two-yard gain. A few plays later, Hester blasted his way from the Florida 35 to the 16. That 19-yard rush was a thing of, if not beauty, then certainly brutality as he broke through the line and took on much smaller defensive backs. Unfortunately for him, he was stopped on third down and one.

  Again, Miles faced a tough decision, with 2:10 left on the clock. Kick a chip-shot field goal to tie the game or go for it? He went for it and Hester again came through, gaining two tough yards. Following a first-down incompletion, it took Hester two more carries to get into the end zone. Florida’s last-gasp drive ended with an incompletion and the fourth-down fortunes of LSU had produced a classic game, 28–24. Five for five on fourth-down plays is pretty special, especially in a game against a top rival, and especially in a season that sees your team go on to win the national championship.

  LSU’s victory over Florida was just one small part of the story. The following week, the Tigers traveled to Lexington, Kentucky. Gary Danielson and I, along with sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson, were there. Demonstrating the strength of the SEC, the Wildcats were ranked No. 17 and they pulled off one of those many 2007 upsets. It took them three overtimes, overcoming a 13-point deficit, and some poor execution on LSU’s part, but they won, 43–37, stopping LSU without a first down on their last possession of the third overtime. LSU suffered a second triple-overtime loss, this time against Arkansas after the Tigers had regained the top spot in the polls in this season filled with so many upsets.

  Despite their two losses, LSU advanced to the SEC Championship Game, beat Tennessee, and then was named to the BCS Championship Game. There they beat
top-ranked Ohio State, 38–24, to win the national championship. Seemed appropriate in a season that began with tiny Appalachian State knocking off the behemoth Michigan Wolverines, that the twice-defeated No. 2 team in the country should be crowned the national champion. Les Miles and his bunch were deserving champions and their season of close victories and losses provided the nation with a lot of thrills.

  I was excited that season to continue my working relationship with Gary Danielson in our second year together covering the SEC. Like Todd, Gary was a former NFL quarterback for the Lions and the Browns. He showed an early interest in broadcasting. While still actively playing in the NFL, he worked on television in both Detroit and Cleveland. He came to us after a relatively brief stint at ESPN as a college football analyst. A former Purdue Boilermaker, Gary has a deep love and understanding of NCAA football.

  It always takes a bit of time to develop a rhythm and a rapport with an analyst. Trust is a major component in any relationship and it’s no different with an on-air partner. I’ve been privileged to work with some great analysts, and with their backgrounds trust has not been an issue. As I’ve said before, I’m there to tell you the story, give you the facts you need to know where we are in the game, and I leave the analysis entirely to my partner. Gary played thirteen years in the NFL and he knows the game inside and out. Todd had that same level of knowledge and expertise, and this is no knock on him, but Gary brought a slightly different perspective. From working with him, I have a better understanding of how an NFL player goes about his business of being a professional athlete. Much of that has to do with establishing and following a routine.