Erving Walker rescues Florida with game-tying 30-footer

Even though Florida has a shooting guard who had 24 points and a small forward with a penchant for burying clutch shots, there was no doubt who coach Billy Donovan wanted to have the ball Tuesday trailing by three late in overtime.

That was point guard Erving Walker.

Florida's 5-foot-8 point guard zoomed up-court, pulled up from way beyond the arc to avoid giving Georgia the chance to foul and buried a 30-footer with one second left to force a second overtime. The Gators didn't waste their unexpected new life, pulling away for a comfortable 104-91 victory.

If early upsets against the likes of Central Florida and Jacksonville suggested Florida lacked the consistency to fulfill its preseason hype, the Gators (16-4, 5-1) are finally playing like a team capable of winning the SEC. They've won eight of nine games to take over sole possession of first place in the rugged SEC East.

Walker's overtime heroics were important for his psyche because he had to atone for a pair of missed free throws in the final 35 seconds of regulation that helped spark an improbable Georgia comeback. The Bulldogs rallied from eight points down in the last three minutes of regulation, tying it on a buzzer beater of their own when big man Trey Thompkins banked in a missed shot just before the horn.

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Postmortem: Florida State's first step on the road to defensive redemption

A season in review.

Jimbo Fisher was hired at Florida State to revive a once-explosive offense that had fallen into utter disrepair by the end of 2006. When he finally supplanted Bobby Bowden as head coach three years later, though, Fisher's mandate was on the other side of the ball: The 2009 Seminole D was unrecognizable as a product of longtime, respected Bowden aide Mickey Andrews, falling on its face out of the gate and eventually stumbling in at dead last in the ACC in rushing, pass efficiency and total defense.

FSU gave up at least 26 points in every conference game in '09, and had to be bailed out by repeatedly by the offense in shoot-em-up wins over bottom-dwellers N.C. State (45-42), Wake Forest (41-28) and Maryland (29-26) – all of which put up more than 400 yards total offense – as well as at North Carolina (30-27), where the 'Noles had to rally from a 24-6 hole in the second half. It was the first time a Florida State defense had allowed 30 points per game across an entire season since an 0-11 effort in 1973, three years before Bowden's arrival.

Compared to the rock bottom of Andrews' swan song, the mediocrity of the first season under Mark Stoops was a great leap forward – or backward, if you're thinking along a timeline – especially against the 'Noles' closest annual rivals, where the results weren't so mediocre. In the instate wars, they held Miami to 17 points and Florida to a paltry seven in a pair of satisfying blowouts. Within the Atlantic Division, they shut out Wake Forest and held Boston College, Clemson and Maryland under 20 in FSU wins.

Elsewhere, though, the shootouts persisted, and the offense proved less prolific in keeping pace. Oklahoma knocked FSU off the national radar with a vengeance in September, dropping four touchdown on the Seminoles the first four times it touched the ball in a 47-17 incineration that brought visions of 2009 flooding back. Even on the heels of a subsequent five-game winning streak that eased some of the worst fears, the 'Noles were lit up in losses at the hands of the three most veteran quarterbacks in the ACC: N.C. State's Russell Wilson (247 total yards, 4 touchdowns in a 28-27 upset that put the Wolfpack in the Atlantic Division driver's seat for the last five weeks of the regular season), North Carolina's T.J. Yates (439 yards passing, 3 touchdowns in a 37-35 Tar Heel win) and Virginia Tech's Tyrod Taylor (287 total yards, 4 touchdowns in a 44-33 triumph in the ACC Championship Game). Four times Florida State allowed upward of 20 points, a good rate in the grand scheme, but all four times it went home a loser.

Fortunately for the overarching sense of progress over the next six months, the Chick-Fil-A Bowl win over South Carolina sent FSU into the offseason with probably the most promising defensive effort of the year – a five-turnover, four-sack, 17-point night against a solid veteran quarterback (fourth-year junior Stephen Garcia, making his 31st career start) and his All-America receiver, Alshon Jeffery, that sealed the Seminoles' first 10-win season since 2003. Cornerback Greg Reid knocked out star workhorse Marcus Lattimore on the first series of the game, and went on to justify his five-star recruiting hype as the game's MVP, setting himself up for a more sustained breakout as a junior. Seven other regular defensive starters will be back with him, including top pass-rusher Brandon Jenkins and the other cornerback, Xavier Rhodes, both of whom landed on the All-ACC team prior to the bowl – and two of the three likely new starters in the fall, linebackers Christian Jones and Jeff Luc, were hyped, five-star recruits themselves last year, to say nothing of 2011's incoming superstar-in-waiting, James Wilder Jr.

