CORAL GABLES — Former Hurricanes cornerback Glenn Sharpe has always maintained he wasn’t guilty of pass interference on Ohio State’s Chris Gamble on the controversial play in the 2002 national title game.
Apparently, a couple of Buckeyes think the same.
Sharpe told me in a phone interview Sunday that his former Atlanta Falcons teammate Michael Jenkins, Ohio State’s leading receiver in that game, ”used to say all the time, ‘Yeah man, Chris was like, ‘Man, you know that was no pass interference.’ But he was going to take it cause the ref gave it to him.”
Sharpe added, “I’ve been told by Jenkins that Chris admitted it himself that it wasn’t pass interference. Even Jenkins said that. He was like, ‘Yeah, they [the refs] got you.”
Sharpe said Jenkins, “is a stand-up guy” and “he wasn’t really trying to rub anything in my face.”
The Hurricanes appeared to have won the 2003 Fiesta Bowl, which decided the ‘02 title, for about three seconds after the incompletion in the end zone until Porter threw a flag.
Here’s a few more comments from Sharpe regarding the 2003 Fiesta Bowl:
— (on what a national championship would have meant) “Obviously, with that being my freshman year and me being from Miami, [winning the title] would have been a big moment. …To come into college and win a national championship your first year, it doesn’t get any better than that.”
— (on the few seconds between the ball hitting the turf and the flag being thrown) ”I was real ecstatic, but then I saw the dreaded flag come out and I was like ‘Ah, man.’ I felt like they had gotten over on me a little bit. But there was nothing I could do about it. That’s just the way the chips fell.”
— (on watching replay of the controversial call) “It took me a while to watch the play to be honest with you. Because I knew what happened and I was real disappointed about it. And I just didn’t want to keep replaying that in my mind because at the end of the day, he made that call and [the refs] have to deal with that. I would feel much worse if I actually did pass interference. But since I know I didn’t, it kind of frees my mind. I don’t feel as though I did anything wrong. I just feel I got a tough break.”
“I’ve only watched that play twice. The first time I watched it was to see if there could have been any type of reason for calling pass intereference. The second time I watched it, I tried to watch it to see what I could have done better, find something I could have improved on. But that was it.”
— “I felt we were robbed of a national championship — the whole team, not just me. It wasn’t that I thought, ‘Oh, they ruined my career’ or ‘They called a bad play on me.’ I was more concerned about the team. We busted our butts that year, we had a great team and I felt like we really deserved to win that game.”
— (on getting over the call in ensuing years) “Football is just like life. A lot of times, things aren’t going to go the way you expect. But the main thing is to try to learn from every circumstance and every situation and don’t let it affect how you view things or affect your attitude.”
Courtesy of the Sun Sentinel
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