Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  Urban decided to give it a try. Both of them visited Johnson during the month he spent in jail, and after his release he spent a lot of time at the Meyers’ house. He became like a big brother to their three children. Urban did what he could to help the kid, but he didn’t empathize with him the way Shelley did. “My attitude was, if you have an addiction to smoking, stop smoking. If you have an addiction to alcohol, stop drinking,” he says.

  Shelley understood that her husband didn’t have the highest regard for her profession. “He was raised to be really strong, so you don’t need help with anything,” Shelley says. “I think it was hard for him to see that people might need help dealing with emotions, stress, loss, addiction—that people could have difficulty dealing with those things to the point where they would try to commit suicide or need to be in a hospital.”

  With Johnson and Smith back in the fold, Utah embarked on a season for the ages. Having begun with high expectations, they entered November with a perfect record. They had become one of the biggest stories in college football. Because Utah played in the Mountain West Conference, the only way it would have a chance to play for a national championship was to go undefeated, and even then it was far from a sure thing. A single loss and the season was over.

  For the first time in his career, Meyer was faced with the challenges of celebrity, scrutiny, and colossal expectations. The stress started to wear on him. He confessed to his younger sister, Erika, that he was “petrified” of losing. “Now we’re all like that—petrified of him losing,” she said. That was especially concerning since Meyer was still trying to contain the benign cyst in his head. During that upset of Oregon the previous season, he was hit by a blinding pain that brought him to his knees. The next week, he went to a doctor to get a CAT scan. When he came in to view the results, he saw the large, dark mass blotting out the image of his brain. Holy shit, he thought. I’ve got a brain tumor. The doctor assured Meyer he did not have a tumor, but that the cyst appeared to have grown. He would have to make doubly sure that he kept his stress to a minimum. That was easier said than done.

  The dreaded loss never came, but even though Utah finished the season with an 11–0 record, due to its weak schedule it was denied an opportunity to participate in the Bowl Championship Series National Championship Game. The Utes capped off the season with a win over Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl. Smith went on to become the No. 1 pick in the 2005 NFL draft, and Meyer became the hottest ticket in the sport.

  As it happened, two of the most prestigious programs in the country, Notre Dame and Florida, had vacancies. Meyer’s abilities were so obvious that there was no suspense as to whether those schools would offer him the job. The only question was which one he would accept. Dozens of media outlets followed every wrinkle in the competition to land him. Despite his sentimental ties to Notre Dame, Meyer chose Florida because he believed he would have a better chance to win a national championship there. So once again he picked up his family, which now included a sixteen-year-old son named Nate, and moved them to another part of the country. He was officially off and running, and the pace was only going to get quicker.

  * * *

  • • •

  For the first time in his career, Meyer was the head coach at a place where winning wasn’t so much appreciated as expected. It was also the third time in five years that he took on the exhausting grind of taking over a program and instilling a culture. His persistence would be tested—and developed—like never before.

  If Meyer was going to get to Us at Florida the way he did in his previous two jobs, he would need another first-rate staff. Mullen and several others who were with him in the past came along, but he also hired two people who would become invaluable—Mick Marotti, the strength coach whom he had befriended at Notre Dame, and Steve Addazio, the tight ends coach at Notre Dame who had gone on to become offensive coordinator at Indiana. One of the staples of Meyer’s leadership was his ability to teach assistants what he needed them to know and then empower them to pass that knowledge to the players. Crucially, Addazio came up with the concept of “Nine Units.” Meyer loved it. From that point on, the team would not have coordinators, it would have “unit leaders.” At various times during the season, Meyer would call on one of the leaders without warning and ask him to speak to the team. “You’ve got fifteen minutes,” he would say. “Make us better.” This created a foxhole mentality within the team. The players got to be so close with the head of their unit that if he ever got dressed down by Captain Emergency for something they did, they would feel awful and want to redeem the unit immediately.

  Meyer inherited a capable quarterback in Chris Leak, but he was not nearly as mobile as Josh Harris at Bowling Green. Nor did his mind work as quickly as Smith’s. The Gators went 9–3 in that first season—good, but not good enough. Once again, Meyer’s culture took hold in his second year. With Leak growing into the offense, the Gators went through the season winning 12 of their 13 games and were granted a slot in the BCS National Championship Game. There they met Meyer’s childhood team, Ohio State, and prevailed easily, 41–14.

  That championship vaulted Meyer into the stratosphere, a perch he did not occupy comfortably. He was still in many ways the same guarded kid from Ashtabula, Ohio. Gainesville is a relatively small college town, and the folks there are obsessed with their football team. Meyer was only forty-two years old. Life was coming at him fast. Every move he made was dissected by the public and scrutinized by the press.

  As long as he had good players to coach, his team would always have a chance to win a national championship. That was especially true at quarterback, which required a unique skill set, intellect, and level of determination to run his offense. Meyer had been fortunate to work with great quarterbacks in the past, but he was about to partner with one whose physical gifts and mental makeup would prove to be the perfect complement. Too perfect, perhaps.

