The sanctification of Saint Timothy Tebow: Flashlight & A Biscuit, No. 23
The SEC's back, for the moment, so let's dig into its illustrious history
Welcome to Flashlight & A Biscuit, my Southern sports/culture/food offshoot of my work at Yahoo Sports. Thanks for reading, and if you’re new around here, why not subscribe? It’s free and all. Today: the SEC’s back, baby!
SEC football returns today, and like everything else in this blessed, haunted part of the country, the thought fills me with both exhilaration and dread. On one hand: HELL YEAH FOOTBALL. On the other: we’re still in the middle of a goddamn pandemic. But still … FOOTBALL!
I’ve spent the last six months watching every sport navigate through challenges no coach, player, executive or administrator could have imagined. Some have performed better than expected (NFL, NASCAR); some stumbled at launch but found their footing (baseball, golf); some have executed their return just about flawlessly (NBA, NHL).
And then there’s college football, the nexus of so many hopes, dreams, legends and lies. College football relies on, is defined by, its sense of community … which, you know, isn’t a great place to be when your community’s carrying around a virus. COVID ain’t having a whole lot of trouble beating Bama.
The whole Let’s Just Do It And Be Legends ethos of college football is what’s unsettling. It’s kind of like jumping out of a plane with a parachute but no training on how to deploy it; you’ll probably figure it out on your way down, but what happens if you don’t? Odds are, the college football season will run pretty much on time and with minimal cancellations … but how confident are you in the odds breaking in your favor in 2020?
ANYWAY. This is not to deter you or dissuade you or shame you for enjoying college football. (Nobody’s rooting against college football; don’t believe the hack opportunists who say otherwise.) We’re rolling forward, so let’s enjoy the hell out of it.
The SEC’s keeping it in the family this year (don’t say it), so each week, we’ll find a historical matchup of significance that mirrors a game on this week’s schedule. I can’t promise everybody’s going to get some run — there’s not a whole lot of history behind, say, the great Vanderbilt-Texas A&M rivalry — but oh, do I have some tales lined up for you.
This week, Florida takes on Ole Miss at noon, so we’ll start there. These teams don’t play each other all that often, but there’s one matchup in particular that still casts a shadow — or, more properly, a heavenly light — over the conference ever since.
Cast your mind back to the hazy days of 2008, a time long before anyone outside of comics nerds knew who Thanos was; a time when a hulking, impossibly handsome Boy You’d Bring Home To Momma was quarterbacking the Gators to what was expected to be an undefeated season and a second national championship in three years.
Tim Tebow, they called him, because that was his name. Forget anything you know about Tebow post-college, because back in those days, Tebow was untouchable — strong, decisive, clear-eyed and full-hearted. He was a god — not THE God, as he’d be quick to remind you, but still a deity — and he owned college football.
The Gators were a year removed from a national championship, but Tebow was the defending Heisman winner. Florida rolled into the season ranked No. 5, and the Gators proceeded to vaporize their first three opponents — Hawaii, Miami and Tennessee — by a combined score of 110-19.
Then came a date with Ole Miss on Sept. 27 — 12 years ago Sunday — and everything for Tebow and the Gators changed. Ole Miss would go on to finish the season ranked 14th, but when they arrived in Gainesville, they were 2-2 following losses to — oh, boy — Vanderbilt and Wake Forest.
So the Gators had reason to be confident, but Tebow could’ve quoted Proverbs 16:18 — “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” — and saved everyone a lot of trouble. Florida lost the game, 31-30, letting it slip out of their hands after leading by 10 points at halftime.
With a typically brutal schedule ahead — LSU and Georgia lurked down the road, along with perpetual rival Florida State — it would’ve been easy for everyone to write off the Gators. But not Tebow. In his postgame press conference, he stepped to the podium and delivered what’s now known to the Gator Faithful as The Promise:
“I just want to say one thing. To the fans and everybody in Gator Nation, I'm sorry. Extremely sorry.
“I promise you one thing. A lot of good will come out of this.
“You will never see any player in the entire country play as hard as I will play the rest of the season, and you will never see someone push the rest of the team as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the season, and you will never see a team play harder that we will the rest of the season.
“God bless.”
As rallying speeches go, it’s not exactly St. Crispin’s Day, and it’s got a lot more words than “Avengers: assemble.” Still, this is college football, where we’ll create icons today that we’ll pray to tomorrow, so Tebow’s never-gonna-let-you-down declaration bypassed anecdote and lore and shot straight into legend. It’s carved on walls, inscribed in locker rooms, probably stitched in needlepoint all over north Florida.
