After four years of starting and stopping, being put into games and being pulled out, sharing time and accepting blame, Doug Johnson finally heard the words from Steve Spurrier he longed to hear.

	Doug Johnson has thrown 62 TDs in his Florida career.

"Doug has clearly proven he's our best quarterback," Spurrier said when he named Johnson his starter this fall. "He's earned it."

Earned it? There have been moments, no doubt, when Johnson believed he paid for the chance to be Florida's starting quarterback several times over.

From the 1996 season, when Johnson became the first true freshman to see playing time at quarterback for Spurrier at Florida, to last year, when Johnson shared playing time with Jesse Palmer until Palmer's season-ending injury, the 21-year-old Gainesville, Fla., native has experienced the ups and downs of the game's most demanding position for perhaps the game's most demanding coach.

Perhaps for the first time in his career, Johnson does not have to look over his shoulder during games. When third-ranked Florida plays host to Alabama Saturday at Florida Field, Johnson knows he will be the starting quarterback.

"I don't know if anything has changed (in my relationship with Spurrier)," said Johnson, who on Florida's career passing charts is ranked fourth with 54 touchdown passes and sixth with 5,677 yards. "He's like any coach. He's more confident with a player as the player gets older. But that's any coach's relationship with a player."

But there is a special relationship between Spurrier and his quarterbacks. The stories are legendary. Spurrier is quick to point out mistakes, quick to hand off blame to his quarterbacks.

Yet just as automatic are the big numbers Spurrier's quarterbacks always put up, at whatever level Spurrier is coaching.

"He challenges you," said Anthony Dilweg, who was one of Spurrier's first college quarterbacks, starting as a senior at Duke in 1988.

In that one season, Dilweg set Atlantic Coast Conference records for total offense, passing yards and passing touchdowns while earning conference Player of the Year honors.

"He would put a lot of pressure on you during the week," said Dilweg, who works in Durham, N.C., and is the sideline reporter for Duke football games. "If you made a mistake, the first thing he'd do is ask you why. He wanted to know why I did what I did. What was I thinking? Why did I look for this receiver instead of that receiver?

"In practice, he was always in your face challenging you, in some, let's say, colorful language. I adjusted to it pretty well, but others didn't like it. A lot of times you had to listen to what he said, not how he said it."

Johnson has listened and learned. Through four games this season, Johnson has completed 76-of-140 passes (.543) for 1,137 yards, 12 touchdowns and six interceptions.

He directs an offense that is averaging 43.5 points per game, best in the SEC and second best in the nation. And his average of 284.2 passing yards per game is ranked second in the SEC only to Kentucky quarterback Dusty Bonner's average of 335.8.

"I don't know that I'm any more confident than I've been," Johnson said. "But when you play every snap, every series, you get into a groove where you know you can play. That's the negative part of alternating quarterbacks (which Florida did last year) -- you can't really get into a groove."

It didn't hurt that Johnson, a second-round draft choice of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 1996, has not played baseball in nearly two years.

He stopped after his sophomore season because of shoulder surgery and then couldn't play this past spring after breaking his left leg last year in the Orange Bowl against Syracuse.

"That has helped (not playing baseball)," Johnson said. "Not having had to make that transition from baseball to football has made it easier. I'm in the best shape of my life, having worked out all summer.

"I just wanted to give myself the best chance to be a football player. I didn't see a reason to go back to baseball after missing over a year of baseball. Why try to go hit curveballs when I felt I had something good going here in football at the University of Florida?"

Good, with a chance to be great?

"Ask me at the end of the season," Johnson said. "Then I can tell you the answer to that."

(Ray Melick writes for the Birmingham Post-Herald in Alabama.)