  In many ways, Tim Tebow was a better version of a young Urban Meyer. He was bigger, stronger, faster, more talented, more handsome, more outgoing, more pious, and, if possible, more determined. Meyer noticed that Tebow was a different breed of cat as soon as he stepped on campus in January 2006. “We did rope pulls, tug-of-war, weight lifting. Any competitive drills we did, he was going to win it,” Meyer recalls. If Tebow wasn’t in the weight room or the practice field, he was in the head coach’s office. He and his coach typically spent eight hours a day together, having long talks about football, life, whatever came to mind. Tebow practically lived in the facility, so much so that Marotti, who is no shrinking violet himself, had to order the quarterback to leave. “I would have to tell him, ‘Tim, get out of here, go be a kid,’” Marotti says.

  Tebow played a minor role as the backup quarterback during the 2006 championship season. Once he became the starter, he grew into one of the truly iconic players in the history of the college game. At 6´3˝, 245 pounds, he was basically a fullback who could throw a little. But he was a winner. The rest of the players fed off his confidence. Tebow finished the 2007 regular season with the second-highest passing efficiency in the nation while averaging 4.3 yards per carry and rushing for 20 touchdowns. He led the Gators to a win over rival Florida State with a fractured bone in his right (nonthrowing) hand. On December 8, 2007, Tebow was awarded the ultimate individual prize in his sport, the Heisman Trophy.

  And yet the Gators finished with a disappointing 9–4 record. Meyer cursed himself for relaxing his micromanaging tendencies, delegating more responsibilities to his staff, and trying to spend a little more time with his family. This was the first time in his head coaching career that he was in his third season at a single place, so he thought he could ease up just a hair. The correlation between those modifications and the team’s record is suspect to say the least, but in Meyer’s mind, the lesson was clear: He could not ease off, ever, for any reason, even just a little. If he wasn’t all in, all the time, the program would suffer.

  Tebow returned f
or his junior season, and though Meyer said he would lighten his quarterback’s load in hopes of preserving him physically, Tebow broke Emmitt Smith’s school career rushing touchdown record—an astounding accomplishment for a quarterback. He did not win another Heisman Trophy (he finished third in the voting), but he did lead the Gators to another national championship, this time a 24–14 win over Oklahoma in the BCS National Championship Game.

  It was remarkable. Meyer was only forty-four years old. He had been a head coach for all of eight seasons. But he owned two titles in three years. He should have felt like he was on top of the world, but he had long before stopped taking the time to enjoy his success. As soon as the win over Oklahoma was over, he went right into a back office and started calling recruits. Shelley noticed he was more preoccupied than ever. He even sent text messages while they were in church.

  Meyer had organized a victory meal during the season for his players after every win, but he stopped going after a few weeks because he preferred to study video of the next opponent. He went back some time later, only to discover that very few players were there. When Meyer asked Marotti where everyone was, Marotti told him that once the head coach stopped coming, the players figured it was okay to skip it as well. Meyer was running hard now, and fast, but not necessarily in the right direction. “Winning stopped being fun,” Mullen says. “Losing was miserable and winning was a relief. That can really wear on you. Where’s the joy in what you’re doing?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Few people knew just how badly the pressure was getting to him. Meyer had always been a great sleeper, but he started having trouble during his first season at Florida. Now that problem was getting worse. He had an unhealthy tendency to stop eating during the season. He also skipped his daily workouts, which Shelley found perplexing. “I’d tell him every day, ‘What, you can’t skip thirty minutes of film to work out? Just get on a treadmill,’” she says.

  Even more frightening, Urban found himself experiencing mysterious chest pains. He thought about other coaches who had died suddenly from heart attacks, like his friend Randy Walker, the football coach at Northwestern, or Wake Forest basketball coach Skip Prosser. He went to a cardiologist on multiple occasions, but each time the doctor found no irregularities. Yet the pains would not subside. The specter of a serious heart problem added to his anxiety, which, in a diabolical cycle, made his anxiety even worse.

  Tebow surprised everyone by turning down the NFL draft and returning for his senior season. In many ways, that was just about the worst thing that could have happened to Meyer. It was as if he were an alcoholic whose drinking buddy said he was going to live with him for another year. The Gators began the season ranked No. 1 by the largest margin in the history of the Associated Press’s preseason poll, but that wasn’t good enough for Meyer and Tebow. They wanted to accomplish something that had never been done at Florida: an undefeated season.

  It’s hard to imagine a more foolish decision. Instead of staying in the moment—setting daily goals like having a good practice, a good film session, a good workout, a good night’s rest—Meyer and Tebow pushed the goalposts farther away and made the thought of losing even more frightening. At the same time, Meyer was taking on more responsibility for running the program because he had lost several assistants, including Mullen and Addazio, who had been hired away as head coaches. When I brought this up to him, I half apologized for using the word foolish, but he cut me off. “Foolish is the appropriate word,” he said. “You’re talking about two very driven personalities. Go undefeated? Here’s what you need to do. Sleep’s not necessary. Don’t need to eat, don’t need to work out, let’s just see if we can get there.”