But it's not like Florida State has ever lacked for talent, or for high expectations as a result. If this group has earned the top-10 projections certain to come their way this summer, it's mainly because they're being compared to their immediate, vastly underachieving predecessors instead of the halcyon headhunters that made top-five finishes routine for more than a decade. With the offense taking significant hits at quarterback and on the offensive line, the old standards will be in force, and it will take another leap forward to meet them.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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FULMER CUPDATE: JANORIS JENKINS POPPED FOR WEED, BCS TITLE IMMINENT

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Welcome back, Greg Mattison: The wreckage of Michigan's defense awaits

The good news for new Michigan defensive coordinator Greg Mattison: He's done this gig before, and well. Mattison spent four years in Ann Arbor under head coaches Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr in the mid-nineties, overseeing a pair of Wolverine defenses that held 19 of 25 opponents to 20 points or less in 1995 and 1996, and didn't allow 30 points even once. After his departure for Notre Dame in 1997, the group he helped develop turned in the best defensive effort in the nation en route to a national championship as upperclassmen.

The bad news: The group he officially inherited today couldn't be a much further cry from the units that produced Sam Sword and Charles Woodson more than a decade ago. In fact, they couldn't be much further from almost any Michigan defense that came before: Each of the last three Wolverine defenses under coordinators Scott Shafer and Greg Robinson since 2008 ranks among the worst in school history, with the attrition-ravaged 2010 unit redefining the local conception of "rock bottom."

After hitting all manner of new lows in Robinson's first year, the '10 Wolverines were in free fall almost from the beginning, eventually finishing dead last in the Big Ten in total defense, scoring defense and pass defense, and near the bottom of the conference in rushing defense, pass efficiency defense and takeaways. They allowed at least 34 points in eight of nine Big Ten games, and went out with a big 52 stamped to their forehead, courtesy of Mississippi State in the Gator Bowl. Nine of 13 opposing offenses racked up at least 435 total yards, including Indiana and Massachusetts. Even if head coach Rich Rodriguez had managed to survive the carnage, Robinson certainly would not have.

At least there's nowhere for Mattison's new charges to go but up, and plenty of reason to expect an uptick with or without the brain transplant on the sideline. In the first case, seven regular starters and 11 of the top 15 tacklers return in the fall, including every member of a beleaguered secondary that was devastated by an apocalyptic plague of attrition and injury before the season even began.

By the end of the year, following yet another season-ending injury to cornerback J.T. Floyd, the rotation on the back end consisted of half a dozen freshmen (Cameron Gordon, Courtney Avery, Ray Vinopal, Thomas Gordon, Carvin Johnson and Terrence Talbott), an overmatched journeyman who spent much of his career at running back (James Rogers) and one walk-on (Jordan Kovacs). None of the above would have seen the field during Mattison's first go-round.

Those growing pains will begin to pay off in 2011, with mainstays Mike Martin and Craig Roh back to anchor the front seven as third-year starters. And if the overall talent level is still well below what you'd generally expect from a Michigan defense, at least the majority of the projected starters this time around were once four-star recruits.

Still, the best thing the Wolverine D will have going for it is Mattison's resumé, which includes successful stops since his first stint in Ann Arbor at Notre Dame, Florida and, since 2008, as defensive coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens, where all three of his defenses finished among the top three in the NFL. He's a "family" hire, a close friend and former colleague of new head coach Brady Hoke, coming aboard to restore the "Michigan Way," or whatever it was that supposedly sent the program tumbling from its usual perch under Rodriguez. The lineup is in no position for anything like an overnight, worst-to-first turnaround, but Mattison can guarantee the faithful this much: It's not going to get any worse.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Clark Kellogg: San Diego State, BYU Prime Examples of 'Equifinality'

Filed under: Duke, Kentucky, North Carolina, FanHouse Exclusive, BYU, San Diego State

NEW YORK -- It's atypical for the premier sporting event on a loaded Wednesday night to be a men's college basketball matchup between San Diego State and BYU. This, however, was the case as the fourth-ranked Aztecs traveled to BYU's Marriott Center to take on the No. 9 Cougars Wednesday.

