by Tim Tebow
It might have only lasted for forty-five minutes or an hour, but those workouts with Coach Mick were exhausting. One of the things he loved to do was have me squat with my knees at ninety degrees, my thighs parallel to the floor and my back against the wall. He would then start to stack forty-five-pound plates and sandbags on my thighs and yell, “Don’t you move! Hold it! Hold it! I’ll tell you when we’re done!” I would hold it until my body was shaking and on the verge of collapse, and he’d then—usually—release me.
Other exercises, he would have me do at least fifty repetitions. For instance, he’d put me on the leg- or bench-press station, and then he’d pick a weight slightly lower than my “max,” the maximum weight that I could lift. I’d lift it as many times as I could—often seven, based on his starting weight. Once my arms or legs were shaking and I couldn’t raise the bar again, he’d take the weight from me and put it back on the rack. Then he’d pick a weight that was slightly less, and I’d pick up with the exercise where I left off: eight, nine, and so on. Once I failed at that weight, he’d take it from me and lower the weight, and we’d pick up again, continuing that process of changing and lowering weights until we reached fifty repetitions. Then he’d take me to the next exercise, for fifty repetitions of that, in a similar fashion of lowering the weights when I reached exhaustion on each one. By the time we’d finish the seated bench press, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to feel my arms or hands. I know what you have to be thinking—about Coach Mick. About me.
We’d often do several exercises, such as seated rows, pull ups with weight around my waist, abdominal exercises that we took straight from some of those done by Sylvester Stallone in Rocky IV, and a seated bench press to work my shoulders, and he always loved to finish with the leg press. He saved the hardest for last.
The whole routine was as much for improving my mental strength as it was for increasing my physical strength. It built up a lot of confidence in me, but Coach Mick didn’t do it with many guys, because some guys would end up quitting in the process, and he knew that wouldn’t help their confidence at all. Actually he was afraid that it might dampen it. The Pounceys, Maurkice and Mike, were both good at those workouts as well. Not many others did them. Coach Mick’s workouts were based on triggering the sympathetic nervous system—I can vouch for that; there was always a definite moment of “fight or flight” when working out with Coach Mick.
After a Friday workout like that, I wouldn’t be able to walk without a limp until at least Sunday. That’s why we couldn’t do those kinds of workouts during the season; there never was enough recovery time available before we had to be back on the practice field or in a game.
Still it wasn’t all work.
During that off-season, I was working on statistics homework in the academic center, when a car pulled up right as I was leaving the building. Phil Trautwein was driving, and Butchie Rowley, David Nelson, and another friend were all there. They told me to jump in, because they were headed to a little place in Gainesville to see Kenny Chesney. I didn’t understand why they were coming by to grab me, when they explained that the place only seated about two hundred people—it was a private concert. And since they didn’t have tickets, they figured having a quarterback with them was their best chance to get in.
I grew up a pretty big country-music fan, especially in high school. I just really liked it because the lyrics tell stories and I felt it was a lot more real than some other types of music. Obviously it’s got its stereotypes about dogs, trucks, beer, and kissing your cousin, but I like the way it sounds. I actually got my dad into it. I put a bunch of songs on my dad’s iPod and he listened to them on the way to the Philippines. When he returned, he said his favorites were George Strait, Brad Paisley, and Kenny Chesney. Not a bad trio.
I thought the effort was futile; I didn’t think there was a chance we’d get in. Sure enough, we were outside, milling around, unable to get in. After a few moments, a security guard recognized me and said, “Go Gators,” and about thirty minutes later, he brought out one of Kenny Chesney’s managers and the head of his security. They said Kenny would love for us to come on his bus and chat for a few minutes. The kicker? I could only pick one friend to come. Not a good scene, since they were the ones who initiated the trip. Of course, they started arguing and arguing, and we never could resolve it. Finally, we drove the head of security crazy, so he told us all to come to the bus.
After chatting with Kenny for a few minutes—he’s so cool that you’d never know he’s a Tennessee fan—we then watched his show for about an hour off to the side, before he decided that he would bring me up onstage and Butchie followed.
We ended up on stage, Kenny asked me to say a few words, and then asked if we knew “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.” I’m not a singer, so more than anything I did the Gator chomp a few times and swayed side to side. By the end, Kenny put on a UF football helmet; he caught some grief back home for that, but, hey, sooner or later we all end up as Gator fans, right?
Our first game of the season was against Western Kentucky, and for that entire week I was pumped, since it would be my first game as a starter. That moment of coming to the Swamp as the starting quarterback was something I’d looked forward to all off-season—not to mention my whole life.
Things went pretty well, considering. We hit some good passes, made some good runs, and played how we needed to against a team that was clearly overmatched. We didn’t take them lightly, though. We competed every down and played hard, and as a result, we won my first start and the first start for a few others as well. With our offense I ended up throwing for exactly three hundred yards. When you play a team like that, you expect them to be scrappy since they may not be as athletically talented. That team, surprisingly, was one of the dirtiest teams I’ve faced in my career. More than a few times it seemed that they were trying to get their fingers through my face mask while we were in a pile. The only logical reason, it seemed to me, was to get to one of my eyes. Just a guess.
