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January 4th, 2006
Rose Bowl - Texas 41 ... USC 38
By Matthew Zemek
In a once-in-a-lifetime national championship game, Vince Young became a once-in-a-lifetime college football legend.
Of all the ways to put the 2006 Rose Bowl into perspective, that is the foremost statement one can make after seeing a game from the gods, and a Texas football hero for the ages.
Understand this: in contemporary American life, there exists a widespread and unwelcome tendency to view contemporary sporting events more favorably than great sports moments from the past. Every remotely close or exciting championship game is viewed as an instant classic. Every new college football powerhouse is viewed as the best team of all time. Events that happened more than ten to fifteen years ago (in other words, the 1980s or earlier) are forgotten and relegated to the trash bin of history. This inclination to disregard the past, and ignore over 100 years of college football history, is shameful.
Some examples: the 2003 Oklahoma Sooners were once viewed as one of the greatest college football teams of all time. Then they lost the Big XII title game to Kansas State. Some might view the 2003 Fiesta Bowl as the greatest college football game ever. True, that game was theatrical and dramatic, but far better punch-counterpunch football games have been played through the years. And ESPN joined the act the past week with its stupid polls involving the greatest college football teams of all time. Great teams such as the 1972 USC Trojans and the 1945 Army squad weren't included on the short list. Memories are short in America today, but college football is a sport where history looms large, and never larger than in the Rose Bowl, the great old stadium in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains.
And so it must be said: if a game and a player are going to make a legendary mark on college football, the Granddaddy demands only the very best. Close games aren't great just because they're close. Greater-than-great players don't just win games, they win games by dominating and seizing the spotlight in unforgettable ways.
On January 4, 2006, the Texas Longhorns and USC Trojans didn't just play a close game; they staged a classic that was worthy of the overwhelming, even suffocating, hype. And amidst the many football players who fashioned remarkable and dazzling plays, Vince Young became the biggest man on the field. If you saw what VY did to win Texas' 800th game and its first national title since 1969, no words could possibly do justice to the mastery, magic and magnitude of No. 10's performance. If you didn't see Vince Young's heroics in Pasadena--and you care about college football--get a game tape from someone... for any price. Why? Because in a time when hyperbole comes easily, and exaggeration is so ridiculously commonplace, it is entirely fair and legitimate to say the following: Vince Young is easily the greatest single player in the history of the Rose Bowl (a mouthful of a statement in its own right), and likely the owner of the greatest single-game performance in the 137-year history of Division I-A college football.
To be fair to the men whose names belong to the past--Red Grange and Anthony Davis; Archie Griffin and Tommie Frazier; Ron Vander Kelen and Tom Clements, among hundreds of others--the college football community must not forget those who established a name for this sport and then sustained it over the long march of time. But in the final game of the 2005 college football season, a long way from 1869 and that first game between Rutgers and Princeton, it is hard to argue with the singlehanded brilliance and indomitable will of Texas' swashbuckling quarterback. VY's performance was so good that a Young man seemed to eclipse old legends with each yard he gained, each USC tackler he shook off. And if the raw quality of his effort wasn't awesome enough, consider the more cosmic connections involved in Vince Young's triumph over Troy. Yes, as good as the merits of your effort might be, you need a touch of the poetic and the amazing to have a game better than any other college football player who has ever lived, and VY has those cosmic kinds of connections.
Consider: this now makes two straight Rose Bowls that VY has almost singlehandedly won. Okay, maybe that doesn't blow you away. But we're just warming up here.
Try this on for size: Vince Young wound up scoring the winning touchdown near the same pylon of the same end zone at the same south end of the Rose Bowl stadium where he scored his final (and go-ahead) touchdown against Michigan the year before. What's more is that Young scored in much the same fashion as he did against the Wolverines: he dropped back to pass, then saw the play break down, then turned to his right while a number of defensive linemen desperately pawed at his feet, and then bolted to paydirt inside the pylon. When one man destroys two Rose Bowl opponents in the same way, with the same level of astonishing ease, on the same spot on the field, in two consecutive years, you realize just how great Vince Young is. For two full years now, defensive coordinators have tried to scheme, plan and adjust to stop him. They've failed. They've failed not because their scheme is bad or their concept is poor. They've failed because Vince Young has proven to be above and beyond the ability of defenses to stop him, especially late in games when opposing defenses are tired. It's just that simple. When one man looms that large in the Granddaddy in consecutive years, capping a national championship season with a jawdropping peformance against a celebrated defending champ that didn't play poorly, hyperbole turns into honest, dead-on analysis: Vince Young played the greatest game ever in college football history.