Prior to the start of the game, I had the chance to speak with Clark Kellogg, the lead college basketball analyst for CBS Sports and ambassador for the inaugural Capital One Cup award, a program which looks to crown the top collegiate program in the country.

Kellogg explained that SDSU and BYU are among the many teams in the country who have proven that success can be found in long-term team-building and not simply in a one-and-done recruiting approach.

"There are a lot of ways to get to a positive result. I think it's called Equifinality," Kellogg told FanHouse. "San Diego State, BYU, Butler, Xavier, Gonzaga ... you can look at a number of programs that may not be a part of power conferences who have shown that they're very competitive on a consistent basis by getting good players who develop and become really good players."

The ascension of BYU's Jimmer Fredette, a front-runner for national player of the year awards, is a perfect example of BYU's ability to compete with major conference teams.

 

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Star Power: Recruiting gurus' track record at the top of the polls, by the numbers

With signing day looming, it's time for the Doc's annual, week-long defense of the recruiting-industrial complex. Part Two: Recruiting rankings at the top of the polls.

College football may not offer the snuggest metaphor for macroeconomics – nowhere else in America are individuals actively prohibited from marketing their skills (or personal property) to would-be buyers – but it does jibe with the growing income gap economists are always talking about. That's true financially, thanks to the BCS, but as ever, it's still in recruiting where the rich get (and stay) richer.

That's not really a revelation, but the numbers throw the cyclical dominance of a handful of recruiting heavyweights into even sharper relief. Since 2006, only 25 different schools have finished in the top 10 of the final Associated Press poll at least once; 15 have finished that high at least twice, accounting for 40 of the 50 top-10 slots in that span. And fully half of those slots – 26 of 50 – have been occupied by one of 10 schools: Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas and USC.

Those 10 also happen to be among the 13 schools – along with Florida State, Miami and Tennessee – that have consistently finished at the top of the recruiting rankings:

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The last two years have been rough for the blue-chip destinations, with USC's multi-pronged descent, Georgia's slide into mediocrity, attrition-ravaged outfits at Michigan and Tennessee joining Florida State and Miami among the ranks of the perennial underachievers and Florida and Texas turning in epic flops last year in the transition from all-time-great quarterbacks to their not-so-great predecessors. USC and Florida State spent the season adjusting to new orders, and Florida, Miami and Michigan are introducing new regimes of their own.

But that still doesn't change the bigger picture: Those 13 schools alone have consistently produced a majority of the top five in the final polls, half of the top 10, at least half of the teams in the BCS and all of the national champions in the BCS era. (With Auburn's triumph – thanks mainly to über recruit Cam Newton, the five-star headliner of a top five class last year – only two of the top dozen recruiting powers have failed to win a BCS championship: Georgia and Michigan. Last year, Oregon was only the third team form outside of the group to even play for a BCS title, joining Virginia Tech in 1999 and Nebraska in 2001, and we might find the '01 Cornhuskers were a pretty highly regarded bunch themselves if those numbers were available.)

You know this already, but in black and white: In any given season, you can count on at least 50 percent of the nation's elite teams on the field coming from the 10 percent that routinely dominate the recruiting rankings. Every year. If n elite class doesn't guarantee a team vaulting to the top of the polls, it still dramatically increases the odds.

As for the other half, chalk it up to a combination of timing and relativity. Eight of the 25 schools with a least one top-10 finish since 2006 – Boston College, Cincinnati, Iowa, Kansas, Louisville, Missouri, Stanford and Utah – have only one, all of them in a one-shot run at the best season at their respective schools in more than a generation, if not ever. (It helps that half of them didn't beat another ranked team on the way to the bowl game.) Among the mediocre recruiters with more than one expedition to the top of the polls, TCU and West Virginia only see one conference rival per year (Utah and Pittsburgh, respectively) that's consistently out-recruited them according to the rankings, and Boise State doesn't see any.

Oregon, Virginia Tech and Wisconsin do, and have made multiple, (albeit sporadic) runs into the elite against outfits that were supposed to possess more talent in their own conferences. As USC, Ohio State and Miami can attest this year, that supposed talent advantage can turn out to be pretty shallow, and sometimes doesn't turn out at all. In the long run, though, when you take all of the numbers into account, it's still a much better bet that it will.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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Postmortem: Nebraska's offense comes full circle

A season in review.

