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It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Tebow!

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By STEVE OTTO Steve Otto

sotto@tampatrib.com sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: October 21, 2009

So there we were, properly duded up in orange and blue and crammed together with 90,000 or so of our closest friends, ready for the victim du jour, in this instance the Arkansas Razorbacks.

It was The Swamp on a late Saturday afternoon in the fall. Surrounding the stadium and across the campus it was a homecoming and tailgating festival as the faithful gathered around grills and portable TVs.

It was the perfect place to forget the recession, the health care crisis or the fact that two of those idiot lights on your dashboard kept suggesting something was dreadfully wrong with your car. There is nothing like a college town on a football weekend in the fall, and in this particular town they do it better than most.

With all the pompoms and circumstance, you had to believe there was no finer place to be in all of America as the No. 1 ranked Gators galloped onto the field escorted by streaming banners and the roar of the faithful.

There was even a football game to go with all the hoopla, although on this particular afternoon someone had forgotten to give the script to the teams. The favored Gators struggled early in a game where the 90,000 fans seldom sat as the hometown heroes turned the ball over too many times. They didn't seem to realize they were supposed to be rolling over the visitors, whose fans were jammed into a corner of the stadium and all appeared to be wearing pig hats and shouting "Sooey!".

It's Tebow time

Every time the Gators would get the ball, a woman standing about six inches behind my left ear would holler out, "It's Tebow time," as if reminding the rest of us that the Florida quarterback was about to take the snap and personally win the game.

It was understandable. Around Gator nation, Tim Tebow is regarded as the greatest football player of all time, and the loudspeakers in The Swamp blared out the theme from "Superman" just to remind us. It's not just his playing. He is a great individual, somewhere in the ballpark with Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer, and there was no doubt he was willing the Gators out of their funk on Saturday.

Despite that, by the third quarter I'd about had it with the "It's Tebow time" woman behind me. There was nothing to do about it. We were packed in so close, I'd gotten mustard on my shirt from at least one guy who tried to squeeze back through the masses from the concession stand.

It's county commissioner time?

It's funny how we treat sports leaders and those in the real world. I haven't heard anybody around here hollering "It's Crist time" or "It's Obama time."

I did hear some people yelling at a recent county commission meeting, but I don't think it was quite the same thing.

Of course, governments are a little like football teams in that it takes more than a quarterback to make them work. There are plenty of people in government ready to take credit if something actually goes well.

Tebow is a great player. But more than that, what he gives the Gators is leadership - something I haven't seen much of in government, where the favorite play seems to be passing the buck.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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