The Essential Gator was getting closer now, the yards clipping beneath his feet as he approached, the noise rising with every step he took.
The game was over, if you can still refer to these Florida-FSU get-togethers as games, and all that remained was the approval. After all, this was the guy who had enabled all of the celebrations the past few seasons.
And so, on a brisk November night, he ran toward an end zone filled with fans wearing blue jerseys. The crowd called his name, and fans waved their posters, and the sound of it all was a bit like gratitude.
In 2004, Meyer was recognized as the college football "coach of the year" by both sportswriters (Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year) and television commentators (Home Depot Coach of the Year Award). He has 20 years of college coaching experience, including eight as a head coach. His overall record as a head coach through the end of the 2008 season is 83–17, and he is 41–13 in conference play. His winning percentage (.830) ranks second nationally among active college coaches.
Meyer is a devout Roman Catholic and, on several occasions, has referred to the head coaching position at the University of Notre Dame as his "dream job", leading to speculation that he would someday wish to coach there. However, according to a July 2009 newspaper report, Meyer insisted he would never leave Florida for Notre Dame . And when the employment status of Irish coach Charlie Weis came into question in November of 2009, Meyer held a press conference to dispel rumors linking him to the possible opening, stating that he would remain at Florida for "as long as they’ll have me.”
Meyer spent one season interning as a defensive backs coach at Saint Xavier High School in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1985, where he met members of the Ohio State coaching staff. His first collegiate coaching position was a two-year stint as a graduate assistant at Ohio State. He then spent the next 13 years as an assistant—two at Illinois State, six at Colorado State, and five at Notre Dame.
After two seasons at Bowling Green, he took the job at Utah in 2003. In his first year there, Meyer was named the Mountain West Conference's Coach of the Year with a 10–2 record, the best ever for a coach's first season at Utah.
Meyer is widely considered one of the most accomplished practitioners of the spread offense. When Meyer got his first head coaching position at Bowling Green, he took trips to visit John L. Smith and Scott Linehan at Louisville, Randy Walker and Kevin Wilson at Northwestern, Bill Snyder at Kansas State, Joe Tiller and Jim Chaney at Purdue, and Rich Rodriguez at West Virginia, all of whom ran some version of the spread offense.
Urban Meyer's teams at Bowling Green, Utah, and now Florida have all run the spread, chiefly utilizing a run-first variation most similar to Rich Rodriguez's at West Virginia with tweaks to fit the offensive personnel (for example, Meyer's first two years at Florida skewed toward a drop-back passing attack led by Chris Leak, while Alex Smith and Tim Tebow led an option run-based spread). Using this offense, he has won two BCS titles, become the first coach to lead a non-BCS conference team (Utah) to a BCS bowl, has coached a Heisman trophy winner (Tim Tebow),[28] and has graduated a player who became a number one overall draft pick (Alex Smith).
