celticdb15
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The white strong safety from Texas(the scapegoat for the Tech loss) uses that game as fuel for improvement!
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<DIV id=byLineTag =byLine>By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY
<DIV =inside-copy>AUSTIN â€" A few mornings this summer, Blake Gideon needed something stronger than caffeine to launch into a punishing, crack-of-dawn routine of sprints and hill climbs and sweaty sessions in the Texas weight room.
The Longhorns' sophomore safety tapped into YouTube.
Last November, the course of his and his team's season changed in an instant in which a tipped pass slipped through Gideon's hands at Texas Tech. An interception would have sealed a critical win. The drop, instead, allowed Tech and brilliant receiver Michael Crabtree to strike for a touchdown with one second left that dealt the 'Horns their only loss â€" 39-33 â€" and cost them a shot at college football's national championship.
The replay is out there. For you. For me. For Gideon, who more than once has searched, clicked and relived the moment, finding motivation in the pain.
"It's not like I have to shield my eyes from it, that I just can't handle it," he says. "It just lights a fire that I'm going to work that much harder.
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"If I have a little trouble waking up in the morning, I'll look at it."
Texas opens its 2009 season two weeks from Saturday, meeting overmatched Louisiana-Monroe at home. Beginning with quarterback and Heisman Trophy runner-up Colt McCoy, the Longhorns return two-thirds of the starters from a team that won 12 games and, at No. 3, finished with the program's third top-five finish in the polls in five years.
They enter this season at No. 2 in the USA TODAY coaches' rankings, behind only defending national champion Florida.
The 6-1, 200-pound Gideon is one of three starters back in a defensive backfield that figures to come under assault again by the Big 12 Conference's array of spread offenses and star quarterbacks. The 'Horns opponents passed for 259 yards a game a year ago, leaving the unit ranked among the nation's bottom 20.
Granted, those numbers also were inflated by teams in catch-up mode. Texas won nine of its games by more than three TDs.
Gideon nevertheless can do without any sort of emotional baggage. "I've said before that I'll be able to think about it and maybe even feel sorry for myself when I'm completely done playing football. That's when I can think about 'I shoulda, coulda done this,' " he says of the drop. "But you've got to go out there and play. Nobody's going to wait for you to feel sorry for yourself."
He has learned. And re-learned.
Almost sidelinded early
The son of a Texas high school coach, Gideon, now 20, was a swift and already instinctive player when he reached his dad's program at Leander High a short drive up I-35 from Austin. He started for the Lions as a sophomore free safety â€" after running varsity track and starting on the baseball team as a freshman â€" but saw his budding athletic career quickly threatened.
Gideon's lower back had given him problems since junior high. The suspicion was that it was nothing more than scoliosis, a curvature of the spine not uncommon among athletes, but he felt a pop one day while taking soccer-style kicks during practice (he was a place-kicker, too) and the pain turned unbearable. Doctors diagnosed four breaks in two of Gideon's vertebrae, and midway through his sophomore season shut him down.
The treatment was rest. When one of the vertebrae was slow to heal, his dad, Steve, recalls, "We started having serious conversations that 'Hey, it just might not be in the works for you.' "
But Blake was determined to get back on the field, and did by his junior season. He emerged as a star on a team that lasted three rounds into the state's large-school playoffs. By his senior year, Texas wanted him despite lingering concerns about his back. In the estimation of Rivals.com, Gideon was a middling two-star prospect.
"We say this all the time and it becomes kind of a cliche, that adversity makes you stronger for future events," Steve Gideon says. "But I can say he lived it. He could write a book on it."
Blake didn't take long to prove himself at Texas, starting all 13 games and playing on special teams as a true freshman in '08. He had eight tackles and broke up a pass in the Longhorns' come-from-behind, 45-35 win vs. then-top-ranked Oklahoma, and finished third on the team with 64 total tackles.
It was a solid first season, no matter the night of Nov. 1.
To lay the loss to Texas Tech solely at Gideon's feet seems a bit unfair. McCoy rallied Texas from a 16-point deficit late in the third quarter to a 33-32 lead in the final two minutes. But before that, normally dead-on passer had thrown a third-quarter interception that was returned for a touchdown and his receivers had several drops. The offensive line surrendered four sacks and an early safety.
