It's the summer of '92, and 18-year-old young men stroll into Yon Hall for the first time.
Danny Wuerffel walks into his dorm to find roommate Jason Odom and his waterbed stretching across half the room. Lawrence Wright comes in with a prideful strut, staking out his territory immediately. James Bates enters with his goofy, Tennessee grin. Farm boy Donnie Young and his soon-to-be 6-foot-4, 315-pound frame ambles forward, looking for competition.
They were the class of '96, a football melting pot of cultures taking refuge in UF's old dorm where only athletes resided. You had Wuerffel, the soft-spoken quarterback who would one day have fans lining up outside his dorm room with pens and photos in hands. You saw Wright, the safety who would tell you exactly what he thought. You got a taste of Bates and his antics that would soon become the yin to Wright's yang in the championship locker rooms. You caught a glimpse of Young, whose drawl revealed his Southern roots.
Outside of Gainesville, they would have never glanced up if they crossed each other in a local Wal-Mart.
Except this was Gainesville, and this was a rickety dorm with one bathroom per floor. This was a dorm with guards at the door that kept visitors limited, and forced the athletes to form a brotherhood bond.
From Bates making fun of safety Demetric Jackson for watching his Steven Segal movies to ping-pong competitions until the wee morning hours, athletes who had about as much in common as a Beethoven fan at a KISS concert formed relationships that built themselves into a towering unit of football dominance.
Now, it's happening again. Well, except that Yon Hall is shut down, and the Segal arguments have probably ceased.
The brotherhood, however, has been reincarnated. This current group of Gators has been transformed from individuals who would leave practice on their own to players who leave practice together, laughing.
The passion of Tim Tebow and Brandon Spikes has become a smooth, milkshake-like blend with the rock-star nature of Joe Haden and the goofs of Chris Rainey.
Ahmad Black's loud, deep laugh is now one with the shyness of Jermaine Cunningham and the evasive Percy Harvin.
Whatever they're doing, Gainesville has seen this before. We all know how it ended last time, as The Swamp's "National Championship 1996" lettering reminds us. That same feeling is here once again.
The Chosen Ones
"Freak!"
And, apparently, "Doohickey."
You will never hear anything more profane than those words leave the mouths of Tim Tebow and Danny Wuerffel. Senior receiver Louis Murphy said he only hears Tebow exclaim "Freak!" after an incompleted pass. In a YouTube video, Bates, the starting middle linebacker on the '96 team, says Wuerffel made it a point for people to not hear him swear by saying words like "doohickey."
When Timmy Tebow was a 5- or 6-year old boy asking Wuerffel for his autograph on a church bulletin at Jacksonville's First Baptist Church, he didn't know he would one day have so much in common with the then-Gators quarterback.
They have committed their lives to Jesus Christ. They have won state championships. They have Heisman trophies at home.
And, now, they've led their teams on unprecedented runs. In 1996, the Gators defeated their regular-season opponents by just more than 34 points per game. This year, it's been just more than 37.
Tebow made a statement for his team on Sept. 27 after UF's 31-30 loss against Mississippi by proclaiming no other player in the nation would work harder for the rest of the season.
"He hates to lose," senior James Smith said.
Wuerffel made his proclamation in silence. After he took vicious hit after hit against Florida State in 1996, there was not a peep of a complaint.
"He was sitting right behind me and I didn't realize," Bates said. "I was kind of embarrassed a little bit. Nobody could've taken that beating that he took and got right back up."
While Wuerffel was not the most vocal - because, as Bates jokingly put it in the YouTube video, Spurrier would tell Wuerffel, "What are you going to do, Danny? … Say please don't do that?" - Tebow's and Wuerffel's work ethics sent a vibe throughout the rest of the team.
"When you have guys like Danny and Tim on your team," said former running back and current UF director of player and community relations Terry Jackson, "it makes you want to do anything for that team."
Part of what they do is win - big.
"The last thing you would think that they would go out and battle somebody to the very end, because they just seem too nice, but that's exactly what you get from each of them," Bates said. "The similarities are all across the board from these two guys."
And there's more similarity here than just their quarterbacks.
Quality Losses
Budding confidence bled into blurred destructions.
Nebraska 62, UF 24.
Michigan 41, UF 35.
The former was in 1996, and the latter in 2008.
The 1995 Gators - a team Young said was by far the most talented team he had ever been on - thought they would go into the game against the Cornhuskers and prance away as national champions.
"It truly pissed us the f*** off," Young said. "I was a mad son-of-a-gun. Honestly, I've never been so aggravated or upset about losing a game. We didn't show what we were about that night. We had the very worst game we could possibly play, and they had the very best game they could possibly play.
"They socked us in the mouth and made us look like a bunch of idiots. That wasn't going to happen again."
Twelve years later, this Gators squad didn't feel much better about their bowl performance.
"It was terrible," Tebow said. "We just didn't come out with a lot of heart and intensity."
It spawned a renewed focus for both teams.
"Getting embarrassed in the last bowl game, I think, was one of the best things to ever happen to Florida football," UF coach Urban Meyer said. "Last year's team was an entitled, selfish group.
"Everyone's walking around, and they're telling them how good they are. Deep in our heart, everyone in this facility knew there was no chance of repeat. Then they got slapped on New Year's Day. They realized you better get to work."
If you want to know how the Gators responded, look at their results.
Pure Dominance
For 2008, it was clear there was a change when Meyer sat in the team's meeting room and had his players' pupils meet his. One year ago, there would be players slouching and not looking their coach in the eye. Now, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed players sit straight up with focused stares.
For 1996, there was a summer of recommitment to workouts. Going even harder than they had before. A trust in each other that they would do what needed to be done.
"All the guys stayed and really busted their butts to get better," Demetric Jackson said. "That was the beginning of that '96 team gelling."
The most talented team Young had been on turned into the best-led team he had been on.
"We were destined," Wright said. "We were a team of destiny in the sense of it was our destiny. We knew that. It didn't take us long to understand what we had to do and how we had to do it."
It brought on an era of complete absurdity.
"It's just crazy how dominant we were," Bates said. "It was more of a weekly 'Who's Next?'"
As with both teams, it was the players learning how to breed success.
"The coaches knew that we had a championship team with all the guys we had coming back this year," junior linebacker Ryan Stamper said. "They pretty much dwelled on the leaders instead of them taking over the team."
That's exactly what they did. In 2007, if a player needed a ride to practice or to a meeting, good luck.
You're on your own.
Now, they not only give each other rides, they spend time with each other outside of football. This team has a chemistry that has been finely tuned. It's that chemistry that has made them play harder for each other, and why running backs coach Kenny Carter called players liking each other the No. 1 thing important to a team's success.
"Guys who used to just do things because they had to, workout because they had to, started to work out because they wanted to," Tebow said. "We got to the point where, instead of checking something off the list, you were going out there with the passion and purpose to get better. That's when this team started to turn things around."
That's similar to when the '96 team would ball up a bunch of tape and whack it around with a stick - a game they called "stickball." Then there were the times when, on the way to games, they would rock the mike as players got on the bus microphone and made some, well, interesting lyrics.
"James (Bates) did a great impersonation of Wild Bill off of Silence of the Lambs," Demetric Jackson said.
And forget about the bad sportsmanship the team showed by allegedly running up the score.
As Wright brought up, they ran up the score so they could give their second- and third-string players a chance to get in the game.
"It's an entirely different mentality," Wright said. "I guarantee you there's not too many teams that thought like that."
It looks like there's one more team thinking the same way. One team that has traveled a similar path. Saturday will show if we're headed for a comparable finish.