Still not con-Vinced? Fine. This is a weighty historical argument that demands a lot of proof. Here's more evidence:
Matt Leinart entered this game with a chance to win three national titles (yes, LSU, you shared one of them) and become, arguably, the greatest quarterback in college football history (after all, how many quarterbacks could have shared that distinction?). Moreover, Leinart played a second half befitting a legend after a shaky first half in which he threw one pick and nearly had a few other balls intercepted. Yes, in that second half, Leinart threw the ball better than he ever has in his storied USC career, repeatedly hitting Dwayne Jarrett (who stepped up admirably after an inconsistent regular season) to complement LenDale White's awesome power running. Leinart entered the game as a legend, and played like a college football immortal throughout a glorious second half.
And Vince Young easily dwarfed anything and everything Matt Leinart did.
While USC had multiple heroes, and while Texas' gutsy, gritty defense had to make an unforgettable 4th and short stand with 2:09 left to give VY his final chance at glory, history will rightly regard this game as the story of how one man wouldn't let his team lose. That man was not Leinart, who refused to bow to Notre Dame in college football's other legendary contest from this now-completed season. No, that man was Vince Young, the non-Heisman winner who outdueled the two trophy-holders on the opposite side of the field. It wasn't that Leinart played poorly, and it wasn't as though Bush didn't wow the throng of nearly 94,000 with his spectacular touchdown run in the fourth quarter. No, while USC's legends played really well, Vince Young played on another planet.
From every conceivable angle, from every legitimate historical perspective, VY's masterpiece in the 2006 Rose Bowl really does hold up under scrutiny as the greatest single-game college football performance of all time. And as a result of Young's singular display of gridiron heroism, Mack Brown and the Texas Longhorns are now national champions for the first time since the Darrell Royal era.
:mj14:
January 4th, 2006
Rose Bowl - Texas 41 ... USC 38
By Matthew Zemek
In a once-in-a-lifetime national championship game, Vince Young became a once-in-a-lifetime college football legend.
Of all the ways to put the 2006 Rose Bowl into perspective, that is the foremost statement one can make after seeing a game from the gods, and a Texas football hero for the ages.
Understand this: in contemporary American life, there exists a widespread and unwelcome tendency to view contemporary sporting events more favorably than great sports moments from the past. Every remotely close or exciting championship game is viewed as an instant classic. Every new college football powerhouse is viewed as the best team of all time. Events that happened more than ten to fifteen years ago (in other words, the 1980s or earlier) are forgotten and relegated to the trash bin of history. This inclination to disregard the past, and ignore over 100 years of college football history, is shameful.
Some examples: the 2003 Oklahoma Sooners were once viewed as one of the greatest college football teams of all time. Then they lost the Big XII title game to Kansas State. Some might view the 2003 Fiesta Bowl as the greatest college football game ever. True, that game was theatrical and dramatic, but far better punch-counterpunch football games have been played through the years. And ESPN joined the act the past week with its stupid polls involving the greatest college football teams of all time. Great teams such as the 1972 USC Trojans and the 1945 Army squad weren't included on the short list. Memories are short in America today, but college football is a sport where history looms large, and never larger than in the Rose Bowl, the great old stadium in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains.
And so it must be said: if a game and a player are going to make a legendary mark on college football, the Granddaddy demands only the very best. Close games aren't great just because they're close. Greater-than-great players don't just win games, they win games by dominating and seizing the spotlight in unforgettable ways.
On January 4, 2006, the Texas Longhorns and USC Trojans didn't just play a close game; they staged a classic that was worthy of the overwhelming, even suffocating, hype. And amidst the many football players who fashioned remarkable and dazzling plays, Vince Young became the biggest man on the field. If you saw what VY did to win Texas' 800th game and its first national title since 1969, no words could possibly do justice to the mastery, magic and magnitude of No. 10's performance. If you didn't see Vince Young's heroics in Pasadena--and you care about college football--get a game tape from someone... for any price. Why? Because in a time when hyperbole comes easily, and exaggeration is so ridiculously commonplace, it is entirely fair and legitimate to say the following: Vince Young is easily the greatest single player in the history of the Rose Bowl (a mouthful of a statement in its own right), and likely the owner of the greatest single-game performance in the 137-year history of Division I-A college football.