The wild thing is: it worked. After Tebow made his Promise, the Gators won their next 10 straight, including victories over four ranked teams in the regular season, a double-digit whomping of Alabama in the SEC Championship, and a 10-point win over Oklahoma in the BCS national championship game. Say what you will about ol’ Bible Boy, he delivered exactly what he promised.
(Side note: that particular Gator team also featured future Patriot-slash-killer Aaron Hernandez in a starring role, as well as a buried-on-the-bench backup QB who completed exactly one pass all season. His name was Cam Newton, and he’d get better.)
Tebow would never again rise as high as he got that season. He would go on to play several unspectacular years in the NFL; get dealt to make room for Peyton Manning; take a run at a baseball career; and establish himself, along with Kobe Bryant and Danica Patrick, as one of the single greatest pageview generators for mid-2010s sports media.
He also inspired an army of acolytes who, to this day, insist that Tebow got drummed out of the NFL for his religious beliefs. Not so. (His throwing motion was slower than a school clock before summer vacation. The truth: NFL coaches love winning. They’d sign a cannibal without a second’s pause if he had an arm like Mahomes. On his body, that is, not in his fridge.)
Tebow’s statue now stands in front of Florida’s Ben Hill Griffin Stadium; that’s it on the left up top. (It’s the one not throwing a pass like Steve Spurrier and Danny Wuerffel.) As long as he doesn’t do something to send his career careening off a cliff — always a possibility these days — Tebow should enjoy a long, happy life talking college football.
Much of Tebow’s aura stems from his on-field successes, but a fair slice stems right back to that day where he walked to a podium and took responsibility for leading his men. It only seems corny now because we don’t see that kind of raw honesty much anymore. Gotta be honest: I kinda love it.
As for tales of Ole Miss … oh, just you wait.
Stream This
“Long Violent History,” Tyler Childers
Last week, Childers dropped an entire album — eight instrumental fiddle tunes and one full-throated protest song — out of the blue (or, really, out of the black, since it arrived around midnight). His goal with the protest song was simple: to try to recontextualize the Black Lives Matter movement — the concept, not the organization — for his primarily White, primarily conservative audience.
“What if we were to constantly open up our daily paper and see a headline like ‘East Kentucky Man Shot Seven Times on a Fishing Trip?’” he wondered in a companion video. “What form of upheaval would that create? I’d venture to say if we were met with this type of daily attack on our own people, we would take action in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia. And if we wouldn’t stand for it, why would we expect another group of Americans to stand for it? Why would we stand silent while it happened?”
Since we now live in a country where even just asking someone to consider another point of view is tantamount to treason, a loud segment of Childers’ audience lit him up, which is a damn shame for so many reasons. Listening ain’t a weakness.
Also, the fiddle music kicks. Give it a go.
Download This
Episode 2 of FIGHT SCENE!, my new podcast with my boy, is now live, and this week we’re talking about the cult classic “The Empire Strikes Back.” Topics covered: what a pathetic fighter Luke is, who would win a battle royale among “The Office” cast, how many Darths there are in Star Wars (well over a hundred!), and whether Darth Vader is truly evil or just a middle manager with a violent streak.
Subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts, or listen right here. Leave us a rating & review, too. It’s free!
Read This
Over at Yahoo, I bared my soul about what it’s like being a Falcons fan after yet another surgery-without-anesthesia defeat, broke down how weirdo Bryson DeChambeau took over the golf world, and tried to make some sense of the knots the NFL’s tying itself into over protests. As always, get more of my pipin’-hot sports takes pretty much every day in the Yahoo Sports Read & React newsletter.
As Mississippi As It Gets
Sure, a hurricane is rolling in, and there’s a heavy sense of foreboding in the air … but there’s also time to do a donut right there in the middle of Beach Boulevard:
Raise a little hell while you stay safe, y’all. See you next week.
-Jay
This has been issue #23 of Flashlight & A Biscuit. Check out all the past issues right here. And if you dug this, share it with your friends. Social media truth: Facebook shows it to about 5 percent of my friends (seriously), and on Twitter, it’s visible in any given timeline for about 15 seconds. So word-of-mouth is how we’re gonna grow this bad boy. Invite others to the party, everybody’s welcome.