LSU’s win brings some normal senselessness to this abnormal college football season
It starred just two people in visiting white uniforms, a Louisianian in No. 38 named Zach Von Rosenberg, who performed the peculiar yet vital American sports task of holder, and a Texan in No. 36 named Cade York, swinging his considerable right leg hard enough to make his left arm look primed to exit socket. They operated from a green sliver of field, and not just any green sliver of field but the top rung of the midfield snout of the Florida Gator logo. In the background of the photo stood a line of vaguely discernible humans wearing home blue, with one holding a sign that might make you say, No way.
“DON’T FLINCH,” it read in the fog, as if some vanguard entry in the ancient art of place kicker harassment.
In a pandemic season of peculiar senselessness, LSU vs. Florida, No. 6 in the College Football Playoff rankings, on Saturday night offered the gift of the kind of normal-year senselessness we have come to relish from our collegiate football. LSU’s 37-34 win became that occasional game that defies all known reality, a game that even managed to hinge on a Florida unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty for the post-play hurling of an LSU player’s shoe. As York boomed that 57-yard field goal into stadium lights made splotchy by the fog with 27 seconds left, a brown dot amid a half-blinding white, it reverberated well beyond Gainesville as these things so crazily do.
It went out to the College Football Playoff committee room in Texas, where the math just grew simpler without Florida (8-2) in the playoff equation. It went up to Columbus, Ohio, where the path just grew simpler with Florida no longer joining those nibbling at No. 4 Ohio State (5-0). Maybe it even went clear to Los Angeles, where Southern California (5-0) reached a faint playoff argument through its latest elusion of a last-minute thicket, its 43-38 win in an empty Rose Bowl against UCLA.
And of course, it ricocheted all through Louisiana, which has had a dour year following LSU, a severe hangover from a championship year, a 3-5 record before Saturday night and various scandals from mild to disturbing. Now it had the CPR of hope for the future, all of which forced a quintessential Louisianian, 31-year-old radio host and former LSU lineman T-Bob Hebert, into a cornucopia of CAPS LOCK and punctuation.
“What a g—–n legend!!!” Hebert tweeted at 11:58 p.m. on Saturday. “Literally the entire mental health of the state of Louisiana rode on this kick and @YorkCade stepped and made it happen FROM 57 YARDS!!!”
The CAPS LOCK now firmly engaged, he continued: “CAN YOU IMAGINE KICKING THE GW KICK FROM THE OPPONENTS LOGO?!?!?!”
For those scoring at home, that’s 12 capitalized words, one capitalized abbreviation for “game-winning,” three question marks and six exclamation points. That’s also a one-tweet expression of the lunacies so many of us hold dear, from the emotional sway that stems from a college team to how that sway can rely upon a 6-foot-1, 198-pound kicker, plus the 6-foot-5, 245-pound punter holding for him.
York hails from Prosper, from along the north edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. He played both high school place kicker and soccer defender, a combo with a plucky variety. Those geeks who rummage around lists of place kicker prospects could have found his name way, way up on the kicker lists of 2018. He seems to have committed to LSU on the spot in May 2018 after a shared LSU-Tulane camp. He joined the Tig-ahs in time for a 2019 freshman season spent in rarefied busyness for a kicker, what with Joe Burrow throwing all those preposterous darts on the offense, so York made 89 of 93 point-afters — good grief, that 93 — and 21 of 27 field goals and scored 152 points, second behind only Wisconsin running back Jonathan Taylor and his 156.
Now York’s a sophomore, and he said on a video news conference Saturday night: “I’m a lot more confident with myself. Basically, every kick they put me out for, I know I can make it.”
Of all the things to remind us of all the normal things, this one came from atop the head of a Gator. “The best Florida team that we have faced,” as LSU Coach Ed Orgeron called it, had gone spiraling into an evening of possible overconfidence and definite turnovers, plus Marco Wilson’s throwing of Kole Taylor’s shoe.
Six plays after that misadventure, LSU had not gotten as close as it wished, so Orgeron had gone to special teams coordinator Greg McMahon, while not going to York. “I didn’t want to mess him up,” Orgeron would say. “Just let him go. But, you know, I talked to Mac. ‘What do you think?’ [He] said, ‘We’re gon’ make it.’ ” Von Rosenberg knelt at the Florida 47-yard line, amid the Gator’s snout. York stood back at midfield in waiting, along the orange top for the Gator’s head. The angry Gator eye scowled from three yards behind York, with the teeth off to the right. In this cultural craziness, the season landscape would change in the way season landscapes do in this madcap sport: on the fleeting matters of the young.
“For me,” York would explain, “kicking field goals isn’t aiming at the upright, it’s aiming down a line and finding a spot. So, just, I know where the uprights are, find a spot and aim toward that. It’s not like it was completely, like, white, and I couldn’t see the uprights. I could see them faintly. It was more I just couldn’t see the ball flying the whole way, but I just picked a spot and trusted it and it worked out.”
He said: “I don’t think about getting iced. I don’t think about, ‘What would happen if I miss?’ I only think about, ‘What happens if I make it?’ And what I was thinking about before the kick was, ‘Run down the field doing the Gator chomp.’ So got to do that.”
Twenty-three seconds later at the closing, Florida would miss its own 51-yard field goal, and Hebert would lock his caps. York would say, “And I want to thank the offense and Coach O for putting me in a place to probably have one of the top three moments of my football career.” A photographer would relish a mighty photo. The top of York’s LSU bio would gain a soaring new photo. And the rest of us would get a familiar turn of what, through 151 years of this nuttiness, has breathed as both normal and crazy.