Still, the unbeaten Longhorns were about to escape. Tech quarterback Graham Harrell moved the Red Raiders back down the field but was running out of time. At the Texas 28-yard line, he rolled left and tossed a pass to Edward Britton that bounced high off the junior receiver's raised hands and another four yards downfield â€" straight toward the onrushing Gideon. The ball was in his gut, then trickled to the ground and bounded up between his legs as Gideon fell and rolled on the turf.
"I didn't make the play," he says. "That's all there is to it."
Even then, Tech had just eight seconds to cover the 28 yards or somehow shave that distance and leave time for a field goal attempt. Crabtree was double-teamed, but caught a strike from Harrell and stepped around Texas cornerback Curtis Brown and into the end zone.
Expressly for Gideon's benefit, Texas coach Mack Brown drove the shared-responsibility point home in the hushed postgame locker room. "I went over to him and said, 'You're OK. It wasn't you, bud,' " Brown recalls. "He kind of smiled and said, 'Coach, I dropped the ball.'
"I said, 'It's over.' "
Those last two plays, though â€" the one that could have won it and didn't, then the one by Tech that did â€" rippled into December and January. Texas fell into a three-way tie for first in the Big 12's South Division, and came out on the short end of a controversial tie-breaker that determined who moved on to the conference championship game. Oklahoma got the nod and crushed North champion Missouri, boosting the Sooners into the Bowl Championship Series' title game vs. Florida. Texas missed the cut by 18-thousandths of a point.
The Heisman might have been redirected, too. McCoy delivered the kind of signature big-game performance against Tech that voters tend to remember, throwing two TD passes in less than 4½ minutes to pull the Longhorns close, then coolly engineering an 80-yard scoring drive to put them ahead with 1:29 left.
But given an extra play, Harrell and Crabtree trumped it. McCoy would wind up second in the Heisman balloting to OU quarterback Sam Bradford.
Gideon's e-mail and text-message inboxes overflowed in the game's aftermath with sentiments ranging from snarky to downright hateful, and "I don't think I answered my phone for about a week unless it was my parents or one of my buddies, one of my teammates," he says.
"Like people were going to tell me â€" as if I didn't know â€" the magnitude of the situation," he says. "All that mattered to me was what my teammates had to say. They're the ones who are with me all year 'round, putting the work in while the fans are sleeping in. Those people hadn't been through it. As long as my teammates told me it was OK, then I was OK."
'Next time ... the hero'
That's exactly what the team conveyed to the then-freshman. McCoy remembers, "The last thing I told him (that night) was, 'Look, don't think you're not going to be in this position again 'cause you are. And next time, you'll handle it the right way and you'll be the hero.' "
A week later, Baylor quarterback and former NCAA track champion Robert Griffin broke an option run 63 yards against the Longhorns. Gideon cut across the field and caught him, knocking Griffin out of bounds at the 11-yard line and allowing Texas to mount a defensive stand. The Bears went out on downs en route to a 45-21 loss.
That, Steve Gideon says, is when he knew his son had moved on.
"I guess, as a parent, you might wonder a little bit. But to say I was surprised he did hold up would be wrong," says the elder Gideon, a former defensive back at Stephen F. Austin who has worked 28 years as a high school coach. "I was proud of the way he handled it."
Blake already has weathered more misfortune, undergoing surgery in the offseason for a torn labrum in his right shoulder â€" now fully healed.
He and the Longhorns won't have to wait long for another crack at Texas Tech. The reloading Red Raiders, who sent Harrell to the Canadian Football League and Crabtree into the first round of the NFL draft, come to Austin on Sept. 19.
The schedule stiffens in October, when Texas goes from its annual showdown with Oklahoma in Dallas' Cotton Bowl to consecutive road games at Missouri and Oklahoma State. The 'Horns also must travel to fast-improving Baylor and Texas A&M.
There is ample opportunity for Gideon redefine himself.
"Man, I hope so," he says. "All I can promise, and call my shot on, is that I'm going out and I'm going to work "¦ try to prove myself and earn my spot every day like the first day I walked on the practice field as a freshman."
