1 » Florida Gators quarterback John Brantley has faced his fair share of obstacles over the course of his college career but trainer Tom Shaw does not believe that will prevent him from succeeding as a professional. According to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Brantley has been training at the ESPN/Disney Wide World of Sports Complex since the season ended and has spent much of that time working with Shaw, the acclaimed trainer/coach of big-time signal callers like Eli and Peyton Manning, Michael Vick and most notably Tom Brady. “You saw what he did at the University of Florida, so a lot of people aren’t giving him an opportunity,” Shaw told the Sentinel. “But with what I’ve seen in the time that I’ve spent with John is that he could be one of the best quarterbacks that I’ve ever had.” Shaw believes Brantley is a better athlete than Brady and has a strong arm but most work on his footwork. “I don’t sell kids. If they’re good they’re good. If they’re bad, I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’m not saying he’s the next Tom Brady or Peyton Manning or whoever. I’m saying this kid has the ability, the talent to be a pro football player and be successful at it because he has all the tools.”

The paper also notes that Brantley is being represented by Joel Segal of Lagardere Unlimited, the agent who has also signed running back Chris Rainey for 2012 and boasts a stable of other Gators including Percy Harvin (Minnesota), Maurkice Pouncey (Pittsburgh), Mike Pouncey (Miami) and Ahmad Black. In other words, it may be wise to expect Brantley to be selected somewhere in the late rounds of the 2012 NFL Draft if Segal has anything to say about it (which he will).

2 » With his show Eastbound & Down set to return to HBO on Feb. 19, Kenny Powers recently decided to write an open letter to Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow called “The Gifted Young Athlete.” The letter, available unedited on Grantland.com, is uncensored and features explicit language. Below is a very short passage appropriate enough for publication here on OGGOA.

Yet here Jesus is, helping me & Tebow out in sports, just because we’re maybe a little bit cooler in his eyes. It’s a raw deal, plain and simple.

Click to expand and read two more BITS in this post.

1 » Chicago Bulls center Joakim Noah has had a star-studded last few days. In addition to being introduced along with the rest of his team by comedian Will Ferrell before Wednesday night’s game (“He’s a Scorpio and a horrible dancer,” Ferrell said of Noah), he was also name-dropped during the latest episode of the sitcom Whitney on NBC. Following a Chicago-Philadelphia game last week, Noah met up with champion eater Takeru Kobayashi, a greeting that was captured by his YouTube channel.

2 » Speaking of Noah, the Bulls’ star center told the Chicago Tribune last month that his rough start to the 2011-12 season was in part due to the pressure he felt after signing a five-year, $60 million contract extension in 2010. “Sometimes you feel like because you’re given so much money you’re expected to do things. That’s not the right mentality to have as a player,” he explained. “I have to play my game. I have to have fun out there. If I don’t, I’m not the same player.” Without an offseason to work on some of the kinks in his game, Noah started exceptionally slow, shooting poorly and turning the ball over more often than he should be. Now back into the swing of things, he has posted double-digit points in eight of his last 10 games (including five-straight double-doubles from Jan 23-30). “I’ve always been a player who reacts well to criticism and doubters,” Noah said. “I feel my teammates were always behind me. But I knew as well as anyone how poorly I was playing. And not only wasn’t I playing well, but I was putting a lot of pressure on myself. I wasn’t playing loose out there. I was playing tight. In the beginning of the year, I was overthinking a lot. I was going through a lot of things personally. I feel a lot more comfortable now. I have to stop overthinking and just play.”

Click to expand and read two more BITS in this post.

Lucas Oil Stadium

The event, which is held for six days from Feb. 22-28, consists of more than 300 players being put through a series of drills, tests and interviews while more than 600 NFL personnel in attendance (including coaching staffs, executives, player personnel and medical staffs) look on and evaluate each of them. It amounts to the final job interview these athletes will participate in before the 2012 NFL Draft commences on April 26.

The three former Gators student-athletes invited to the combine include:

Running back Jeff Demps – Group: 6; Camp: RB06
Defensive tackle Jaye Howard – Group: 7; Camp: DL22
Running back Chris Rainey – Group: 6; Camp: RB24

Former Florida cornerback Janoris Jenkins (Group: TBD; Camp: DB27) was also invited and is expected to participate in the event.

Demps, on the other hand, is unlikely to take part in the combine as he has decided to run track for the Gators and attempt to qualify for the 2012 London Olympics.

The two notable names left off the invite list are those of quarterback John Brantley and wide receiver Deonte Thompson. Other draft-eligible Florida players include center/guard Dan Wenger and defensive end William Green.

Read about each player’s day-to-day schedule in Indianapolis after the jump!