Anyway, Coach pulled me in the fourth quarter, and Cam Newton finished the game, did a solid job, and scored our last touchdown.
That game was unique for another reason: it was called because of lightning midway through the fourth quarter. Our 49–3 lead that we held at the time instantly became the final score.
I know people often criticized the strength (or lack of perceived strength) of our out-of-conference schedule, but our next opponent, Troy, had a solid team. We knew we needed to start out with great intensity and try to get up on them right away by playing well and hard. With their version of the spread offense, that team can put up a lot of points on you before you know it. We started well with intensity and determination and ended up scoring every time we had the ball in the first half, building a lead of 49–7 by halftime. They were playing a soft cover-two defense and letting our receivers get a clean release off the line of scrimmage without bumping them too much, so we were able to take advantage of our “vertical” passing attack by completing deep passes downfield, or in the football vernacular “over the top” of the defense.
In the second half we came out totally unfocused, and they began to chip into our lead. The first-half score and seeing what we were able to do, instead of creating a hunger for us to continue, apparently caused us to lose a bit of our intensity. After Troy quickly scored seventeen unanswered points to start the half, we finally regrouped and regained our focus enough to fend them off, 59–31.
That next week in practice we definitely had a number of things we needed to improve on, especially when it came to making midgame adjustments and learning to not just “pull up” in the middle of the game. This was where the lack of intensity that I’d been so worried about during spring practice was showing itself. With the Tennessee game at home looming large in front of us that week, we had to learn how to finish games and cut down on our penalties.
Though I’d started for the previous two weeks, that did little to stop the butterflies in my stomach as we prepared to take
the field against Tennessee. The Swamp was going crazy—it felt like the fans didn’t let up from pregame until the game was finally finished—thank goodness. We needed every one of them.
The Vols got the ball first, but our defense stopped them on three plays. They punted to us, and Brandon James was electrifying as he ran the punt back eighty-three yards for a touchdown. The whole stadium was shaking.
It was a lead we would never relinquish. We raced out to a 28–13 halftime lead as I took a shot downfield and hit “Coop” (Riley Cooper) for a touchdown. We ended up doing a lot of different things, spreading them out, and running bootlegs. We passed for a second touchdown, and I ran for one before halftime. To start the second half, we received the opening kickoff and got a great drive going. We marched the ball down the field, deep into their territory, and hoped to put the game away with a speed post down the middle of the field to Coop.
Tennessee’s freshman cornerback, Eric Berry, was covering Coop, and Riley was supposed to come in just underneath him. Whatever he did, Coop needed to ensure that he came in flatter than Berry—that is, closer to me and in front of Eric Berry. Riley was young and didn’t run the route just right, and I was young and threw it anyway—when I should not have. Then the even-younger Eric Berry came in underneath Coop and picked it. I did all I could to run him down, but I couldn’t catch him. Instead I watched his back as he put distance between us, taking it ninety-three yards for a touchdown to put them back into the game. I still remember the play call: “Far Trio Left 60 Houston”—some things you just never forget.
I was frustrated with the interception and frustrated that I didn’t catch him. And I took pride in running well for a big guy. I didn’t have the same straight-ahead speed, but I have good agility and quickness.During my time at Florida, there were very few guys I couldn’t run with. Each year, somebody would challenge a new guy to race me in quickness agility drills—guys like Ahmad Black, David Nelson, and Aaron Hernandez. Aaron was so mad when we raced that year—his freshman year, and my sophomore year. He was sure I couldn’t beat him even once. I did. Then I beat him again. And again. We raced over and over, finally quitting with my holding a 34–2 lead in our races. Don’t get me wrong—I never broke into the top group with guys like Joe Haden, Percy Harvin, Chris Rainey, and Jeff Demps. But I could run a bit, which was part of why I was annoyed with Berry’s touchdown.
It was now 28–20, and they forced us to punt. In their series, their running back, Arian Foster, never got a clean handoff from Tennessee quarterback Erik Ainge, resulting in a fumble. Dustin Doe, one of our linebackers, picked it up in full stride and took it all the way back to the house. With that touchdown, we were up fifteen, and from that point, we proceeded to bury them.
Early in the fourth quarter I hit one of our wideouts, Louis Murphy, on a deep pass, and we scored moments later, this time on the old familiar play: 97 Q Power, our name for a quarterback run up the middle. We ended up changing that name because I’d audibled to it so often, shouting, “Power Power,” that people finally figured out what it was. We switched it up and started calling it “Mickey,” as a tribute to Coach Mick, who was always so focused on developing power in us.
By the end of the game, we’d gained over five hundred yards of offense on our way to an unexpectedly lopsided 59–20 win. Coach Meyer was proud of us; we kept competing all game long, and guys kept stepping up to make plays when we needed them. To win my first SEC start at quarterback gave me a huge sense of place and purpose. It was a good Tennessee team that we demolished. Thanks to the guys up front on the line and those guys at the receiving end of passes, I ended up with four touchdowns (two in the air and two on the ground). And thanks again to our receivers’ catching skills and running with the ball after the catch abilities, we averaged almost twenty yards per completion. Personally, it felt really good, but what felt better was that we’d done it together. It had been a team effort—truly—and a huge win for us.