McCoy is insistent. "I hope he's in that position again</TD></TR></T></TABLE>
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<DIV id=byLineTag =byLine>By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY
<DIV =inside-copy>AUSTIN â€" A few mornings this summer, Blake Gideon needed something stronger than caffeine to launch into a punishing, crack-of-dawn routine of sprints and hill climbs and sweaty sessions in the Texas weight room.
The Longhorns' sophomore safety tapped into YouTube.
Last November, the course of his and his team's season changed in an instant in which a tipped pass slipped through Gideon's hands at Texas Tech. An interception would have sealed a critical win. The drop, instead, allowed Tech and brilliant receiver Michael Crabtree to strike for a touchdown with one second left that dealt the 'Horns their only loss â€" 39-33 â€" and cost them a shot at college football's national championship.
The replay is out there. For you. For me. For Gideon, who more than once has searched, clicked and relived the moment, finding motivation in the pain.
"It's not like I have to shield my eyes from it, that I just can't handle it," he says. "It just lights a fire that I'm going to work that much harder.
<DIV id=tagCrumbs>
"If I have a little trouble waking up in the morning, I'll look at it."
Texas opens its 2009 season two weeks from Saturday, meeting overmatched Louisiana-Monroe at home. Beginning with quarterback and Heisman Trophy runner-up Colt McCoy, the Longhorns return two-thirds of the starters from a team that won 12 games and, at No. 3, finished with the program's third top-five finish in the polls in five years.
They enter this season at No. 2 in the USA TODAY coaches' rankings, behind only defending national champion Florida.
The 6-1, 200-pound Gideon is one of three starters back in a defensive backfield that figures to come under assault again by the Big 12 Conference's array of spread offenses and star quarterbacks. The 'Horns opponents passed for 259 yards a game a year ago, leaving the unit ranked among the nation's bottom 20.
Granted, those numbers also were inflated by teams in catch-up mode. Texas won nine of its games by more than three TDs.
Gideon nevertheless can do without any sort of emotional baggage. "I've said before that I'll be able to think about it and maybe even feel sorry for myself when I'm completely done playing football. That's when I can think about 'I shoulda, coulda done this,' " he says of the drop. "But you've got to go out there and play. Nobody's going to wait for you to feel sorry for yourself."
He has learned. And re-learned.
Almost sidelinded early
The son of a Texas high school coach, Gideon, now 20, was a swift and already instinctive player when he reached his dad's program at Leander High a short drive up I-35 from Austin. He started for the Lions as a sophomore free safety â€" after running varsity track and starting on the baseball team as a freshman â€" but saw his budding athletic career quickly threatened.
Gideon's lower back had given him problems since junior high. The suspicion was that it was nothing more than scoliosis, a curvature of the spine not uncommon among athletes, but he felt a pop one day while taking soccer-style kicks during practice (he was a place-kicker, too) and the pain turned unbearable. Doctors diagnosed four breaks in two of Gideon's vertebrae, and midway through his sophomore season shut him down.
The treatment was rest. When one of the vertebrae was slow to heal, his dad, Steve, recalls, "We started having serious conversations that 'Hey, it just might not be in the works for you.' "
But Blake was determined to get back on the field, and did by his junior season. He emerged as a star on a team that lasted three rounds into the state's large-school playoffs. By his senior year, Texas wanted him despite lingering concerns about his back. In the estimation of Rivals.com, Gideon was a middling two-star prospect.
"We say this all the time and it becomes kind of a cliche, that adversity makes you stronger for future events," Steve Gideon says. "But I can say he lived it. He could write a book on it."
Blake didn't take long to prove himself at Texas, starting all 13 games and playing on special teams as a true freshman in '08. He had eight tackles and broke up a pass in the Longhorns' come-from-behind, 45-35 win vs. then-top-ranked Oklahoma, and finished third on the team with 64 total tackles.
It was a solid first season, no matter the night of Nov. 1.
To lay the loss to Texas Tech solely at Gideon's feet seems a bit unfair. McCoy rallied Texas from a 16-point deficit late in the third quarter to a 33-32 lead in the final two minutes. But before that, normally dead-on passer had thrown a third-quarter interception that was returned for a touchdown and his receivers had several drops. The offensive line surrendered four sacks and an early safety.