Schedule:
Travel, Registration, Pre-exam & X-rays, Orientation, Interviews
Wednesday – Groups 1-3; Thursday – Groups 4-6
Friday – Groups 7-9; Saturday – Groups 10, 11

Measurements, Medical Exams, Media, Psych Tests, Interviews
Thursday – Groups 1-3; Friday – Groups 4-6
Saturday – Groups 7-9; Sunday – Groups 10, 11

NFLPA Meeting, Psych Tests, Interviews
Friday – Groups 1-3; Saturday – Groups 4-6
Sunday – Groups 7-9; Monday – Groups 10,11

Workout (timing, stations, skill drills), Departure
Saturday – Groups 1-3; Sunday – Groups 4-6
Monday – Groups 7-9; Tuesday – Groups 10, 11

OGGOA will offer full coverage of the combine throughout the event.

1 » According to The Gainesville Sun’s Pat Dooley, Florida Gators defensive coordinator Dan Quinn interviewed for but turned down the same position with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Quinn, who has been at Florida for just one season, was a NFL assistant with four different teams from 2001-10.

2 » The 2011-12 season may now be in the books but that does not mean Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow‘s name is out of the news. Tebow, who sat down for a 30-minute interview with ESPN’s Hannah Storm last week, will be featured on ESPN2 in “SportsCenter Special: Face to Face with Tim Tebow” on Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 10:30 p.m. Tebow’s recent ESPN rounds included an interview with Scott Van Pelt and Ryen Russillo, which you can view below.

Four more BITS on Crowder, Demps, the Oh Fours and Wambach after the break!

3 » In a similar fashion to what happened in New Orleans two season ago, one former Florida player may unseat another Gators star currently on the roster of a NFL team. According to ESPN, it is unlikely that the Atlanta Falcons will choose to bring back veteran linebacker Mike Peterson for his 14th season. Instead the team appears to have its sights set on former Miami Dolphins LB Channing Crowder, who “retired” in 2011 to spend time with his pregnant wife and new baby after Miami decided to cut ties with him. The key connecting the dots? Former Dolphins defensive coordinator Mike Nolan took the same job with the Falcons in the offseason.

4 » Now concentrating on track and field, Florida junior sprinter Jeff Demps got good news on Friday when he learned that his 6.59-second 60-meter run at the Virginia Tech Elite Meet was good enough to automatically qualify him for the 2012 NCAA Indoor Championships. Demps, who has won the individual national title each of the last two years, earned the 6.59 time in his first meet of the 2012 season. “We’re obviously very pleased with Jeff,” head coach Mike Holloway said. “He’ll be the first to tell you that he didn’t execute the race well in the final, but he’s been working a lot in practice and he’ll only continue to improve as we get deeper into the season.”

5 » The Oh Fours received some news on Monday. First the good news, in which former Gators point guard Taureen Green announced on Twitter that he will play for the professional basketball team Tofaş of the Turkish Basketball League in 2012. Since leaving Florida, Green has spent short stints with three NBA teams but left the league in 2008 and has spent the last four years overseas playing in Spain and Greece.

On a much more somber note, Denver Nuggets guard/forward Corey Brewer left the team Monday morning after learning that his father has passed away at the age of 68 in Portland, TN. Brewer and his father, Ellis “Pee Wee” Brewer, were extremely close and shared hundreds of memories both on and off the court, which you can read about in this April 2007 story by Pat Forde of ESPN.com. Our deepest condolences go to the family.

6 » Learning that the WPS would not be active for the 2012 season, former Gators striker and current U.S. Women’s National Team member Abby Wambach is trying to stay positive and focusing on competing in the 2012 London Olympics. “You have to take all of the good things with the bad and make the best of them,” she told ESPNW. “It has been a hard week for women’s soccer. But, as a community, we’ve got to lose the egos. We have to get past the issues that have come between us.” Women’s soccer in the United States got a boost following the 2012 Women’s World Cup, but Wambach believes that a women’s league will need help from the MLS to create a long-lasting professional organization. “I think it’s probably going to be necessary for a league to survive,” she said said. “If we can get into a relationship with an MLS community, you’ve got many things built in. You’ve got infrastructure: people already in place in some jobs who might be able to help, stadiums, fields. There could be many costly things that are at least dramatically cut back, so you’re in a position where you can actually succeed. And then see if maybe in a few years, you could even be making money.

Only three former Gators participated in the Super Bowl; Trattou was inactive and another was forced to sit out due to injury. OGGOA has checked and re-checked the box scores to bring you a summary of what these Gators accomplished Sunday.

Super Bowl XLVI was the 10th consecutive NFL championship game to feature a former Florida player. It is the third time in the last four seasons that one has won a ring.

