We had a bye week before we played Kentucky, and during the bye week, Kentucky beat LSU. Go figure. We headed to Lexington the weekend of the game, and Kentucky was particularly focused on this being their second big game in a row, since it was us and they hadn’t beaten the University of Florida in two decades. They were ranked thirteenth in the country at the time, and after that LSU game, we certainly weren’t going to take them lightly. Their quarterback, Andre Woodson, had been playing really well for them, and they had other good offensive players and a pretty good defense to boot.
We went three and out to start the game, and then Andre Woodson threw a thirty-three-yard touchdown pass. It was clear we were in for a ballgame. If we hadn’t been ready to go up until then, that was a pretty good wake-up call. When we got the ball back after their kickoff, I told Coach Meyer to give me the ball. The first play we threw an option run-pass/stretch play to the right, and I just punctured it by breaking several tackles, gaining about twenty-five yards. From that point on, we really started moving. We drove them backward down the field and closed out the drive when I threw a ten-yard touchdown pass to CI. They couldn’t move the ball against our defense, and when we got the ball back, I threw a sixty-six-yard touchdown pass to a wide-open Louis Murphy. It was a lot of fun to be in a game like that with both teams playing well, and scoring. We led 21–10 at the half.
We scored on our first possession of the third quarter to make the score 28–10, and it went back and forth for a while after that. Early in the fourth quarter I carried the ball, and after a gain, I hit one of their players as I continued the run, bouncing off him and throwing me off balance; then when I reached down to put my hand on the ground to brace myself, another player hit me right on my outstretched shoulder. Right away, I could tell that the hit had done some pretty significant damage to my shoulder. I couldn’t even lift my right arm. My nonthrowing arm, thank goodness.
I know my body pretty well, and as the game wore on and the pain remained, I knew this was going to nag me the rest of the season. But the pain wasn’t disabling, and as we expected, it would require the standard course of treatment as any bad sprain requires.
Kentucky came back to score, cutting our lead to a single score. We needed to mount a drive, and we did. I hit Kestahn Moore in the flat for a big first down. Then we called Trick Left 51 X Pause, and they manned up on Percy Harvin. He beat the guy on an inside fade, and I hit him on the fade at their four yard line.
On the following play, I scored but paid the price again when I lowered my right shoulder to hit a guy to get in there. I remember the agony I was feeling. The sprain didn’t get any better with that blow to the shoulder.
But more important, that drive and score sealed the game, as we won a close one, 45–37. The next day I had an MRI on my shoulder, and we found out that it was AC separation (acromioclavicular joint separation) and a sprain. The usual course of treatment for such an injury is icing, anti-inflammatory medication, and physical rehabilitation. I got to work, trying to rehab it and recover as quickly as possible. The problem, of course, was my inability to give either of my shoulders a lot of rest. The activities of daily living were hard enough, but then add football—well, no rest for the weary during the season.
Though I knew this could be a season-lingering injury, I was unwilling to accept that. I expected it to resolve itself and heal within moments of being diagnosed and beginning the required course of treatment. It wasn’t to be—at least not as I hoped. By using my shoulder, I wasn’t doing anything that would make it worse in the long term. The only issues before me were the pain level I faced and the functionality of the shoulder to be able to execute the plays. That’s when I started getting shots before every game and as needed before practice to help with the healing, flexibility, and usability of my shoulder, because it was during this next week that we had to get ready to go play Georgia.
I prayed regularly for my shoulder to heal, a process which was way too slow in coming. I had a few why? moments—not so much “why me?”—but “why not go ahead and heal it now, Lord?” I wondered what lesson I was supposed to be learning through this—I thought I had gotten a bit better at patience. But the truth of the matter was that as much as I loved the scripture verse from Isaiah, I wasn’t always real good at embracing it in my life:
Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.
I get the “mount up with wings like eagles” part—I have felt His power and protection in the midst of some of the most difficult of moments—in the Philippines, at LSU, in dealing with trouble from others, and making decisions for my future—like the one that led me to the University of Florida. I get the part about “they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary”; I have felt His hand on my back in moments when I didn’t understand what was going on and why, and in situations where I wasn’t sure I could go one step further.