Halloween: Nebraska is 7-1, ranked in the top 10 in both major polls and in the top 20 in total and scoring offense. The Cornhuskers have just easily dispatched undefeated Missouri, 31-17, a week after snapping Oklahoma State's 6-0 start in Stillwater. Both have come on the heels of dominant road blowouts over Washington and Kansas State. The 'Huskers are averaging 38 points on 459 yards per game, making speedy redshirt freshman quarterback Taylor Martinez is one of the breakout stars of the season.

Two months later: Nebraska has closed the year by losing three of its last four, failing to top 20 points in any of them, including a six-point, zero-touchdown effort in a loss at Texas A&M and a seven-point flop against Washington in the Holiday Bowl – a little over three months after throttling the Huskies by five touchdowns in Seattle. In between, the 'Huskers went three-and-out eight times and failed to score at all in the second half of a 23-20 loss to Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship Game. For the year, the offense now comes in 60 yards and a full touchdown below its season averages at Halloween, and has fallen into the bottom half of the Big 12 on both counts. Martinez has failed to run for a touchdown in the last nine games, and snapped a five-game streak without throwing for a score with a second quarter TD in the bowl game, Nebraska's only points in the stunning loss. What happened?

The short answer is that Martinez got hurt, spraining his ankle with the victory in hand against Missouri. Then he got hurt again, injuring his foot early in the debacle at Texas A&M, gamely returning in the second half to no particular end. That was the same night that he incurred the very visible wrath of coach Bo Pelini on the sideline, and the transfer rumors began in earnest amid a sense of general decline. Even with Martinez ostensibly healthy, the embarrassment in the Holiday Bowl was the final sputtering of a team on 'E.'

In the bigger picture, though, the end of 2010 looked an awful lot like the majority of 2009, minus the uplifting bowl redemption. The '09 Cornhuskers were inept enough offensively to lose three games in which the defense allowed fewer than 17 points, including the infamous, 13-12 loss to Texas on the final snap of the Big 12 Championship Game, in which the 'Huskers failed to score a touchdown. Much of that failure was laid at the feet of quarterback Zac Lee, a one-dimensional "manager" type who failed to generate enough of a passing game – or at least enough respect for a hypothetical passing game – to keep defenses from ganging up on the respectable ground attack. The offense finished 11th in the conference in passing and total offense, with an abysmal 105.1 efficiency rating in Big 12 games.

With the added threat of Martinez running out of the shotgun, the 2010 attack was quite a bit better than "respectable" on the ground, as it turned out, softening up secondaries for big gains downfield: Martinez had 150 yards (including a 24-yard touchdown pass) on just seven completions at Washington, 128 yards (including a 79-yard touchdown pass) on just five completions at Kansas State, 116 yards (including a 40-yard touchdown pass) on six completions against Missouri, and 323 yards with five touchdown passes at Oklahoma State. After the injury against Mizzou, though, it was all downhill. Martinez's next start was a lackluster, 20-3 win over North Division whipping boy Kansas, and his last three starts yielded a grand total of 33 points, seven scoreless quarters, a pass efficiency rating well below 100 and a single sustained touchdown drive covering longer than 12 yards. By the Big 12 Championship Game, Martinez looked equally uncomfortable in the pocket (he double-clutched his way into seven sacks at the hands of Oklahoma defenders) and ineffective as a runner, to the point that tailback Rex Burkhead started taking regular Wildcat snaps in the second half – with almost no threat whatsoever to throw – in search of some kind of spark.

It didn't help Martinez's cause that backup Cody Green cameoed with a solid, 10-for-13, two-touchdown effort in a 45-17 rout over Colorado in the regular season finale. But Green didn't see the field as the game plan deteriorated against Oklahoma and was brutal in relief in the Holiday Bowl, completing a paltry 3 of 12 passes. Despite the rumors and apparent clashes with Pelini, there doesn't seem to be any doubt that Martinez is still the starting quarterback as Nebraska embarks on its exodus to the Big Ten. Whether he can still be the electric playmaker that briefly had Big 12 defenses shaking in their cleats in October, on the other hand, will be one of the burning questions of the year.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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