Other Week Results

 

Dec. 2, 2000 By Len Pasquarelli SportsLine.com Senior Writer

ATLANTA -- In 17 months of employment by SportsLine.com, this humble scribe, who spends most of his weekends documenting the NFL, has covered only three college football games. That includes Saturday evening's SEC championship tilt here at the Georgia Dome, a facility twice as packed as it figures to be for Sunday's NFL yawner between the Atlanta Falcons and the Seattle Seahawks.

Playing for the seventh time in the nine conference championship encounters, the Gators won for the fifth time, topping Auburn by a 28-6 and barely breaking a sweat doing so. So enamored was I of coach Steve Spurrier's youthful squad that I am stepping out on that same shaky limb I did in '99, when I prognosticated the Alabama team that destroyed these same Gators last year would go into the 2000 season as no worse than a top five club.

Hey, why not, since they had 18 starters returning.

Jabar Gaffney and the Gators are headed to the Sugar Bowl after pummeling Auburn.(AP)

Don't count on the wondrously skilled Gators being visited by either of those plagues. Spurrier hasn't lost eight games in consecutive seasons, let alone one year, and the man who is known in the conference as "The Evil Genius" isn't going anywhere. Fact is, he is about to sign a four-year contract extension in the next few weeks.

So mark it down: Florida, which raised its record to 10-2 and will play in the Sugar Bowl, should be even better a year from now.

"Well, if speed and youth mean anything, yeah, you would have to think Florida definitely will be one of the top teams in the country," said Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville, whose Tigers fell to 9-3 and will travel to the Citrus Bowl. "Obviously, they play a lot of young people. And when it comes to speed, they've got it all over the place. Everyone talks about those skill-position players on their team, but take a look at the defense and the quickness on that side. I don't think that they blitzed us one time, and still we had problems protecting the back side of the quarterback."

Credit the Tigers for hanging in a game in which they fielded a physically inferior team. Auburn is a young team, too, and Tuberville probably needs another solid recruiting class or two before he can compete with a team as athletically gifted as the Gators. The problem is, even in a couple of years, many of Florida's standout performers will still be around in Gainesville.

Of the Gators' 22 starters, only three are seniors. There is a good chance, several sources told SportsLine.com, that at least three underclass starters -- defensive end Alex Brown, defensive tackle Gerald Warren and offensive tackle Kenyatta Walker -- will opt for the NFL Draft. But as long as the Gators retain most of their offensive playmakers, they will be difficult to beat.

The breakdown on the Gators' non-senior starters: three freshmen, eight sophomores and a like number of juniors.

Three of the four Florida touchdowns were scored by freshmen or sophomores. Quarterback Rex Grossman, who was named the game's most valuable player and threw four touchdown passes, is a freshman. Of the team's 429 total yards, not a single one was contributed by a senior.

Grossman hit 17 of 26 passes for 238 yards. Wide receivers Jabar Gaffney and Reche Caldwell combined for eight catches, 175 yards and three scores. Like Grossman, the electrifying Gaffney is a freshman. Caldwell is a sophomore. Tailback Earnest Graham, who rushed for a conference title game-record 169 yards on 19 carries, is a sophomore as well.

It's one thing for youth to be served. Spurrier has made sure all season that it is serviceable, too, and that bodes well for the Gators' future.

"I don't really like to talk too much about how young we are, because it just becomes an excuse if you don't win," Spurrier said. "But with this bunch, we should compete to be back here next year. We play a lot of people and get them game experience. We should be in the (SEC championship) chase for a few years, I would say."

As is his habit, Spurrier annually sets the bar for his team only as high as the conference title. By this time next year, however, the Gators will have seriously underachieved if they are not a part of the BCS title pursuit. Sure, take them out of The Swamp, and the Gators are occasionally like crocs out of water. They are susceptible at times to losing in such way stations as Starkville and Baton Rouge and some of their defeats are entirely inexplicable.

But unless Grossman severely backslides, or the wide receiver tandem of Gaffney and Caldwell develops a terminal case of the dropsies, SEC defensive coordinators will suffer some sleepless nights in '01. Grossman wasn't even the starting quarterback when Florida opened its summer camp. Booted off the team a year ago, Gaffney, whose father played in the NFL as will he someday, didn't start until the sixth game of the year. Caldwell wasn't a full-time starter till the second half of the season.

Yet the fleet Gaffney established a national record for the most receiving yards by a freshman and he and Caldwell led the nation in receiving yards by a wideout tandem.

"But it all starts with the trigger man," Caldwell said. "And he was red-hot tonight."

Doug Johnson, the former Gators quarterback who will start his first NFL game on Sunday afternoon here for the Atlanta Falcons, was on the Florida sideline all night. And he might have been only the second-best Gators quarterback there.

Not blessed with great arm strength, Grossman nonetheless found the small areas in the "cover three" zone Auburn employed most of the game. He has a very quick release and that was evident all evening.

His first touchdown pass, a 10-yarder on the Gators' opening possession, got to Caldwell despite bracket coverage. His second, a 66-yard pass to Caldwell, was dropped nicely into the Tigers' umbrella coverage. A 27-yarder to Gaffney in the second quarter found the receiver in stride on a route up the right seam. And the 12-yarder to Brian Haugabrook was zipped in front of a nickel defender and under duress.

One NFC college scouting director who was in attendance assessed that Grossman lacks some velocity but noted that his accuracy and the uncanny ability of Spurrier to call plays that afford the wide receivers yawningly open spaces make the Gators "almost impossible" to defend.

"At one point, we just decided, 'Well, you can't blitz this guy,' because he gets the ball out before you can pressure him," said Auburn cornerback Larry Casher. "We maybe tried (to blitz) three or four times, tops, and he picked up every one of them."

After the first three series, the Tigers opted for softer zones and Spurrier adjusted by having the ball slipped off to Graham on delays and draw plays. He seemed, as usual, to have an answer for virtually every defensive front. And while the Tigers struggled to stem the tide, the offense did not help the cause with three turnovers in the first 19 minutes, all converted into touchdowns. Two of the takeaways came on fumble recoveries by weakside linebackers and the third was a "red zone" interception by corner Lito Sheppard.

A do-it-all performer with great hands, so good that Spurrier has used him on offense at times this year, Sheppard is a prime example of the Florida depth. He is an incredible cover defender but he didn't even get onto the field for three series because Spurrier rotated his corners.

"It's a luxury having so many guys who can contribute for you," said defensive coordinator Jon Hoke. "We want to give as many guys as we can a chance to play."

Outside of Warren, the Gators' front seven is not as solid as in years past, but it crowded most of the interior gaps and forced Auburn star tailback Rudi Johnson into one of his poorest games in an otherwise tremendous season. Johnson finished with only 59 yards on 17 rushes. The biggest offensive presence of the evening for Auburn was fullback Heath Evans, who posted 114 yards combined rushing and receiving.

Amazing, the tough-running fullback had just 254 total yards during the season. His play, and the fact he weighs in at 250 pounds, sent a few NFL scouts scrambling for information on him. Most of the night, however, it was the Auburn defense that was scrambling.

"And most times," acknowledged cornerback Rodney Crayton, "we couldn't catch up."

Last Updated November 19, 2006