But I wasn’t real good at the “wait for the L
ORD
” part. You would think that when we stop and take a look at all He has done since the beginning of time and throughout the universe—let alone in my life—it would be easy to “wait.” It would be easy to understand that His timing should be our timing and that ultimately everything He does is for our benefit and our good—even though at the time it may not seem so and we may not understand. For example, my life, from fetus stage to my birth, if left to the “wisdom” of some doctor sitting before my mom and dad, would never have happened. God’s timing, God’s will. In my better moments I knew that.
I wasn’t there yet, but in my heart I wanted to be, and day-by-day I was working and praying to get there, with Him and for Him.
The LSU and Kentucky games
continued to reinforce my place in the Heisman Trophy discussion, because we had put up some big numbers against good teams. Part of the big numbers we were posting reflected all the talent around me. Another part of them may have been due to our inability to get our running backs on track, resulting in my carrying more of the running load than the coaches had originally anticipated. As the season progressed, though, it had been getting harder for me to keep up the running load, because more and more defenses were keying on me. And with my shoulder a bit dinged, it became another personal and team challenge for us to overcome.
As we were getting ready for Georgia, it was clear that my impinged shoulder had become a bit more than a slight problem. I could no longer raise my right arm above my head. The coaches wanted to try to game plan where I didn’t have to run, but since without me our running game wasn’t solid, that wasn’t going to work. We had some good passes and play action in the game plan, so we felt confident that I wouldn’t have to do too much in the way of running. Even though I wasn’t close to 100 percent, it was exciting to go back to Jacksonville—my home—for the annual battle between Florida and Georgia.
We fumbled on our opening drive, and they took it down the field, scoring easily. That’s when a fight broke out on the goal line, or at least that’s what it initially looked like to us. We saw Georgia’s players on the sideline racing onto the field as if there was a fight, but then we realized they were jumping up and down and celebrating, merely acting like Pee Wee League players. Except that I couldn’t remember ever seeing any little kids actually doing that. They were celebrating, dancing all over the field and making gestures to us, the stands, and, I suppose, the national-television-viewing audience.
If we’d have been a more mature team, I think we would have handled that moment differently than we did. Instead we took it as an affront. That was frustrating to me because instead of merely taking it out on them on the field, we had some guys who wanted to go out there and respond to their goal line antics by engaging them in a fight.
It all settled down quickly enough, thanks to the referees and coaches from both teams. We took the ensuing kickoff and drove the ball right down the field, closing the drive when I hit Louis Murphy for a touchdown. Tied, 7–7. Unfortunately, Georgia had a great game plan for us on offense, which we watched throughout the afternoon as Knowshon Moreno emerged as a top college running back with 188 yards and three touchdowns. On defense, they knew I was hindered by the injury to my shoulder and couldn’t be myself, so they started dropping more and more people into coverage, believing I wouldn’t run very often, if at all. Eventually I started to run the ball a little, even with my shoulder, and I ended up running in one for a touchdown to finish a drive. My shoulder was killing me. It was tough. We had other guys out there for us playing with their own dings and sprains and at less than full speed or strength and with some pain. It was simply something we had to do—the only difference being that my injury was more noticeable and, as such, was highlighted more frequently by opposing coaches, players, and the media.
By halftime, I could barely lift my right shoulder at all. Toward the end of the first half I had been catching snaps with basically just my left hand. We were trying to fight and bounce back. A lot of things weren’t going our way, but we were battling, and we were still right there in the game, at least for a while.
The second half produced one of the worst plays of my college career. We had a tight end post route with another player running an under route, coming underneath the post route. Their defense bit on the underneath route, so I had Cornelius Ingram wide open on the deep post. I missed him. Threw it about three yards over his head. Had I been accurate, it would have gone for at least fifty or sixty yards, if not a touchdown. Instead, we got nothing on that drive. My fault. It didn’t help with turning the momentum either.
We just didn’t have all we needed to make a strong statement on the field that day. We struggled to stop them on defense, with their running, primarily Knowshon Moreno, for big chunks of yardage, taking time off the clock. And also scoring at the end of the drives. We had guys who came to realize, through that game, that they were out of shape and not as disciplined as they needed to be. Unfortunately, for every guy like Louis Murphy or the Pouncey brothers, who made sure they prepared themselves and took care of themselves during the week in preparation for the game, we had some other “leaders” who didn’t and who, worse, were a little too eager to stay out on Thursday nights and as a result ran out of steam in the fourth quarter. And in the end, it cost the team. Those concerns, which showed up early in the year as we headed into spring practice, were still with us. We were talented, but we had some really soft spots within the team that showed up in that game. We struggled to find what we needed and to fight through the difficult moments.