To be fair to the men whose names belong to the past--Red Grange and Anthony Davis; Archie Griffin and Tommie Frazier; Ron Vander Kelen and Tom Clements, among hundreds of others--the college football community must not forget those who established a name for this sport and then sustained it over the long march of time. But in the final game of the 2005 college football season, a long way from 1869 and that first game between Rutgers and Princeton, it is hard to argue with the singlehanded brilliance and indomitable will of Texas' swashbuckling quarterback. VY's performance was so good that a Young man seemed to eclipse old legends with each yard he gained, each USC tackler he shook off. And if the raw quality of his effort wasn't awesome enough, consider the more cosmic connections involved in Vince Young's triumph over Troy. Yes, as good as the merits of your effort might be, you need a touch of the poetic and the amazing to have a game better than any other college football player who has ever lived, and VY has those cosmic kinds of connections.
Consider: this now makes two straight Rose Bowls that VY has almost singlehandedly won. Okay, maybe that doesn't blow you away. But we're just warming up here.
Try this on for size: Vince Young wound up scoring the winning touchdown near the same pylon of the same end zone at the same south end of the Rose Bowl stadium where he scored his final (and go-ahead) touchdown against Michigan the year before. What's more is that Young scored in much the same fashion as he did against the Wolverines: he dropped back to pass, then saw the play break down, then turned to his right while a number of defensive linemen desperately pawed at his feet, and then bolted to paydirt inside the pylon. When one man destroys two Rose Bowl opponents in the same way, with the same level of astonishing ease, on the same spot on the field, in two consecutive years, you realize just how great Vince Young is. For two full years now, defensive coordinators have tried to scheme, plan and adjust to stop him. They've failed. They've failed not because their scheme is bad or their concept is poor. They've failed because Vince Young has proven to be above and beyond the ability of defenses to stop him, especially late in games when opposing defenses are tired. It's just that simple. When one man looms that large in the Granddaddy in consecutive years, capping a national championship season with a jawdropping peformance against a celebrated defending champ that didn't play poorly, hyperbole turns into honest, dead-on analysis: Vince Young played the greatest game ever in college football history.
Still not con-Vinced? Fine. This is a weighty historical argument that demands a lot of proof. Here's more evidence:
Matt Leinart entered this game with a chance to win three national titles (yes, LSU, you shared one of them) and become, arguably, the greatest quarterback in college football history (after all, how many quarterbacks could have shared that distinction?). Moreover, Leinart played a second half befitting a legend after a shaky first half in which he threw one pick and nearly had a few other balls intercepted. Yes, in that second half, Leinart threw the ball better than he ever has in his storied USC career, repeatedly hitting Dwayne Jarrett (who stepped up admirably after an inconsistent regular season) to complement LenDale White's awesome power running. Leinart entered the game as a legend, and played like a college football immortal throughout a glorious second half.
And Vince Young easily dwarfed anything and everything Matt Leinart did.
While USC had multiple heroes, and while Texas' gutsy, gritty defense had to make an unforgettable 4th and short stand with 2:09 left to give VY his final chance at glory, history will rightly regard this game as the story of how one man wouldn't let his team lose. That man was not Leinart, who refused to bow to Notre Dame in college football's other legendary contest from this now-completed season. No, that man was Vince Young, the non-Heisman winner who outdueled the two trophy-holders on the opposite side of the field. It wasn't that Leinart played poorly, and it wasn't as though Bush didn't wow the throng of nearly 94,000 with his spectacular touchdown run in the fourth quarter. No, while USC's legends played really well, Vince Young played on another planet.
From every conceivable angle, from every legitimate historical perspective, VY's masterpiece in the 2006 Rose Bowl really does hold up under scrutiny as the greatest single-game college football performance of all time. And as a result of Young's singular display of gridiron heroism, Mack Brown and the Texas Longhorns are now national champions for the first time since the Darrell Royal era.
:mj14:
