Tebow Helps Gators Snap Streak Against 'Canes

GAINESVILLE | There’s a reason Florida hadn’t beaten Miami since 1985. The Hurricanes have had some pretty strong teams in those six meetings between then and now.

The Gators collided with a young UM team Saturday night that also has a chance to be pretty strong before this season is over. But it’s not quite there yet.

The ’Canes made things tough, real tough, on Tim Tebow and the nation’s No. 5 team. But Florida manged to finally pull away with a 17-point fourth quarter for a 26-3 victory before a record crowd (90,833) in The Swamp.

“That was a very tough win,” UF coach Urban Meyer said. “Give a lot of credit to our opponent. Boy, they played hard.

“Our defense played outstanding. That’s two weeks in a row. Our defense right now, if you don’t go hard you stand out like a sore thumb and you won’t play.”

Heading into the fourth quarter, the Gators were clinging to a 9-3 lead — and had only 243 total yards (and a lot of frustration) to show for those meager points.

Tebow and the offense finally broke through.

First, Percy Harvin scored on a 2-yard run less than two minutes into the quarter, the TD being set up by a leaping 28-yard reception by Carl Moore.

Then, with 8:59 to play, Tebow threw a 19-yard strike to Louis Murphy for a 23-3 lead.

Jonathan Phillips finished it off with a 29-yard field goal with 25 seconds left.

“(UM’s defense) did a nice job mixing it up,” Meyer said. “If I had to do it over, we probably would have done more play-action passing in the first half.

“We did some play-action passing in the second half. I wish we had done that a little earlier. In the fourth quarter, we opened up on offense a little bit and made some plays and guys played very well.”

Heading into the season, the popular perception about Florida was this would be a team that would have an explosive offense — and hope to have an improved defense.

On Saturday night, the Gators won with their defense, while the offense struggled.

The defense shut down UM’s running game, prevented true freshman quarterback Robert Marve from hitting any big plays in his first start, and held Miami to a mere 140 yards of total offense.

[ Robbie Andreu writes for The Gainesville Sun. ]