That night after the Florida–Georgia game, I stayed at home on the farm in Jacksonville with my family, and we went out to eat. I take losing hard, but being around my family has always helped put things into the right perspective. Even so, I wasn’t very hungry. The next day I drove back to Gainesville with my brother Peter. It was one of the worst drives back ever for two reasons: I still couldn’t get rid of the sickening feeling I had about the result of the game, how it had happened, and how frustrating it was to endure that 42–30 loss. And then there was my shoulder, which I had reinjured during the game. On both fronts I was upset and concerned. Things seemed to be heading in the wrong direction for us.
It’s funny. I’m not sure that we weren’t as close-knit as that 2006 team or as well prepared, but the 2006 team had mature leaders. We gutted it out, though, and turned our frustrations toward our next opponent.
You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.
—M
ATTHEW 5:14
The following week
we played Vanderbilt, who made the mistake of showing up that day. The coaches had helped us to mentally and emotionally turn the page on the previous week and had also prepared a good game plan for us. We were able to spread the ball out more to others; because of the possibility that Percy Harvin might not play, the coaches had to game plan for that possibility. Even with as great a player as Percy was for us, the tendency is to key on one person too much, which doesn’t always make that person or the team better. We managed the ball very well in the Vanderbilt game, in both the turnover category and in making the necessary plays when we had to. Those are the things we needed to continue to do better as an offense.
My coaching career, if I ever have one, started that day. We had a third down and three yards to go for a first down early in the game and deep in Vandy’s end of the field. As we huddled on the sidelines, they called the play, but I didn’t really like the call.
“How about if we run a naked bootleg and then pass to (wide out) Jarred Fayson?” I suggested. Coach Meyer wasn’t sure it would work, but he said he trusted me and to go ahead and go for it. They came out in exactly the coverage I’d had a hunch they were going to run. Fayson was wide open, made the catch, and walked into the end zone for a touchdown. Coach and I laughed about it afterward, and I gave him a hard time, telling him, “This coaching stuff isn’t that hard. I like this gig. Maybe there’s a coaching job for me at Florida one day.”
But whether you’re talking about being a coach or being a player—the thing that’s hard is leadership. In the past, I have worked at casting a vision and modeling appropriate behavior, but this season, I was faced with the challenge of getting through to guys who were wired differently than I was. I had to keep finding new ways to motivate others.
South Carolina was up next. They were a good team with talented players, and we had the distraction of Percy Harvin all week. Will he play or won’t he? He was having migraine headaches, and the coaches were putting together two game plans again. South Carolina had almost beaten us each of the previous two years, and we definitely weren’t going to take them lightly. They had a good defense, and they could score points—especially if the “Old Ball Coach” had anything to say about it.
Speculation surrounded us all week. How bad was Percy’s illness? It went right up to the last minute. We flew to Columbia without him, but there was still a hope that he could either be on another flight or someone was going to drive him up later in time to play. The coaches were concerned with not only his health, but with having to develop an alternate game plan without him, simply because he was such an explosive player.
As for me, I told Coach during our usual Friday-night talk—he and I always sat down every Friday night at the hotel to discuss the upcoming game—that we’d be fine, we’d spread the ball around more to others, and that whoever we had with us in Columbia would be sufficient to win this game.
After our talk, I got treatment on my right shoulder that night from AP—Anthony Pass, our head trainer. It was getting better, the inflammation was going down, and AP was doing ultrasound on my shoulder. He had applied the ultrasound cream to my shoulder and then had draped a towel over it while he was working on it. I wasn’t paying any attention to what was happening with my shoulder, but instead I was looking away and talking to other guys who were in our training area. After a while, my shoulder started tingling and then hurting. I was surprised at how effective the ultrasound felt that night. AP pulled the towel back and looked stricken when he saw my shoulder. He just started saying, “I’m so sorry,” over and over.
