A Man-Sized Throw -- Tyler Bray's 30-yard TD pass to Denarius Moore against South Carolina
Subtitle: Woo! Hello, Tyler Bray!
It wasn't that Matt Simms had played all that badly. Yeah, he did have those two fumbles on sacks that South Carolina had converted into points, but at the point that Derek Dooley decided to give Tyler Bray a shot, Simms was 10-13 for 153 yards and a TD, and the Gamecocks were up only 17-10 despite the fourteen points the Vols had given them on turnovers.
But Dooley called Bray's number anyway, and Will stood and screamed somewhere in the stands about the idiocy of the move. Bray immediately threw a pick six on his very first pass attempt to give Carolina a 24-10 lead.
But Dooley gave it back to Bray and changed the entire course of the season. With the game still threatening to spin out of control, Bray and the Vols got the ball on the 30 yard line with 5:07 remaining in the third quarter. The team went nowhere, but got a second chance when a fake punt resulted in a 25-yard gain and a first down. On the next play, yay Bray:
It was not a fluke, either, as he tossed another one to Gerald Jones soon after that. We didn't win, but we never looked back.
Heh, Gator Bit -- Matt Simms' 40-yard TD pass to Justin Hunter against Florida
As we said when discussing Watch the Pretty Pattern, everyone still thought Florida was Florida when Tennessee played them. The Gators scored twice more after that play to go up 24-10, but Simms and Hunter made it interesting early in the fourth: