GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Jelani Jenkins was a redshirt freshman that night in 2010. He recalls how deafening The Swamp became as unbeaten LSU lined up for the game-tying field goal with 35 seconds left.
LSU kicker Josh Jasper, sizing up the goalposts from 53 yards away, tried to zone out the uproar, “but it was so loud I felt like my helmet was shaking.”
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On the visitors’ sideline, LSU coach Les Miles and special teams coordinator Joe Robinson kept an eye on the Gators defenders, hoping they’d be caught unaware by the field goal fake appropriately named “Tiger!”
What transpired next — the 150-pound kicker scooping up an errant over-the-shoulder pitch from his holder Derek Helton, then running around right end and diving past Jenkins for the first down — became peak Mad Hatter Madness.
On the 10th anniversary of LSU’s misdirection that led to a 33-29 victory, the circumstances remain a study in improbable execution, replay-booth geometry and perhaps divine intervention.
“It was heartbreaking,” said Jenkins.
“I’m surprised Florida didn’t figure it out,” said Jasper.
Jasper’s leg had the range, having hit from 57 yards during a spring game.
“Still,” he admitted, “making a 53-yarder on the road is not an ideal situation with the game on the line.”
As LSU’s offense moved across midfield in the final minute, trailing 29-26, Jasper stayed loose by booting balls into the net. When Florida stoned a third-and-1 play for a 2-yard loss, Jasper came out primed to kick. Pacing off his steps at the left hash mark, Jasper heard the referee whistle for a stoppage, which he presumed to be Florida’s attempt at icing him.
“But I found out Coach Miles had called it, and I was like, ‘What are we doing?’”
Gators fans behind the bench used the timeout to unload on the kicker.
“There’s only like 10 feet between the field and the stands at Florida, so the fans are right up on you,” said Jasper, who is a construction manager in Memphis and occasionally works with kickers at the Lausanne School. “I give them credit because they even knew my family’s names. And they were saying what they were going to do to my older sister Kolby. I don’t think I ever told my parents all the stuff they were saying, out of respect for Kolby.”
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With Jasper taking extra warmups during the timeout, he wasn’t huddling with the field goal unit, so he didn’t realize that Robinson — lovingly known as “Joe Rob” — had called for the fake. It was a crucial piece of missing information as Jasper jogged back onto the field a second time.
“For some reason, I turned around, and saw Joe Rob was calling me over,” Jasper said. “So I ran back and he told me, ‘Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!’”
Turns out the holder Helton wasn’t aware of the fake either.
“I ran out to the spot and told him, ‘Dude, we’re running the fake.’ And Derek looked at me like, ‘Are you kidding?’ It caught him off guard too.
“On the plane ride home after we won, I remember thinking, ‘How do you almost not tell the two most important people on the play?’”
Robinson, who’s now a special teams coordinator for UTEP, spent three seasons at LSU and found Miles to be “the best in the world about preparing our team with fakes.”
That became part of the program.
“He believed in ’em and he helped our team believe in ’em,” Joe Rob said. “We worked on them so much in practice that you knew when we ran one our chance of converting was great.”
For the previous six weeks, LSU had repped the “Tiger!” fake against the unsuspecting scout-team defense, with Jasper once taking a pitch to the house and never failing to pick up the first down. It even worked when they sprang it against the starting defense that included Patrick Peterson, Morris Claiborne, Tyrann Mathieu and Kelvin Sheppard.
Helton’s no-look flips at practice typically hit Jasper in rhythm. (“He was really good at it,” Robinson said.) But the one in The Swamp happened to be a complete flub.
“When I saw it come off his hand, I knew I wasn’t going to catch it without fumbling or kicking it,” Jasper said. “But the way the ball was rotating, I knew it was gonna bounce pretty much straight up.”
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The pitch that became an unintended bounce pass hit the kicker in stride and went for a 5-yard gain.
“Everybody on our team executed pretty well except the guy throwing the ball,” joked Robinson. “Thank goodness the belly of the ball hit the ground so that we got a good bounce and Josh made an unbelievable play.”
Said Jasper: “It wasn’t run perfectly, but it was run good enough.”
Or was it?
A review that stretched beyond five minutes threatened to unravel LSU’s trickery. The replay booth took an eternity going frame-by-frame to determine whether Helton’s flip was a lateral or an incomplete pass.
Gators coach Urban Meyer saw the video board replay and wishfully pointed “Florida ball” in the opposite direction. The LSU coaches on the headsets upstairs even warned Joe Rob that it appeared to be a forward pass.
“I was just demoralized,” Robinson said. “And I’m standing right there next to Coach Miles getting an earful about why that ball bounced off the ground. It was five minutes that felt like five hours.”
Jasper was confused, initially thinking officials merely were reviewing the first-down spot. It didn’t cross his mind that it might have been an incomplete pass.
“All of a sudden my heart sunk,” he said. “That was the game, you know?”
Multiple camera angles mixed with multiple prayers: Helton kneeling at the 43 and his over-the-shoulder pitch landing virtually in a direct line behind him. Ultimately, the replay official saw no evidence to overturn the first down.
Robinson said recently that “after looking at the replay a million times,” it still remains inconclusive as to whether or not the pitch went forward.
“We were so very close to that play not working,” he said. “Then 10 years later someone might be calling me to ask, ‘Why in the hell did y’all try that?’”
After the successful fake, LSU still had to finish the game-winning drive, of course, so more drama ensued. Jarrett Lee lobbed a 3-yard fade to Terrence Toliver for the go-ahead touchdown with six seconds left.
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In typical Miles fashion, even that margin was minuscule.
It still smacks of a crushing defeat for Florida’s Jenkins, who recorded his first college interception earlier in the night against Jordan Jefferson, the other half of LSU’s quarterback tandem.
“That was the biggest game I had played in my life up until that point,” said Jenkins, who became a three-year starter at Florida and spent four seasons with the Miami Dolphins. “It was The Swamp at night. Two ranked teams. And we were wearing orange.”
Though Florida was trying to block the field goal, the unit had safeguards in place and veteran players in position. Starters such as safeties Ahmad Black (35) and Will Hill (10), cornerback Janoris Jenkins (1), defensive end Duke Lemmens (44) and linebacker A.J. Jones (16) were on the field, as was Jelani Jenkins (43), who had taken over as the first-team middle linebacker.
“I was sort of a clean-up guy on the field goal,” Jenkins said. “I was supposed to be keeping my eyes on any type of fake.”
He noticed when LSU’s right-edge protector, tight end Chase Clement, ducked to invite penetration and rolled out. Within an instant, Clement was lead blocking for the kicker, and Jenkins strung the play out wide. But Jasper, who was athletic enough to play receiver in high school, outran the pursuit of Black (35) and cut back inside of Jenkins to reach the marker.
“I kinda overran him, and I was devastated,” Jenkins said. “As a perfectionist, as an athlete, you wanna make every play.
“I was so in the moment, and so hurt that they got the first down, I don’t think I realized that the ball bounced on the ground until the next day.”
Pounding the turf after failing to trip up Jasper, Jenkins barely paid attention to the replay review. “I wasn’t even thinking that the play might not count,” he said. “I was just thinking I should’ve made that play cleaner than I did.”
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Jenkins, who last played in the NFL in 2017, now operates a company called Mind Body Sports and speaks about the power of taking a positive approach.
“I know what I could’ve done better in that situation, and now there’s that part of me that is more forgiving,” he said, chuckling. “There obviously was a safer play than going for the block that we could’ve lined up for, but basically LSU just executed and we didn’t.
“It seems like there was something divine in the air that allowed that bounce to happen perfectly. LSU had it on their side that night.”
When a fake works, there’s a tendency to cast the victimized unit as flat-footed and unprepared. That wasn’t the case for Meyer, whose eyes had been opened to the vitality of special teams in 1996 when he was coaching receivers at Notre Dame and found himself reluctantly put in charge of the kicking and punt units. An offseason meeting with Frank Beamer changed Meyer’s perception and he subsequently spent his own money to visit with the NFL staffs of Bill Parcells in New England and Marty Schottenheimer in Kansas City.
Meyer carried that fire for special teams into his head coaching tenures at Bowling Green, Utah and it especially paid off at Florida, where between 2005 and 2010 the Gators blocked 32 kicks. That included a deflected field goal against Oklahoma in the BCS Championship Game in January 2009 and the legendary “Cock Block” to avoid a South Carolina upset in 2006.
Meyer’s attentiveness to special teams game-planning and the energy he directed toward attacking kicks, became the reason why LSU’s trickery succeeded.
“What you need for that play to work is an opponent that brings a real tough, hard rush from the field,” Robinson said. “Coach Meyer is one of the greatest special teams coaches there’s ever been, and Florida was good at blocking kicks because they were very aggressive. And the more aggressive they were, the better chance we had of that fake working.”
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Jenkins appreciated the emphasis Meyer placed on the special teams, how it galvanized young players to become a point of pride.
“We’d work on it every day, and Urb was very heavily involved in it,” Jenkins said. “Special teams ate first at the hotel for dinner, before the offense and the defense. Special teams was the team.”
Early in the fourth quarter against LSU, trailing 26-14, the Gators’ special teams jumpstarted a rally. Andre Debose exploited a crease by running back a kickoff 88 yards untouched.
It stood to be the monumental special teams play of the night … until the Mad Hatter struck in the final minute, when Jasper — still the second-most accurate kicker in LSU history — scooped up an errant pitch and cemented an unusual legacy.
“Nobody cares that I was an All-American kicker that season and had the most field goals in the nation,” he said. “They only wanna talk about the fake.”
(Top photo of Josh Jasper: Phil Sandlin / Associated Press)