At that point, I saw it. There was a bad burn on my shoulder—it looked like some skin had melted away. It really started hurting about then, but I could tell AP felt terrible about it, so I said, “It’s all right, man; it’s not a big deal.” But I knew when I put the shoulder pads on the next night it was going to be a rough night.
I certainly have made sure to remind him over the years what he did to my shoulder that night in Columbia and how dressing and playing the next day with the “sunburn” he’d laid on me was no picnic. And whenever I had the chance, I would make sure that anyone and everyone within listening distance heard the story about the “trainer-inflicted sunburn.” He did so much to keep me healthy and on the field for my career that it was fun to give him grief over this accident.
In the end, Percy wasn’t able to play. It was an ESPN Saturday-night game. We always loved Saturday-night television games, except this one turned out to be one of the coldest games I ever played in my college career: somewhere around game time, it was freezing. Other than the temperature, there was a really good atmosphere, a little bit like the Louisiana State game but not quite as intense or personally vindictive. Still, their fans knew that without our team’s blocking a field goal at the end of the previous year’s game, they would have kept us from winning the National Championship. They were giving me a hard time during pregame and I loved it. Being hassled always gets my competitive juices flowing. Some guys prefer home games, and I do love a home crowd too. However, there’s something about quieting a noisy road crowd that gets me going. I had a great feeling about that game, and I had a lot of friends and family who made the trip up to support us.
On the opening drive, I scored on a third-down play, plowing into the end zone through another good-size hole our line had opened up and then ending the run on a pretty big collision too. It was one of my favorite plays that game, in no small part because my shoulder held up, despite both the separation and the burn. We went up quickly, 7–0. On their possession, they turned the ball over, and I threw a touchdown pass to Jarred Fayson, a fade route into the corner of the end zone that made the score 14–0.
From that point on, the game turned into a pretty good little shoot-out, with each of us scoring in turn. Aaron Hernandez had his coming-out party that night by having his biggest game of his freshman season. We had a chance to build a bigger lead on them but couldn’t do it and instead fumbled the ball and kept them in the game.
We went into the locker room at halftime up 27–14, but they were still in the game. In the second half we stayed with our game plan and kept executing. I was so into what we were doing as a unit that I wasn’t paying much attention to the score. In the fourth quarter we needed a separation score to seal the win. On fourth down and goal to go, I ran it, smashed into two guys on the goal line, and piled over them to get it into the end zone for the touchdown. We knew we had it wrapped up. Finally, we added another touchdown on a pass that I threw to Bubba Caldwell for a 51–31 win.
It was a good night for all of us. I later reminded Coach that I’d told him we’d step up even without Percy. I think it was a good growing experience for us as a team to be on the road without one of our best players against a very good team and to win. Not to mention they also had Coach Spurrier on the other sideline, who always seems to figure out a way to beat people. Their best receiver, Kenny McKinley, had a big night in receptions and yards gained, but our defense stepped up and we were fortunate to keep him out of the end zone.
After the game, a reporter asked me how it felt to score all those touchdowns. I knew we’d had a big night but didn’t realize I’d had a hand in seven touchdowns—five rushing and two passing. South Carolina was the game that probably did as much to influence the Heisman voters as any game we played that year, but I didn’t realize it at the time. People were talking about it, but it really didn’t enter my mind. I didn’t have any control over it, so I stayed focused on the next game. South Carolina was quite a game for all of us and, thanks to the rest of the guys on the team, for me personally.
The next week we continued on a roll as cohesive units on both offense and defense and beat Florida Atlantic in a game that was a tune-up for the Florida State Seminoles’ visit to our place the next week. One interesting note from the FAU game is that both starting quarterbacks—Rusty Smith and I—attend First Baptist of Jacksonville. They played us tough but in the end, we won the game. Percy missed the game again.
But Percy was back for the next one, and FSU was talking their usual brand of trash all week. Of course, I was always ready to play Florida State, but having their senior weak-side linebacker, Geno Hayes, quoted as saying, “Tim Tebow is going down. We can go out there and shatter his dream,” helped fuel the fire for all of us. My dream, really, was to beat FSU—badly.
For as much as they were trash talking, we forgot that they were coming in at 7–4, having finished in the middle of the pack in the Atlantic Coast Conference standings. By the time of the pregame warm-ups, they were dancing around. At least they never danced on the
F
in the center of our field—there were several of us watching for that, especially after Georgia’s shenanigans on the goal line after their first score a month earlier.
