Breakthrough on the Bayou

The Baton Rouge Advocate published a column in its Saturday edition telling LSU to take this game seriously — not because UAB might win, but because the Tigers needed the practice.

"LSU needs to make UAB something of a scrimmaging tool to success," the writer argued, "as was Akron (56-0) in 1997."

The same column called UAB a "Rent-A-Win team" — a program whose only purpose was to fill a date on the schedule. The guarantee check was $410,000.

Watson Brown put the phrase on the locker room blackboard before kickoff. Every player saw it.

Chris Brown, a UAB cornerback, read it and took it personally. "We read that in the paper, and it got to a lot of us," Brown said. "Statements like that downgrade our program. It's not like we've been going places and getting no-hitters."

What happened next was the biggest win in UAB football history — and an upset that, 26 years later, remains the most significant game the program has ever played.

"Alabama-Birmingham qualifies as a gimmee"

The disrespect was not limited to one columnist.

Television announcers in Baton Rouge spent the week talking about LSU's upcoming trip to Tennessee. UAB was the warmup. One Baton Rouge writer called the Blazers "sacrificial lambs. From them, LSU was supposed to take what it wanted." Another wrote that LSU "should, despite its deficiencies, thoroughly be able to dispose of the UABs on its schedule." The plural — UABs — dismissed not just the team but the concept.

Even Cary Estes, who covered UAB every day for the Birmingham Post-Herald and knew exactly how good the defense was, predicted LSU 28, UAB 17. His scouting report was direct: "Throw in the home-field advantage for LSU, an unproven quarterback for the Blazers and the loss of several UAB offensive players with injuries, and this game could get ugly. Probably the best the Blazers can hope to do is keep it close."

He wasn't wrong about the injuries. Wide receivers Willie Quinnie and Maurice Gallery were both out with knee injuries. Fullback Carl Fair was limited with a sprained ankle. Tailback Cedric Thatch was questionable with a sore foot. The passing game had produced 45 yards the previous week at Kansas. Watson Brown had benched senior quarterback Daniel Dixon and handed the job to Thomas Cox, a sophomore out of Jess Lanier who had never started a college game.

Brown did not sugarcoat the situation. "You don't want to go in there and lose the game throwing it around with people who haven't played much and don't know what they're doing yet," he said.

The offense would have to take a back seat. "We have to win right now with our defense and special teams," Brown said. "I don't like it. But that's flat fact and the way it is until we get some of these guys back."

He was not, however, afraid.

"I would be very surprised if we're intimidated," Brown said. "We haven't been in the past. That's not our style. Our kids are good at going on the road. We play hard, we don't lose our composure."

These same players had been to Nebraska. They had played at Tennessee and Virginia Tech. Tiger Stadium was big. It was not new.

"I think we play better sometimes in bigger games like that with bigger crowds, because we gain something off it," Brown said. "We use it."

The one man in Louisiana who took them seriously

The only person in Baton Rouge who seemed to understand what was coming was Nick Saban.

Saban was in his first season at LSU, rebuilding after a 34-17 loss to Auburn the week before. His team was 2-1 and searching for consistency. He watched the Kansas film and noticed something the columnists had missed.

"They gave Kansas as much as they wanted," Saban said. "That is an indication of the quality of football team that we are playing this week. UAB has a lot of experienced players."

He called Watson Brown "a good offensive coach" who "presents a lot of problems." He told his team to prepare. Whether they listened is a separate question.

Adrian Abrams, UAB's linebacker, had promised this after the Kansas loss a week earlier: "LSU will know, when they look at this film, that they'll have to play one of their best games to beat us."

The program had never beaten an SEC team. Auburn and Vanderbilt in 1996, Tennessee in 1998 — three games, three losses. UAB's all-time record at the Division I-A level was 15-20. On paper, there was no reason for this to be close.

Tiger Stadium

The game kicked off at 7 p.m. The crowd was 85,339 — only one Tiger Stadium game had ever drawn more. It was homecoming. Shaquille O'Neal was in the building to have his jersey retired, the fourth number LSU had ever hung alongside Bob Pettit, Billy Cannon and Pete Maravich. The Tigers had won five straight homecoming games.

The crowd expected a scrimmage.

Brown's game plan was built on one premise: stop the run. Josh Booty had thrown for 680 yards and six touchdowns in three games — 11th in the country in pass efficiency. But LSU's ground game was averaging 133 yards, and Auburn had held the Tigers to 83 the week before. If the Blazers shut down the run, the play-action would die with it.

"They'll fake a lot of running plays, then try to throw the ball down the field," Brown said. "So the key is stopping the running game first. If they get their running game going, then we'll have to do more things to stop that, which is going to let them get their play-action passes going."