PLAYERS OF THE WEEK
LB BRANDON SPIKES, New England Patriots: 11 tackles [game-high] (eight solo), forced fumble
TE AARON HERNANDEZ, New England Patriots: Eight receptions [team-high] for 67 yards (targets: 14, long: 12), touchdown

THE REST
DT GERARD WARREN, New England Patriots: Two tackles (one solo)

INJURED / INACTIVE
LB JERMAINE CUNNINGHAM, New England Patriots: Hamstring (season)
DE JUSTIN TRATTOU*, New York Giants^: Inactive

^ Team won Super Bowl XLVI.
* Rookie

2011 WEEK: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | WC | DV | CC

1 » On a lighter note than the story from Thursday about Super Bowl XLVI being a dream come true for New England Patriots linebacker Brandon Spikes and his mother comes this story about Spikes’s preplanned attire for the occasion. As he did before the 2009 BCS National Championship, Spikes donned his all-pink suit as the team left New England and may very well rock it again on Sunday before the game. “Brought the lucky suit out again!” Spikes tweeted, adding that it is his lucky championship game suit. Below are a handful of pictures Spikes has taken over the weekend while in Indianapolis, IN including two with teammates and fellow former Gators tight end Aaron Hernandez and defensive tackle Gerard Warren.

Click to expand and read three more BITS in this post.

1 » Early Friday morning, Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow sat down with Hannah Storm for another interview, this one mostly about the 2011 season. Though the below video is only a clip of the interview, it will be aired in full on ESPN‘s SportsCenter on Friday. If/when the network makes it available online, OGGOA will update this thread with a video of the complete interview.

Click to expand and read three more BITS in this post.

For a young kid growing up in certain areas of Shelby, NC, dreams of playing college football – let alone someday in the NFL – can seem entirely impossible.

Throw in the fact that his brother was sentenced in 2003 to life in prison without parole on first-degree murder charges stemming from a drug deal gone wrong in 2001 and many expected Brandon Spikes to go down with the ship.

“There was a lot of negative people who said, you won’t do this, you won’t do that because he didn’t do this, he didn’t do that,” Spikes told USA Today in 2008 about his neighborhood growing up. “You won’t ever get a scholarship, you won’t go to Florida and play as well as you did. My whole career has been about proving people wrong.”

He started on that path during his time in Gainesville, FL with the Florida Gators. Spikes went from five-star recruit and the No. 13 prospect in the nation to a player who looked like he might be underwhelming after the Gators’ defense struggled mightily in 2007.

Months after the season ended, Spikes sat down with then-Florida head coach Urban Meyer, shed some tears, and told him he had no choice but to succeed going forward.

“I let him know this is my life. Without this, I don’t know where I would be. Football has been everything. It was my way out; it was my way here,” he said. “I just told him this is what I do. I wake up in the morning and I breathe, and this is the first thing on my mind.”

Spikes became the defense’s leader that season, the parallel to quarterback Tim Tebow and what he did for the Gators’ offense.

His hit on running back Knowshaun Moreno at the start the 2008 Florida-Georgia game is one of the most famous tackles in school history, and it fueled a 49-10 victory that helped propel the Gators to another win in the 2008 SEC Championship over Alabama and eventually to the 2009 BCS Championship.

Spikes promised when leaving for college that he would make his mother proud. His second national title in three years undoubtedly put a smile on her face, but his decision to stay a fourth year and graduate rather than leave early for the NFL likely made that smile grow exponentially wider.

There was something else he said to his mother, a promise he told the Boston Herald that he made to her when he was a child. Spikes said one day he would play professional football and support their family, reiterating that promise after his brother was incarcerated because his sibling had made a similar pact with the family.

“The promises he made to my mom – he was going to get us out of our situation and he didn’t,” Spikes said in a story published by the Herald on Thursday. “He fell off the road. I couldn’t do that to her. She’s everything.”

So when Spikes came across as a dirty player during his senior season after being caught eye-gouging during a game, he stood up and increased his coach-mandated suspension from a half-game to a full game.

“I accept responsibility for my actions and I accept the consequences of my actions. I would like to apologize to my team and the coaching staff and Washun Ealey. Football is a very physical and emotional game, but there is no excuse for my actions.”

When draft analysts said Spikes was too slow to be picked high in the 2010 NFL Draft, he ignored them, kept his head down, continued working hard and wound up being selected with the No. 62 overall pick in the second round by the New England Patriots.

When he made what he called a stupid decision and was caught having sex with a girl on an Internet stream before his rookie season, he stayed out of the spotlight and concentrated on becoming a better football player.

When he was suspended four games by the NFL for allegedly violating the league’s banned substances policy, he explained that it was due to a particular ingredient in his ADHD medication but still issued an apology:

“I’ve been contacted by the NFL and informed that I will be suspended four games for the detection of an illegal substance in a drug test. The substance was a medication that I should have gotten clarification on before taking. It was not a performance enhancer or an illegal drug. The integrity of the game is very important to me. I understand the league’s ruling and apologize to my teammates, the fans and the Patriots organization for this mistake.”

