Something to consider RE: playing bama twice.

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Florida’s team, which tasted the bitter herbs of crushing defeat on November 30, 1996, was granted a mulligan 33 days later.

You saw what happened. Spurrier tweaked his system, adopting the shotgun look that he had always been loathe to use against FSU or anyone else. Wuerffel made his own adjustments, which were enhanced by the fact that inside the Superdome, he was playing in a climate-controlled environment more conducive to pitch-and-catch brilliance. The Gators had everything to prove, while Florida State’s coaches and players – despite a fierce dislike of their in-state rival – simply could not summon the same juice the second time around. How could they have been expected to do so? They had already climbed the mountain, already conquered their foremost adversary in a time of test and tension. What was left for them to do? All the eagerness and ambition and energy stood on Florida’s sideline.

The Gators thumped the Seminoles, 52-20. Florida State was humiliated, Bowden made to look like a fool, his defense rendered impotent and his game plan turned into a laughingstock. Florida State received withering scorn in an intensely-focused national spotlight, but the Seminoles had already done the heavy lifting. They won the true test, the game when both the 1996 Florida and Florida State football teams were a mystery to each other. In the rematch, there was no mystery, and the losing team held all the cards, not to mention all the incentive and motivation.

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Now, 15 years later, consider what – exactly – was meaningfully different about THIS rematch in the Superdome, THIS rendezvous after a November showdown? What was different about the LSU-Alabama sequel? What central dynamic from the 1997 Sugar Bowl did NOT exist in the 2012 BCS National Championship Game?

The winner went all-out. The loser didn’t seem to care very much… because, after all, it had already prevailed against the team on the other sideline. The winner positively dominated from the word go. The loser got buried and embarrassed, pounded into submission with haymaker after punishing haymaker. Pundits – enough of them to register, at any rate – were converted and brought around to the view that, yes, this dominant performance of considerable quality (and it WAS a dominating performance of considerable quality, mind you…) was enough to give Alabama the undisputed national title, over and against an LSU squad that merely defeated the Cotton (Arkansas), Rose (Oregon), Orange (West Virginia), and….uhhhhh… the BCS National Championship Game (Alabama) winners.

Florida was voted and honored as the undisputed 1996 national champion of college football within the framework of the Bowl Alliance system. Alabama, at press time, will likely be honored as the undisputed 2011 national champion of college football within the framework of the Bowl Championship Series system

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i hear ya. DId you cick the link? It's pretty damn funny even if you have seen it a million times.

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It isn't easy to beat the same team twice in a season.

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By the way, Tennessee never recovered from that 2001 SECCG. Many credit that game with the beginning of the end of the Vols.

LSU fans better enjoy what they had.

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