Still, the unbeaten Longhorns were about to escape. Tech quarterback Graham Harrell moved the Red Raiders back down the field but was running out of time. At the Texas 28-yard line, he rolled left and tossed a pass to Edward Britton that bounced high off the junior receiver's raised hands and another four yards downfield â€" straight toward the onrushing Gideon. The ball was in his gut, then trickled to the ground and bounded up between his legs as Gideon fell and rolled on the turf.
"I didn't make the play," he says. "That's all there is to it."
Even then, Tech had just eight seconds to cover the 28 yards or somehow shave that distance and leave time for a field goal attempt. Crabtree was double-teamed, but caught a strike from Harrell and stepped around Texas cornerback Curtis Brown and into the end zone.
Expressly for Gideon's benefit, Texas coach Mack Brown drove the shared-responsibility point home in the hushed postgame locker room. "I went over to him and said, 'You're OK. It wasn't you, bud,' " Brown recalls. "He kind of smiled and said, 'Coach, I dropped the ball.'
"I said, 'It's over.' "
Those last two plays, though â€" the one that could have won it and didn't, then the one by Tech that did â€" rippled into December and January. Texas fell into a three-way tie for first in the Big 12's South Division, and came out on the short end of a controversial tie-breaker that determined who moved on to the conference championship game. Oklahoma got the nod and crushed North champion Missouri, boosting the Sooners into the Bowl Championship Series' title game vs. Florida. Texas missed the cut by 18-thousandths of a point.
The Heisman might have been redirected, too. McCoy delivered the kind of signature big-game performance against Tech that voters tend to remember, throwing two TD passes in less than 4½ minutes to pull the Longhorns close, then coolly engineering an 80-yard scoring drive to put them ahead with 1:29 left.
But given an extra play, Harrell and Crabtree trumped it. McCoy would wind up second in the Heisman balloting to OU quarterback Sam Bradford.
Gideon's e-mail and text-message inboxes overflowed in the game's aftermath with sentiments ranging from snarky to downright hateful, and "I don't think I answered my phone for about a week unless it was my parents or one of my buddies, one of my teammates," he says.
"Like people were going to tell me â€" as if I didn't know â€" the magnitude of the situation," he says. "All that mattered to me was what my teammates had to say. They're the ones who are with me all year 'round, putting the work in while the fans are sleeping in. Those people hadn't been through it. As long as my teammates told me it was OK, then I was OK."
'Next time ... the hero'
That's exactly what the team conveyed to the then-freshman. McCoy remembers, "The last thing I told him (that night) was, 'Look, don't think you're not going to be in this position again 'cause you are. And next time, you'll handle it the right way and you'll be the hero.' "
A week later, Baylor quarterback and former NCAA track champion Robert Griffin broke an option run 63 yards against the Longhorns. Gideon cut across the field and caught him, knocking Griffin out of bounds at the 11-yard line and allowing Texas to mount a defensive stand. The Bears went out on downs en route to a 45-21 loss.
That, Steve Gideon says, is when he knew his son had moved on.
"I guess, as a parent, you might wonder a little bit. But to say I was surprised he did hold up would be wrong," says the elder Gideon, a former defensive back at Stephen F. Austin who has worked 28 years as a high school coach. "I was proud of the way he handled it."
Blake already has weathered more misfortune, undergoing surgery in the offseason for a torn labrum in his right shoulder â€" now fully healed.
He and the Longhorns won't have to wait long for another crack at Texas Tech. The reloading Red Raiders, who sent Harrell to the Canadian Football League and Crabtree into the first round of the NFL draft, come to Austin on Sept. 19.
The schedule stiffens in October, when Texas goes from its annual showdown with Oklahoma in Dallas' Cotton Bowl to consecutive road games at Missouri and Oklahoma State. The 'Horns also must travel to fast-improving Baylor and Texas A&M.
There is ample opportunity for Gideon redefine himself.
"Man, I hope so," he says. "All I can promise, and call my shot on, is that I'm going out and I'm going to work "¦ try to prove myself and earn my spot every day like the first day I walked on the practice field as a freshman."
McCoy is insistent. "I hope he's in that position again</TD></TR></T></TABLE>