One year ago, at the dawn of 2013, C.J. Uzomah was about as far away from this championship setting as any multipurpose, have-hands-will-travel, tight end/wide receiver could get.
For one thing he played for Auburn, which meant he was in the grips of a Greek tragedy repurposed into a football season. Going 3-9, and 0-8 in the SEC, just two seasons after winning the BCS championship, the Tigers were falling too fast to be only under the spell of gravity. They seemed to be rewriting physical law all along the descent.
And with no games to play, no class to attend at the time, Uzomah was back home in Suwanee, muttering quiet oaths.
“I was probably sitting on my couch thinking about never wanting the feeling of that year to happen again,” he said. “All of us kind of took on the motto: never again.
“To go from there to being in California now, on the biggest stage in college football, is remarkable.”
Here at the dawn of 2014, Uzomah was on a little stage Thursday morning, addressing media near the scene of the BCS Championship game. Up a couple of freeways Monday night in Pasadena, Auburn will play Florida State for the crystal football.
A year ago there were Auburn players who weren’t terribly keen on wearing their school-issued warm-ups in public. Now they are clothed head-to-toe in fleece bearing the BCS championship logo. Tugging on his blue sweats, Uzomah said, “I hope I stay this big — then I’ll be able to wear this for a long while.”
All along the path of a revival that was even more sudden than their fall, Auburn coaches and players have tried to offer logical explanations. They have attempted to explain the resurgence in myriad ways.
But now that they’ve actually arrived — it’s real now, as real as a nonrefundable airplane ticket — does the reasoning seem any more, well, reasonable?
Sure, a new coaching staff, led by the triumphant homecoming of the former offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn, swept in like a refreshing breeze.
Yes, they said all the things that you’d expect a new staff to say: Things were going to change; we are going to surprise the world; get ready to produce one of the biggest turnarounds the sport has ever witnessed. Of course, they did. They’re coaches, and coaches talk large.
Fullback Jay Prosch admitted Thursday, “That’s kind of how all coaches are, and that’s what they say and then things fade.
“But things never faded.”
How many times has some struggling program tried to reboot itself in the weight room, bringing in another strength-and-conditioning coach to introduce a new era in the offseason? If it really worked all the time, each one of them would be one-and-done.
But here came Ryan Russell, redefining the workout culture at Auburn. Where in the Gene Chizik era the weight room was as quiet as a library, now music blared. Each time a player set some new personal best, he got to ring a bell and celebrate loudly with his teammates. And from that first workout under Russell, it was obvious these sessions would not always be compatible with keeping that day’s breakfast on one’s stomach.
A purging was underway.
“I think guys fought it at first, but then they started seeing the change in themselves and in the team, and that’s when they were like, OK, this is a good thing. They started taking pride in it, and we started to see ourselves change,” said Prosch, the fullback built like a mortar round.
“It was about competing, not dwelling on last year,” senior defensive end Nosa Eguae said. “Moving on and focusing on today. You can’t control what’s going to happen in September when it was February. You got to control what you’re doing today and that’s working out, getting bigger, faster and stronger and becoming a man in the classroom and on the field.”
They all say that: Take it one day at a time. The cliche guides a football player through rough seasons and smooth.
Practices, once they began, were no different. Malzahn put his guys in pads just as often as the NCAA would allow and told them to buckle up for a long, hard ride.
Do not for one moment forget who you should be, he told them.
“Auburn is a blue-collar, hard-nosed, physically and mentally tough team,” Malzahn said. “That’s who we are and how we win football games here. That’s how they’ve done it for a long time. We felt that was the one thing was had to get back.”
“I think it’s evident we bought in,” Uzomah said.
The Tigers broke their SEC losing streak on the second week of September, when another reclamation project, quarterback Nick Marshall, hit Uzomah with a winning touchdown pass in the last 10 seconds. They lost the next week to LSU, but they showed spine doing it, outscoring LSU 21-14 in the second half.
Then the miracles came: the big catch against Georgia, the outlandish return of a missed field-goal attempt against Alabama. Suddenly there was a season cast in the light of divine providence.
One year ago, Marshall, too, was far, far away from any kind of championship talk. He was at home in Pineview, weighing options about where to go after being kicked off the team at Georgia and rehabbing his image at a Kansas junior college.
He sat just feet away from Uzomah on Thursday, testifying as well to just how far one may come in a very short time.
“What means the most to me right now is coach Malzahn and (quarterbacks) coach (Rhett) Lashlee giving me the second chance to come back into the SEC to play football,” he said. “It’s just something that when I was at Georgia, I try not to think about. It’s just something I put behind me and thank the man above that I got a second chance to play college football.”
One year ago, Auburn fans despaired.
Now they will flock to this scene to be heard loud and proud again.
“We owe them that,” Auburn running back Tre Mason said Thursday. “Putting them through what we did last season, we owe them a season like this.”
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