On our very first drive, the referee called a false start, but we had already started the play, so I continued and rolled out to my left before they blew the whistle. After they blew it, Geno Hayes slapped me in the facemask, and then head-butted me after we had all clearly stopped, and was in my face, talking trash, with spit flying everywhere.
Not a good idea. At all. I had started out irritated with them and him, and now I was playing angry. The next play was a third down and sixteen. It was supposed to be a pass play, but nobody was open when I looked around, so I tucked the ball under my arm and ran for a long gain and a first down. Oh, and by the way, during the run I made FSU’s trash talking, face-mask slapping, and head-butting linebacker, Geno Hayes, miss.
As much as I would never find myself rooting for FSU, that university and its football program have turned out some fine players and people through the years. People like running back Warrick Dunn and linebacker Derrick Brooks, both of whom I have the utmost respect for and have looked to as role models for how to live life. Warrick Dunn bought houses for families who needed them but couldn’t afford them. Derrick Brooks helped children, in so many ways, to be the best they could be and took them on trips to stimulate their thirst for learning. It’s hard for me to imagine either Derrick Brooks or Warrick Dunn saying or doing some of the things we experienced that day from some of those FSU players.
Although the score was still 0–0, the game was over at that point. Trust me—we knew it was over. We just kept playing for the fun of it.
We were driving, and on a play-action pass from their twenty-two yard line, I stood up after faking the handoff and saw that their defensive end had come free (unblocked) and had me in his sights. I saw him at the very last second and ducked, taking a quick look at him as he flew over my back, and then I spun out and ran it in for a touchdown. I vividly remember running right and then cutting back to the center of the field at the ten just to run over one of their defenders who was there. I did and finished the run into the end zone.
It’s not often that I shy away from contact, and there are some games where I just like to go right at people. This was one of those games, and as I scored, I thought,
This is going to be a great day
.
On defense, we were flying around and hitting people. We stopped them, got the ball back, and drove down the field. I hit Louis Murphy in stride in the back-right corner of the end zone—he did a great job getting a foot down and in the end zone for the score. That was probably one of my best passes that year—and Louis was a big part of that. We went up 14–3. Then it was a bit of a back-and-forth battle, except that our defense was keeping them out of the end zone, making their only option a string of field-goal attempts.
On the next drive, I threw an out pass to Murphy, and although the ball got away from me a little, Murph made a slick, reaching, one-handed catch. We finished the drive and went up by a score of 21–6.
In the second quarter we drove down the field again and ran a Mickey (our renamed Power) up the middle from the five yard line, and while I was stiff-arming one guy in the facemask at the one yard line, and with my right hand pressed against his facemask, another guy missed me and hit my right hand, pinning it between his and the other’s helmet. I felt something crack but only as I was getting up and celebrating a new lead: 28–6. I celebrated with the team but didn’t tell anyone about my hand.
While we were on defense, AP came over to me, grabbed my hand, and saw my reaction. He wanted to examine my hand further, but he knew I wasn’t coming out of the game anyway, so instead he sprayed a cooling spray on it. That stuff was great—the marvels of modern medicine—as it kept me comfortable and able to stay in the game. Every time I’d come over to the sideline, AP would spray it again to give me relief. Percy and I were able to do whatever we wanted to on offense, and Louis Murphy, Bubba Caldwell, and our backs had good games as well. It was really cool. When I threw a touchdown pass to Bubba Caldwell to make it 38–12, Bubba threw the ball up into the crowd—farther it seemed than I had thrown it to him. I was able to finish the game, and we dominated it in all aspects, ending up scoring some more and eventually winning, 45–12.
The last four minutes on the field, as we were running the clock out, the stands were full as the whole crowd was still there in full force and doing their thing—going just a little bit crazy. There were guys there dressed in Heisman shirts and carrying Heisman signs. The buzz seemed to be increasing about that award with each passing game. And the Florida State game was a big game to be able to play really well as a team and individually, as so many of us did—it was a wonderful feeling and night to enjoy.
After the game we went to get an X-ray of my hand and found out that it was, in fact, a complete break. I asked AP what the stuff was that he’d been spraying on it and learned that it was some sort of antiseptic, like Bactine or something.