And when he learned seven games into his second season that a knee injury would force him to miss the majority of the year, Spikes worked hard in rehab and returned in Week 17, earning back his starting role with the team.

Three weeks later he led New England in tackles in the AFC Championship, a game in which he also grabbed an interception in the fourth quarter.

The Herald also spoke this week with Spikes’s mother, Sherry Allen, who not only took care of her son during his time in Shelby but even wound up moving to Gainesville while he was in college after being laid off from her old job as a factory worker.

“I feel like I’m living in a dream,” she told the paper.

A true football player at heart, her son has “I love this game” tattooed above his left wrist and stands not only as a favorite of Gator Nation but also of his teammates (past and present), Patriots fans and New England’s owner.

“Do you know how lucky we are to have Brandon Spikes on the team?,” owner Robert Kraft exclaimed two weeks ago. “He’s the man. He’s the man. He told me we were going to win that game and when he made that interception that was so cool. He told me he was going to do it for Myra [Kraft’s deceased wife]. I love having this man on our team.”

On Sunday, Allen’s dream comes true and Spikes’s hard work will be realized when he steps on the field as the starting inside linebacker for the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI.

Photo Credit: CBS Boston

1 » Appearing Monday on WKOV 690 AM in Jacksonville, FL, new Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan responded to a caller who was wondering if he would consider trading for Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow should he be made available. “You know something? I think I can tell you this. I had a long chat with Wayne [Weaver] that year. Obviously the Rams drafted Sam Bradford, and I was talking to Wayne then on what they ought to do,” Khan said. “I should have an offline conversation with you, OK? I’m going to absolutely talk your ear off. Some of the stuff might not be politically correct, but I share your sentiment. I think, when is the next time Jacksonville is going to have an athlete like Tim Tebow? Coming from being raised in Illinois, I couldn’t see Red Grange playing for anybody other than the Bears or Dick Butkus playing for anybody other than the Bears. I don’t want to get into 20/20 hindsight, and God help us, the draft record has not been the best with the Jaguars.”

Khan was then asked by the host if he would have drafted Tebow had he been owner of the Jaguars at the time. “100 percent I would have. Absolutely,” he said. “The first Jaguars game I came to was in ’10, we played Denver here. There were a lot more Tebow jerseys in the Jaguars stands than the teal jerseys for any player, let’s face it. You hate to get into 20/20 hindsight and finger pointing, but certainly [I would have] if I had anything to do with it. We probably won’t have a chance like that again.”

2 » Even though his team is not participating in Super Bowl XLVI, Tebow will be in Indianapolis, IN for festivities over the course of the week. He will also be a guest on NBC‘s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Wednesday along with actor/comedian Tracy Morgan and musical group All American Rejects. Tebow’s name has been a hot topic on Fallon’s show recently as the host as done a parody character of him and David Bowie and also used him in a number of jokes over the last few weeks.

Click to expand and read four more BITS in this post.

1 » One of two schools vying for the services of five-star defensive end Darius Hamilton (Ramsey, NJ), the Florida Gators were thought to be behind the Rutgers Scarlet Knights in contention for his commitment. The New Jersey boy was expected to stay in-state and play for Rutgers but his thoughts may be in the process of changing when it was reported Thursday morning that the Scarlet Knights’ head coach, Greg Schiano, is on his way to take the same job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Hamilton has said that Florida and Rutgers were his final two and planned to make an announcement sometime before National Signing Day on Feb. 1. He was supposed to meet with Schiano on Wednesday, but it is unknown if that visit took place.

Should the Gators miss out on Hamilton and/or five-star athlete Josh Harvey-Clemons (Valdosta, GA), Florida could offer a scholarship to three-star DE Junior Gnonkonde (Lakeland, GA). According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, UF has been calling about the former Georgia Tech commitment but will only have room for him in their class if they miss out on one or both of Hamilton and Harvey-Clemons.

2 » Originally scheduled to participate in the 2012 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow has been forced to withdraw from the event due to the multiple injuries he suffered against the New England Patriots in the second round of the NFL Playoffs. Though Tebow does not need surgery and is expected to make a full recovery, he will not be able to participate in the event from Feb. 9-12. An avid golfer, Tebow was undoubtedly looking forward to the event, and the tournament’s directors were certainly hoping he would be able to play as well.

Extra BIT » No. 5 Florida lacrosse will begin its 2012 campaign with an exhibition match Thursday against England at 6:30 p.m. The Gators are looking to build on consecutive impressive years and hope to win their first national championship in the program’s third season of existence.