In sending Ohio State to a second straight crushing defeat in the title game, marauding LSU became the first school to win the BCS twice

Boeckman fumbled on Highsmith's fourth-quarter sack, and the celebration was on for LSU. Al Tielemans/SI

By Austin Murphy

LSU quarterback Matt Flynn had just thrown the last of his four touchdown passes in the BCS championship game on Monday night, a soft lob to tight end Richard Dickson, who might as well have been wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, for all the success that Ohio State had in covering him. With the Buckeyes driving -- they put up a window-dressing touchdown to cut the final score to 38-24 -- Flynn stood on the bench with less than two minutes left, leaning over to embrace teammates and taking in the scene. The normally stoic Flynn, a senior from Tyler, Texas, sighed deeply several times and blinked back tears.

"I was standing there thinking what this team had gone through, and what I'd gone through," he recalled later in the Tigers' nearly deserted locker room at the Superdome. "I mean, you can't dream it any better than that."

On his first visit to the Baton Rouge campus, when he was a star at Robert E. Lee High, Flynn arrived at night and stood outside Tiger Stadium. The grand old bowl was bathed in light, "and it gave me chills," he recalls. "I knew it was a place I wanted to be, a program on the rise."

Flynn committed to LSU before his senior season. What he didn't know was that, six months later, LSU would sign an even more highly touted quarterback. For the next four years (including a redshirt season), Flynn was a backup, playing behind one JaMarcus Russell the last three. During that time Flynn was tempted by outsiders to transfer, but he stuck it out, holding for extra points, taking snaps in garbage time, waiting "stubbornly," as he put it, for his day in the sun.

That day arrived this season, but only after Russell left early for the NFL (and became the No. 1 pick in the draft). Even then the sunshine quickly faded for Flynn. He was tearing up Virginia Tech in LSU's second game when he suffered a high right-ankle sprain that kept him out of the next game and curtailed his mobility for several weeks. Then, on a late touchdown run against Arkansas on Nov. 23, he separated his throwing shoulder. Two painkilling injections allowed him to stay in that game, a 50-48 triple overtime loss, but the bum shoulder kept him out of the SEC championship game eight days later. "I've watched a lot of games here, but the hardest thing I've ever had to do was watch that one," he said of the Tigers' 21-14 win over Tennessee.

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