hilaryalehman

Before I begin this rant, a little about me (under a cut, because this is long and I know a lot of people won’t feel like reading):

I went to UF from 2005 to 2009. I was not a football fan when I entered college — I couldn’t have told you what a first down was — but I graduated a rabid Gators football fan. And I have Urban Meyer to thank for that.

Meyer started at UF the year I did, and so I always felt a connection with our coach. I happily joined in on many an “Urban Meyer, clap clap, clapclapclap” cheer. And when we won our two national championships in the 2006 and 2008 seasons, I gave all the credit to Urban.

I still do.

In 2009, the year of our undefeated season until we played the SEC Championship, I took our loss to Alabama hard. It was my last semester, and that loss came about a week away from graduation. I equated the football season ending with everything college-related ending. I woke up the morning after the SEC championship and cried.

I graduated. Surprisingly, the world did not end. Two days later, I was sitting in a hotel room in Baton Rouge, La., on my way home when I saw the news on Twitter: Urban Meyer to retire for health reasons.

I was pretty devastated. I thought it was kind of weird. But, I told myself and others, if Meyer’s health was at stake, who was I to judge? If he had suddenly had a mid-life revelation he wanted to spend more time with his family, that was his business.

That lasted a day. Then Urban Meyer came out of retirement.

Again, I thought it was kind of weird. But, we Gators had seen it happen before (see Donovan, Billy). I defended Meyer against allegations that he was a bad father, a liar about his health. Maybe he’d just realized how great Gainesville was. As someone who had just graduated and wanted more than anything to be able to go back, I thought I understood. Selfishly, I looked forward to another season with our seemingly golden coach.

And then, the 2010 season happened. Meyer had clearly been right about his health, or something. His heart wasn’t in it. The coaching, once the most creative in the SEC, couldn’t seem to get beyond the fact that we didn’t possess a running quarterback. When Meyer announced again that he’d retire at the end of the season, I felt better about it. He’d given it a try. He was worried about his health and his relationship with his family. We’d have a new coach who could give it his all.

Fast forward to last week. As a media junkie, I know that once you start to see a rumor everywhere, it’s probably true. And once Urban issued a forceful and carefully crafted denial, I knew it definitely was.

Now to the question I’ve been getting: “Why do you care?”

I like Will Muschamp a lot. I’m glad he’s our coach, and I look forward to the future with him. I am thankful to Urban Meyer for giving it his all in the five football seasons I was at Florida.

But the fact is that we live in a world where — naive expectation or not — people are expected to tell the truth. And if anything seems clear at this point, it is that Urban Meyer has not.

Meyer is certainly not the first coach to shirk his commitments and to deny that he was doing it. Roy Williams did it when he left Kansas to coach at Chapel Hill. Nick Saban did it when he left the Dolphins for LSU — issuing a denial that he was taking the job days before he did, which kicked off my longstanding distaste for him.

Does Meyer owe UF anything? At this point, I’d say no. But he owed us that last season he was at Florida. He didn’t give us that. He left us with a team with very little depth and no concept of how to work together as an offense. He broke his promises to recruits based on something that has turned out to be a myth. And poor John Brantley — I want to send him a fruit basket for everything he had to go through under an Addazio/Meyer offense that was completely tuned out.

But that’s not the biggest thing.

I’ve been thinking a lot these past few weeks about what it means to be a college football fan, and I’ve come to this conclusion: college football is never, ever about integrity. In fact, it is often about the opposite. We tell players to keep their promises to the University, to not take money in exchange for playing football for their school. But the same players play for coaches who will cover up those NCAA violations and hide behind  “integrity” and sweater vests; coaches who will use their families as human shields to quit when the going gets rough and then take $4 million a year when they tire of family time.

I realize a lot of people will disagree with this. I realize these moves were the most effective for Meyer’s career and got him where he wanted to be. And I get that Gators feel that we owe him loyalty for the national championships he brought us.

Sure, it’s about Urban Meyer for me. He created some of my fondest memories from a great four years. But it’s also about what he represents in college football, that choices are always OK as long as they end up in wins and dollar signs. It all makes it hard for me to reconcile my extreme fandom and support with a system that, in practice, repeatedly endorses some of the things I find most abhorrent: deception and hypocrisy, throwing people under the bus to get what you want.