By Michael Wilbon
Thursday, January 5, 2006

PASADENA, Calif. Vince Young isn't quite the passer Matt Leinart is and he's not quite the runner Reggie Bush is. But Young certainly is enough of each to be a champion. Asked, in the biggest game of his life, to beat a two-time defending champion by going half the field in the final two minutes, Young completed passes as calmly as Leinart and ran as skillfully as Bush. He's the best player in college football because with his arm, legs and head he beat the triple-team of Leinart, Bush and LenDale White in the Rose Bowl on Wednesday night.

Young was so good, USC Coach Pete Carroll gambled with two minutes left and went for it on fourth and two, unsuccessfully, in an effort to keep the ball rather than punt it and concede Young a final chance. Asked if he would second-guess his decision, Carroll said no, that everybody in the house, 93,000-plus, had just seen Young go down the field like the wind, that the best way to win the game was to hold on to the ball and keep Young on the bench.

"It really didn't matter where they were going to start," Carroll said of Young getting one last chance. "He's really off the chart. That's a heck of a football player -- an extraordinary football player. He's as difficult a quarterback as there is to defend. That was our moment [on fourth down] to seal the win."

It was also the Longhorns' moment to win the game, once they stopped White on fourth down and danced triumphantly to the sideline as Young took over.

It seems the folks who voted Young a distant second to Bush in the Heisman Trophy race might have gotten it wrong. It was Young who rushed for 200 yards and passed for 267 to dethrone Southern Cal, to win the national championship, and to make himself a god forevermore in Texas, where nothing matters like football.

His eight-yard dash to the right corner of the end zone with 19 seconds left to give Texas its final margin, 41-38, will go down as one of the great clutch plays in college football history, even though he ran and threw with the same determination, precision and what felt like a sense of invincibility the entire night.

Young was the best player in a game of absurdly great players. How often do four college players as relentlessly hyped as Bush, Leinart, White and Young have been all season, deliver so thoroughly on demand? They produced one sublime play after another here in the Rose Bowl; White, Bush and Young even inserted themselves into the history books, breaking records 60 years old and putting up numbers nobody dared suggest.

Leinart, after a slow start, completed 16 of 19 passes the second half. With him firing darts, White plowing through Texas around the goal line (three touchdowns) and Bush making another handful of incomprehensibly brilliant plays, USC worked its way from a 16-7 deficit into a 38-26 fourth-quarter lead. Bush's turn-the-corner, 26-yard touchdown run was something that immediately led anybody old enough to jump to comparisons with all the greats from Jim Brown and Bobby Mitchell, to Gale Sayers and O.J. Simpson, to Herschel Walker and Marcus Allen, to Barry Sanders and Marshall Faulk.

Perhaps nobody, ever, at the college level has been as good turning the corner and laying tracks as Reggie Bush is at this very moment.

But we can play the comparison game with Young, too, since he's the greatest passing-and-running threat since John Elway was at Stanford. Not in Michael Vick's dreams does he feel the rhythm of the passing game the way Young feels it right now.

A third straight championship certainly seemed possible for USC, what with a quarterback as accurate as Leinart, a pair of runners as fast and as versatile as Bush and White, and receivers as athletic and as sure-handed as Dwayne Jarrett and Steve Smith. While USC certainly hadn't seen a defense with as much speed as Texas, the Longhorns hadn't run into anything remotely resembling the Trojans' offense.

And in realizing both those things, the nation was treated to a classic, perhaps even an epic.

"It was surreal when you're sitting there in the fourth quarter, down by two scores, and you think you're going to win the game," Texas Coach Mack Brown said. "We never really thought we were going to lose the game. The thing that I like best about our team tonight was that they never got discouraged -- they never gave up."

Brown was known, until now, as a coach who couldn't win the big one, like Roy Williams of North Carolina was known until that first Monday of last April when he ripped off that label. Brown, knowing that his drought was less severe than that of the University of Texas, which hadn't won since 1969, said his first phone call would be to the imperial coach of UT, Darrell Royal.

It didn't look good early for the Longhorns, what with a fumbled punt leading to a 7-0 USC lead. It could have been worse, perhaps should have been. But Carroll passed on a 33-yard field goal to go for it on fourth and one, only to have Leinart stuffed on a quarterback sneak. And there was that bizarre lateral attempt by Bush at the end of a 37-yard screen pass that led to an embarrassing turnover.

Perhaps Carroll and Bush and all of the Trojans, having won twice already, felt a little bit of invincibility and wanted to throw the knockout punch in the first round. Of course, the Longhorns were more resilient than that. And Young is too good to flinch at a 7-0 lead. It's incomprehensible that Young will stick to his latest statement and come back to Texas for his senior year after playing this way. And a man would have to be a fool to not seriously consider taking Young in the NFL draft, unless he has a proven and successful quarterback already aboard. His stock couldn't ever be higher than it is at this moment, having gone through the great Southern Cal to win the national championship.

"If he comes back next year, which we think he will," Brown said, "he'll have a tremendous chance to win the Heisman.

But it's difficult to believe that Young, with what he made happen in the Rose Bowl, could have any regrets, or could feel anything but euphoria after the performance of his life.