“I see dead people … Walking around like regular people … They don’t even know they’re dead … They’re everywhere.”
In college football’s zombie apocalypse, Tennessee and UCLA are … alive?
Way back then, as huge cellphones roamed the earth, M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” immortalized child actor Haley Joel Osment’s words to Bruce Willis up there (1999), and Tennessee and UCLA appeared in a top three of a football ranking of a very late November (1998), and a scrapheap quarterback from South Dakota via Utah helped an Oklahoma defense claim a surprise national title (2000).
Come Jan. 3, 2001 in a rock-throwing Orange Bowl, Oklahoma led favored Florida State 6-0 after three quarters and won 13-2.
A linebacker (Torrance Marshall) won MVP as should linebackers more often.
Everyone forgot what they saw, except in Oklahoma.
How funky that it would end up being that quarterback, Josh Heupel, the son of a high school principal and a football coach at Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., who by 2022 would yank Tennessee out of a crypt of which it had pretty much paid off its mortgage. Tennessee had come to define forgettable in its 85-88 run across the past 14 seasons of five head coaches who arrived and thudded, arrived and thudded. Butch Jones going 9-4 twice came to seem herculean in a way the expectant locals never could have bad-dreamed. One could fret for an entire generation of Knoxvillian children, who not only knew only a national irre … levance (how dreary) but also had to hear from elders of a bygone relevance (how mortifying).
Now, they’ve just gone to Baton Rouge and put a big hello of 40-13 pelting on LSU, reached 5-0 with Alabama due in next, and so here’s second-year head coach Heupel, 44 years old by now: “Our fan base, can’t say enough about it, phenomenal, driving in, seeing all the orange banging on the bus, getting into the [LSU] stadium, seeing it, you know, everywhere inside of the [LSU] stadium. Appreciate our fan base, man. Our players do, too.”
How recuperative, the banging on buses.
And then, still Heupel, previously at UCF: “Can’t wait for next week’s atmosphere. Expect it to be absolutely electric.”
That references Neyland Stadium, that storied old hulk by the Tennessee River which America might have forgotten it had in its midst. A college football wanderer might have happened in there here and there through the years, including September 1998 for the runaway bedlam of Tennessee upending the University of Florida at Steve Spurrier in overtime, a home coach’s wife exulting to the elevator because a visiting Gator missed a closing field goal. Or September 2017, to witness Georgia Coach Kirby Smart running around rejoicing with ample Bulldog fans after the 41-0 on the scoreboard emptied out everyone else.
Well, five years further into the muck, they’ve up and beaten Florida 38-33 in Knoxville on Sept. 24, causing one rung of fresh hope, and now they’ve mauled LSU to cause still another. The hope traveled to Baton Rouge to the degree that the marvel of a quarterback, Hendon Hooker, told reporters of the fans, “I feel like their presence was definitely the difference in the game.”
Another difference was the pass that made it 20-0 Saturday, Hooker’s 45-yard touchdown to Jalin Hyatt, among the prettiest things anyone ever saw.
Another difference has been Hooker’s touchdowns-to-interceptions ratio across a season and a half since transferring from Virginia Tech — 41-3, also among the prettiest things anyone ever saw.
“They’re on the same page,” Heupel said of his team. “They’re fighting for the same goals. They understand their plans on their unit and compete really hard. They love each other. And they love competing every day, like, last week’s practice, Tuesday and Wednesday, just the way we finished, it’s a fun team to be around the way that they practice.”
“Well,” LSU Coach Brian Kelly began, “that was not what we had planned nor expected,” and no, true, right, people don’t expect 40-13 home losses to Tennessee, not anymore.
Yet now the batty landscape brims with Tennessee Orange but also UCLA Blue, a hue of blue long since also among the prettiest things anyone ever saw. UCLA tore through defending Pac-12 champion Utah 42-32 in the Rose Bowl on Saturday and shone fresh light on the established talents of another quarterback long familiar but finding fresh heights: Dorian Thompson-Robinson. Thompson-Robinson, in a fifth UCLA season, would be the nation’s sixth-highest-rated passer (with Hooker seventh), and he would be the guy who just said to reporters, “We all know the history between UCLA and Utah … ”
Actually, wait, a lot of us know nothing of that history.
Why would we?
For one thing, UCLA had spent the past 16 seasons going 99-99, a startling achievement of mathematics if not necessarily football. For another, UCLA hasn’t turned up in a Rose Bowl since just months before “The Sixth Sense” release date, becoming reputed maybe even for the un-American act of prioritizing academics. How harsh.
Here, then: The past four meetings, Utah had won 48-17, 41-10, 49-3 and 44-24, the last three during the UCLA reign of Chip Kelly, the former Oregon and NFL coach with the fun offenses and the dull quotations. Players “understand that how you train during the week is how you play on Saturday,” Kelly said on Saturday, listeners staying awake through that and other passages.
Listeners include Ben Bolch, the estimable Los Angeles Times writer who pointed out last week that Jake Bobo, the Duke transfer who has caught four touchdown passes the last two games, is not the son of Mike Bobo, the semi-famed former Georgia quarterback and offensive coordinator and former Colorado State head coach. That’s despite the fact that Jake Bobo’s father is named Mike and used to play some quarterback. And that’s despite the impossible fact that the other Mike, now an analyst at Georgia, has five children, one named Jake.
After spending years this century inhabiting bowl games people watch because they aren’t sure what else to do with their time — Las Vegas, Sun, Silicon Valley, Emerald, Eagle Bank, Kraft Fight Hunger, Foster Farms, Cactus — the Bruins look lovely and swell. They stand 6-0 for the first time since 2005 while their adored neighbor Southern California stands 6-0 for the first time since 2006. Now USC heads for Utah while UCLA heads for, wow, Oregon.
“To be honest with you,” the smashing UCLA running back Zach Charbonnet told reporters, “it doesn’t mean [anything] … We’ve got Oregon up next, so we’ve got a little improvement week coming up. We’ve got to improve during that week and then go into Oregon and be ready.”
So while they’re improving, we’re all luxuriating. What a bonanza of colors from east to west, shining through the dirt.
Source: WP
