SCOTT JACOBS

When you’re immersed in a big time rivalry there’s very little grey area.  You see things black and white, generally wins and losses.  You hate the other team with all your might, and you wish for their failure.  Sometimes, your hatred of that school or team is so great, that you find yourself rooting harder for them to lose, than for your own team to win.  You laugh when their superstar cries, and any weakness with their coach is one that you jump on and poke fun of mercilessly.  You bash their town, their stadium, and you look for faults even when there are few.

But no matter how much I dislike Florida or Urban Meyer, and want to celebrate the great coach stepping away from an empire he appeared to be building, I just can’t.  I’m not happy today.  Not even a smile.  Florida’s team on paper just took a huge backstep.  It means nothing.  I didn’t like Meyer (probably because he won so damn much) and his team was the love of ESPN’s life, but today I find myself saddened by his departure from the game.  You hate to see anyone have to go out because of health problems.  Not like this.  Not now.

But Meyer’s shocking announcement that he’s stepping down as head coach is not because he lost his love of the game.  It’s because he loves life too much to let the stresses of being a football coach at a bigtime level put that life in jeopardy.  Meyer has stated that this is not something that has happened overnight and that it was something that was building up over the years.  Maybe it started at Bowling Green.  Maybe Utah.  Maybe it was long before any of that.

“I have given my heart and soul to coaching college football and mentoring young men for the last 24-plus years and I have dedicated most of my waking moments the last five years to the Gator football program,” Meyer said in a statement.

Today he decided that his heart was more important than winning football games.  Today he gave up the chance to head a potential dynasty.  Florida has already claimed two national titles in the last three years.  They were a SEC Championship beatdown away from playing for another one.  Winning cures all the saying goes.  But apparently Meyer didn’t know how to cope with losing.  And there was not a whole lot of losing.  Meyer lost just 10 times since taking over the Florida job in 2005.

It’s been well chronicled that coaching can be a very stressful profession and coaching an elite team in a ‘football is life’ conference probably doesn’t help relieve that stress.  There is big time pressure in big time college football to succeed.  UF was number one most of this past season, but it didn’t seem like an enjoyable year.  Once it became inevitable that UF and Bama were on a crash course to play for a berth in the national title game, only one thing mattered: beating the Tide.  UF’s dynamite season was virtually erased it seemed when Alabama pummeled the Gators in Atlanta, and shortly after news broke that Meyer had been hospitalized.

Rivals are supposed to relish when their enemy gets weakened.  But there is no joy in this.  No one wants to see a great career come to a halt just like this.  Not me, hopefully not anyone.  But after their Sugar Bowl matchup with Cincinnati (in the game that has more storylines than half the 32 bowl games combined), Meyer will recede into the background.  He’ll stay in Gainesville, live a much more low key life, and hopefully his health will improve.

It’s not often that a coach takes himself out of the game when he makes as much as Meyer does, or wins as much as Meyer does.  But his health is more important than any crystal ball or two, and today Meyer made that official to a stunned college football world.

Photo: AP

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