I was simply relieved that we’d won such a big game and was relaxing with my family that evening when the guys on ESPN started talking about me as a Heisman candidate. Up until then, I was simply thinking about starting and winning our games. It was fun to hear, but I quickly realized that I didn’t have time to focus on it—I needed to get back to focusing on preparing to start and our piling up wins.
The good feelings lasted one more week, but we could feel that things weren’t exactly right, not yet where they needed to be, even in a win. We beat Ole Miss on the road, in my first start away from the Swamp. We knew they had a pretty good team and they were well coached, but some people still took them too lightly, to the frustration of many of us. We got a lead and played pretty well, but there was an undercurrent of things to come in that game.
I ended up with some surprisingly big numbers for the game, throwing for over 250 yards and rushing 27 times for 168 yards, with two touchdowns passing and two rushing. As a result, I was named the SEC Offensive Player of the Week for the second time that year after our 30–24 win, but the biggest takeaway from that game was how very sore I was following the game. From around the four-minute mark of time remaining in the game, I may have carried the ball every single time as we ran out the clock and kept the ball away from Ole Miss.
I’m not sure why it unfolded that way in 2007, with my running as much as I did, as we had some very talented running backs, but for some reason we struggled to develop a rhythm with our running game, trying to incorporate all our backs into the game.
With that win, we cut Mississippi’s all-time series lead over us to one, and with SEC scheduling, we were going to be able to tie the all-time series up with them the next season in Gainesville. To be honest, I don’t think any of us thought about that at the time, but one thing is for sure: we weren’t paying any attention to Auburn just one week away.
Honestly, Auburn didn’t seem like a particularly good team in 2007. They have had great teams before and after, and Auburn and Florida have been known to play some of the most dramatic football games in SEC history. Highlights include Kerwin Bell’s leading Florida to eighteen fourth-quarter points to erase a seventeen-point deficit and beat unbeaten number four Auburn, 18–17, in 1986 (note: every Gator fan in the western hemisphere claims to have been at Florida Field for that game—just ask one), or Steve Spurrier clinching the Heisman Trophy with a field goal to beat Auburn in 1966, and plenty of other Auburn–Florida moments as well.
Auburn had started the season ranked as high as number fourteen but lost two early games at home, to Mississippi State and South Florida, and hadn’t looked good in the process. However, for the second year in a row against Auburn, right off the bat things didn’t go our way. I think we all underestimated them, both coaches and players.
Auburn clearly had more momentum and played with more passion as the game began. They shut us down early. We went three and out on our first possession. In the meantime, they were slowly and methodically moving the ball against our defense. Every time they got the ball, they were holding it for five to seven minutes, chalking up first downs and maintaining possession as they ran the clock down. We weren’t taking advantage of our possessions, and they were running the ball trying to shorten the game. They scored twice in the first half, and it was 14–0 at the half.
We tried to rally the troops in the locker room and came back out after the half, and on the first drive we hit a deep post down to the goal line. Down, 14–0, we really needed a touchdown, but Auburn’s defense and their defensive coordinator, Will Muschamp—who grew up in Gainesville—rose to the challenge. The first play was 97 Power . . . and a linebacker came straight through and blew me up in the hole. No gain. We couldn’t score on second or third down, either, and had to kick a field goal.
Looking back, I think the reason we lost that game was because we didn’t put that ball in the end zone to score that first touchdown right after we came out in the second half. It would have been 14–7 and we’d have been right in it while laying claim to that ever s
lippery momentum. Instead, we kept playing from behind, but we did keep playing. Things weren’t going well with our passing game, so they started running me a lot, counter left, counter right. We kept fighting and finally tied it with two touchdowns in the fourth quarter at 17–17.
Our tying touchdown came on an out route that I threw to Cornelius Ingram—whom I played basketball against when I was at Jacksonville Trinity Christian Academy and he was at Hawthorne High School—in the end zone.
With a couple of minutes left in the game, we got the ball in pretty good field position and then called a screen play to Percy. The screen was a good call and Percy tried to turn a good play into a great play as he usually can. But as he was trying to cut to the outside, a defender swiped his leg and tackled him for a seven-yard loss. We were in bad shape, because that hindered our ability to do anything on second and third down. I hit Kestahn Moore on second down, then on third down and long yardage to go, the pass was broken up and we had to punt.
Auburn took the punt and marched the ball down the field and then kicked a game-ending field goal to beat us at home, 20–17.
It was so frustrating because we had the ball with an opportunity to win and I couldn’t get it done. Right or wrong, I put the loss squarely on my shoulders. I’d let everyone down. I felt like that T-leaguer again, wishing I had the ball in my hands one more time at the end of the game to try and make things right for us. It was a tough one to take.
I was praying a lot at different times in that game too. Obviously my earlier point about God’s not necessarily favoring a particular outcome over another would seem clear. I guess it was an answer to prayer. Just not the answer I wanted.