  They almost did, remaining perfect through October and November and strengthening their hold on the No. 1 ranking. Meyer was grinding himself past the point of no return. He was taking two Ambien pills and drinking a can of beer just to get three or four hours of sleep. Despite the efforts of his wife and staff to get him to eat, or at least drink protein shakes during the day, he was too wound up to ingest anything. He dropped nearly forty pounds. His pants sagged off him so badly that Marotti called him “Poopy Drawers.” Shelley knew her husband was having a hard time, but she was in denial about how bad things were. “You don’t really see that physical change when you’re with somebody every day,” she says. “I didn’t think it was really bad.”

  Urban, on the other hand, knew full well he was on a downward spiral. He just felt there was nothing he could do to stop the momentum. “I wasn’t oblivious to what was happening. I lost thirty-seven pounds, I was unhealthy, I wasn’t working out,” he says. “It’s just, when do you find time to stop it in this profession? Are you gonna take that time during recruiting? No. Will you take time during spring practice? No. You take time during the month of July, but then you’re getting ready for the ship to pull away in August.”

  The Gators finished the regular season 12–0, setting up a titanic clash with No. 2 Alabama in the SEC championship game. Four days before the game, Meyer had to suspend his prized defensive end Carlos Dunlap after he was charged with driving under the influence. That further darkened Meyer’s mood. “His reaction was all about ‘woe is me, the sky is falling,’ rather than what our response would be,” Marotti says. “It was almost like because we didn’t have Carlos Dunlap, we couldn’t win. That’s when I was like, This ain’t good.”

  On the morning of the Alabama game, Florida’s sports information director for football, Steve McClain, reached out to Shelley and said he wanted to talk to her. When she got to the stadium, McClain told her that he was very concerned about her husband. She was taken aback but figured they would deal with the problem once the season was over. Marotti had the same sense of foreboding as he stood next to Meyer on the sideline during the game. “I could see it on his face. Like, Man, he don’t look right,” Marotti recalls. “It just looked like he wasn’t even there. Then the game got worse, it just snowballed. He was fighting, but the tank had run out.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Florida lost that day, 32–13. That ended both the Gators’ undefeated dream and their chance to play for a national championship. Later that night, as Meyer was lying in his bed at home in Gainesville, he experienced a chest pain more severe than any he had known. He let out a yelp and fell out of bed. Shelley dialed 911. As she knelt beside Urban listening to his breathing and checking his pulse, she felt confident he was not having a heart attack. She tried to pry him up—“Urban, honey, wake up,” she said on the 911 call that later become public—but he would not stir. The ambulance soon arrived and transported him to a local hospital.

  Meyer does not remember much about that night, which is a blessing. He does, however, recall waking up in the ambulance and thinking that he might be dying. “I remember asking them, ‘Did my son see it?’” he told me. “When they told me he didn’t, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m fine now.’ That’s all I really remember.”

  When he was examined in the hospital, the doctors told Meyer he definitely had not suffered a heart attack. Instead of bringing relief, that loosed a set of deeper fears. “That’s when your mind really starts playing games with you. It’s not a heart attack. What is it, then?” he says. He was referred to a gastroenterologist, who suggested that his symptoms indicated a severe case of reflux. The doctor prescribed Nexium. Within two days, the pains subsided.

  Meyer was relieved that he finally had a diagnosis, but clearly his problems went deeper. After a few weeks of thinking things over and talking with his family, he announced to a stunned public that he intended to resign following Florida’s game in the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s Day.

  The next day, however, he backtracked, calling his separation from the team a “leave of absence” and saying he believed he would be on the sidelines the following season. Bud, in an interview with New York Times reporter Pete Thamel, voiced skepticism about the effects of t
aking a leave. “Of course he can’t change,” Bud said. “You can’t change your essence. You can change if you drink orange or grapefruit juice for breakfast. You can’t change the nature of your being.”

  Meyer coached the Gators to a 51–24 Sugar Bowl victory over Cincinnati, his alma mater. Though he ostensibly took a few months off to rest and recover, he stayed in touch with recruits, helping Florida to land the consensus No. 1 class yet again. By mid-March, he was back on the sideline for the spring game. His leave of absence was officially over.

  With his chest pains under control, Meyer thought continuing to coach was what he wanted. His certitude was punctured later that fall, when his daughter Gigi signed a letter of intent to play volleyball for Florida Gulf Coast University. Gigi signed the letter at a public ceremony at her high school. Urban thought about skipping it—he had lots of work to do that day—but his assistant guilted him into attending. As Gigi spoke, she thanked Shelley for driving her to all her practices and matches. Then she said, “Dad, you were never there, but thank you, too.” Gigi didn’t mean it to come off as harsh as it sounded, but the pain that Urban felt was as bad as any reflux. He realized at that moment that even though he loved his daughter very much, he had not given her much of his T-I-M-E. And now it was too late.