The defense would have to carry the night. Brown knew it. The players knew it. What nobody knew was that the secondary — the unit that was supposed to be UAB's weakness after losing three starters — was about to deliver the performance of its life.

First quarter

UAB's first break came on an LSU mistake. Tailback LaBrandon Toefield fumbled, and Sentell Winston recovered at the LSU 33. Four plays later, Rhett Gallego kicked a 29-yard field goal. UAB 3, LSU 0.

Cox, the new starting quarterback, found nothing but trouble. Five consecutive incompletions — not near-misses, but the kind of throws that confirm every doubt. Brown pulled him. Dixon, the senior who had been benched after the Kansas game, went back in.

Second quarter

The touchdown drive was nine plays and 72 yards — the longest sustained offensive possession UAB had managed in weeks. The key early play: on second-and-four from the UAB 44, Jegil Dugger ran for 10 yards. Dugger was the workhorse. He had carried 18 times for 121 yards at Kansas the week before and would carry close to 30 times in this game. When UAB moved the ball, it moved on the ground.

The touchdown was a scheme play designed by offensive coordinator Pat Sullivan — the 1971 Heisman Trophy winner at Auburn, now calling plays at Tiger Stadium.

Dixon explained afterward how it worked: "We had to run the option a couple of times, and we ran the pass on a fake option hoping that they would bite. And they bit enough for it to work."

Dixon found Leron Little for 24 yards — a throw that cleared the LSU secondary and gave UAB its first touchdown. Gallego kicked the extra point. UAB 10, LSU 0.

At halftime, 85,339 fans sat in a quiet that was not supposed to exist. UAB's defense had held LSU scoreless. Booty, the quarterback who entered the game ranked 11th nationally in pass efficiency, was being frustrated by a secondary that had lost three starters from the year before. Adrian Singleton alone already had two interceptions. Avery Warner had one.

The Rent-A-Win team was winning.

The Tigers answer

LSU came out of halftime with urgency. An eight-play, 50-yard drive ended with Domanick Davis scoring from a yard out. The key play: Booty hit Davis on a 22-yard pass from the UAB 31. Suddenly it was 10-7, and the stadium was alive again.

UAB's defense held through the rest of the third quarter and into the fourth. LSU's offense kept sabotaging itself — turnovers, penalties, dropped passes. The Tigers committed 13 penalties for 113 yards on the night. Saban would say afterward that his team reached the red zone three times and scored no points from those trips.

Then came the break LSU needed. On third-and-10, UAB was flagged for pass interference — 15 yards, automatic first down. Three plays later, John Corbello kicked a 35-yard field goal. Tied, 10-10, with 10:33 left.

The decision

The final minutes were a stalemate. UAB punted 10 times in this game. Neither team could sustain a drive. The game was headed for overtime.

With less than a minute left and the ball on LSU's own 29-yard line, Saban had a choice. He could run the clock and play for overtime in front of his homecoming crowd, with the momentum of the tying field goal behind him.

He chose to throw.

He called four streak routes. The plan was to take a shot deep or check down to tailback Domanick Davis. If nothing was open, throw it out of bounds and play for overtime.

Booty saw something different. He thought Jerel Myers was running open — or at least open enough. He abandoned the play call, audibled to a route nobody had repped in practice and threw to Myers.

Myers was not looking.

Chris Brown — the same cornerback who had read "Rent-A-Win team" in the newspaper that morning and let it burn — intercepted the pass at the LSU 42 and returned it to the LSU 17.

Saban did not blame his quarterback. "There was no out route on that play," he said. "He was supposed to throw deep, or throw a check down. It's my fault, I take responsibility for it. If a player doesn't do what he's supposed to do out there, I have to do a better job of teaching."

Booty took responsibility for the other half: "I tried to make a play we hadn't made in practice."

32 yards

Rhett Gallego was a junior from Hueytown High School. His first college kick had been at Nebraska in 1998, when he was 18 years old. He kicked two field goals at Tennessee that same season. By the night of the LSU game, he had missed one field goal in his entire career. He was 11-of-12.

After Brown's interception, Gallego tried to collect himself. "As soon as he intercepted it, I tried to clear my head," he said. "The thing that was the most nerve-wracking was having people come up and say, 'Come on, you're going to make the kick.' I want them to encourage me. But at that time, you just want to be left alone."

He was not left alone. LSU called three timeouts. The crowd was as loud as it had been all night. Gallego stood through two running plays and all three stoppages before he lined up behind holder James Malone.

The kick was 32 yards. "It started off to the right then curved right back," Gallego said.

