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Sunday, June 11, 2006
Meyer ready to raise the bar
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
By the usual standards, Urban Meyer had a great first season. His Florida Gators beat Tennessee, beat Georgia, beat Florida State, beat Iowa in the Outback Bowl. But Florida also managed to miss the SEC title game because it lost to Steve Spurrier, which meant the old measures didn’t fully apply.
Did losing to Spurrier and South Carolina affix a small asterisk to an otherwise heartening season? No, said Meyer. “A big one.” So give him credit for candor.
Also give him credit for being cool — literally. On Sunday he addressed the Atlanta Gator Club wearing khaki shorts. In his prepared remarks, Meyer bluntly told the gathering of 600 that Florida was “not a great program.” (He added: “We’re going to get there.”) He also conceded the drought — five years and counting — since the Gators last played for the SEC championship was simply unacceptable.
Is this the year it ends? (Preseason consensus has Florida No. 1 in the SEC East and among the nation’s 10 best teams.) Not willing to clamber onto a Donnan-like limb, Meyer went mum. Asked by a Gator Clubber about the odds of Florida playing in the Georgia Dome on Dec. 2, the coach said: “I’m not going to answer that.”
Earlier, in a quickie interview conducted outside the Cobb Galleria Centre, Meyer said he’d put his team “right in the middle of the pack” in the East. But middle-of-the-pack is where the overmatched Ron Zook kept finishing, which is why Meyer now has his job.
Last season, Meyer said, was “a learning experience for everyone involved.” His vaunted spread offense didn’t function nearly as well in a conference where defenders can really run. (The Gators finished 61st nationally in total offense.) Many believe the smallish dropback passer Chris Leak is the wrong sort of quarterback to oversee the spread, a notion with which Meyer quibbles.
Asked if Leak would be the guy he’d choose if college coaches got to draft players, Meyer said: “I’ve got to be careful how I answer this. He had a great spring, so I’d say he would be. But we’ve got to do a better job of doing what he does well.”
There are places where going 9-3 would buy a first-year head coach a hasty extension — hello, Charlie Weis — but Florida is no longer one of those. The Gators expect greatness from all their teams. Indeed, Meyer was scheduled to address the Atlanta Gator Club on Saturday, April 1, but the convocation was postponed because that happened to be the date of the Final Four.
“Are we now a basketball school?” said Meyer, who sat in the RCA Dome as the Gators took their title. “We’ve got a volleyball coach who has won like 15 SEC titles in a row, and she thinks we’re a damn volleyball school.” And the football program? “Everything is in place to win.”
The schedule is harder: Florida faces road tests at Tennessee and Auburn and Florida State. But recruiting seemed to go swimmingly, and Meyer has gotten glowing reports on offseason conditioning. “We’re not having to convince guys to work hard,” he said.
This could well be a return-to-glory season for the once-mighty Gators, but if last year convinced Meyer of anything it’s that the SEC has more skeptics per capita than any league in the land.
“I wasn’t quite prepared for the opinionated officials,” he told the crowd, and then he recounted a moment from the Georgia game.
The Bulldogs had cut a 14-point deficit to four and the Gators, needing a play to change the dynamics, faced fourth-and-inches. So Meyer told the nearest ref, “If we don’t get the [Georgia alignment] we want, I’m going to burn a timeout. I’ve got a fake punt called. And he looks at me like, ‘You’re running a fake punt?’ “
Long story short: The fake punt worked and Florida won and the official stopped with the incredulous looks. And that’s the nature of the business. Win the SEC East and nobody will look askance at this coach and his spread offense. Lose to Steve Spurrier enough times and Urban Meyer will be looking for work.
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