UAB 13, LSU 10. No time remaining.

His teammates buried him.

"I was the bottom person on the pile," Gallego said. "That's not fun. I don't think I'm supposed to bend that way. At first I was trying to fight it. Then I just collapsed and let go. I lost my mouthpiece. Somebody kept putting their finger in my ear. It was crazy."

Undrae Crosby, one of the tight ends, found a UAB flag and carried it on a lap around the stadium.

Joe Meadow had played at UAB before any of this was possible. He made the trip to Baton Rouge. After the kick, he was on the field with Brown and Winston — the two defensive backs whose turnovers had started and finished the night.

On the same night LSU retired Shaquille O'Neal's jersey, on the same night Josh Booty passed Y.A. Tittle on the school's all-time passing list, the Rent-A-Win team won on the last play of the game.

What it meant

Watson Brown had been a head coach for more than two decades — at Austin Peay, Cincinnati, Rice, Vanderbilt and UAB. His teams had lost far more than they'd won at most of those stops. The one exception at Vanderbilt was a 24-21 win over LSU in 1990 — the Commodores' lone victory in a 1-10 season.

A decade later, Brown beat LSU again. The circumstances were different. The feeling was the same.

"I'm real proud of our guys to say the least," Brown said. "We've been there two or three times against some really good teams."

"I don't think that anybody thinks that we go in and play for money," he said. "Our kids showed a lot of class tonight, and I'm proud of them."

Eddie Freeman, the defensive tackle who would become a second-round NFL draft pick two years later, said what needed to be said: "This game means everything for our program. It shows that we're not a pushover."

Gallego, the Hueytown kid whose kick would define the night, thought about what the win meant in the state. "We're always battling Alabama and Auburn," he said. "The fact we came in and beat somebody in their conference, and somebody who has a chance to beat them every year, that does tremendous things for this team. It puts us that much more on the map."

Dixon, the quarterback who was benched and came back to throw the only touchdown, looked beyond one game. "To beat an SEC team, that's a huge step for our program," he said. "But people will respect us more if we're able to continue on and not be sporadic. Playing well week in and week out is how we'll get our respect."

No credit given

The Baton Rouge Advocate ran a column the next morning under the headline "Rent-a-loss." The same writer who coined the phrase that ended up on UAB's blackboard wrote: "Only in the second half did [LSU] manage to play up to the level of UAB — and that isn't a lot of rungs up the ladder."

Even in defeat, the columnist would not credit UAB. LSU had lost the game. The turnovers, the penalties, the mistakes. Not that UAB's defense forced those turnovers. Not that UAB's defensive line had controlled the line of scrimmage for most of the night.

Brown had seen this before. He would see it again. "We've fought image forever," he said. "We were 4-2 in Conference USA last year and beat East Carolina, and everybody said, 'Oh, it was a fluke.' I don't know when it's going to be that people say UAB is just a pretty good football team."

Thomas Cox, the quarterback who started the game, saw it from a vantage point the Advocate would never understand. "These guys have been playing football just about since it was invented," Cox said. "We've been around for about 10 years. And we come in here and knock them off. That's great. It has to help us gain respect."

What came next

Nick Saban would win a national championship at LSU three years later, leave for the NFL and then build a dynasty at Alabama that produced six national championships. He became the most accomplished coach in the history of the sport.

On the night of Sept. 23, 2000, UAB's defense forced six turnovers against his offense, held his team to 65 rushing yards and won at Tiger Stadium on a field goal as time expired. Booty said it plainly: "It was tough for all of us from the get-go. We didn't come out ready to play. They were doing everything right, and we were doing everything wrong."

LSU fullback Tommy Banks said what the Advocate columnists would not: "They are a great team. They have a lot of talent and on defense, they are going to do some good things this year."

He was right. The defense ranked 11th nationally by season's end. Two members of the front four — Bryan Thomas and Eddie Freeman — became NFL draft picks. The secondary that was supposed to be the weakness finished that night in Baton Rouge with four interceptions.

UAB went on to finish 7-4 — the best record in program history. The Blazers never got a bowl bid. But on one Saturday night at Tiger Stadium, the Rent-A-Win team proved it belonged.

Saturday night, 26 years later, the men who played that game gather for the reunion banquet. The $410,000 was a nice check. What they took from Baton Rouge was worth more.

Sidebar: The flag — Wayne Champion's daughter made him a sign for the LSU game in 2000. Twenty-six years later, it's still here.

The 2000 UAB Season Series

Part 1: Setting the standard

Part 2: The Quest

Part 3: Breakthrough on the Bayou (you are here)