Mike Celizic

It’s about the team, not the individual, and you know that’s what Urban Meyer preaches because that’s what coaches do. But now he’s asking everyone — team, school, family — to sacrifice for him because he just realized that he’s more important than all of them.

This can’t be right. It’s either about you or it’s about the team. Life doesn’t work both ways.

At least it doesn’t work both ways for most of us. If we’ve got a personal problem, nobody’s going to tell us to take a month or six months or even a year off while we sort it out and not to worry about money because the company’s going to keep paying us.

It only works both ways if you’re as extraordinarily successful and charismatic as Urban Meyer. Win a couple of national championships, give inspirational talks about values and family and faith, attract the top recruits, inspire the alumni to write big checks to the general fund, and you can do anything you want.

It’s understandable. If Meyer were my football coach, I’d bend so far over backwards for him a platoon of chiropractors couldn’t straighten me out again. I wouldn’t care about what’s right. I’d care only about keeping this extraordinary football coach on my sideline, where his value to the program is incalculable.

So if you’re a Florida fan, keep right on celebrating because Meyer said that after all his passionate pronouncements about the primacy of family, the coach still feels in his gut that he’ll be coaching the team come fall.

But as you talk about what an incredibly great coach he is, leave out the parts about his devotion to faith and family ahead of everything else. I know that’s what he preaches and it’s clearly what he believes. It’s just not what he does.

The disconnect is painful to witness. On Saturday, when Meyer quit his job because he feared for his heart and his health, he told The New York Times that when he told his family that he had coached his last, his 18-year-old daughter, Nicki, hugged him and said, “I get my daddy back.” That hug, he told the newspaper, he took “as a sign from God that this was the right thing to do.”

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Just a day later, when he went on the practice field and saw how spirited and upbeat his team was, he realized he couldn’t just quit. The players are his family, too, and he couldn’t leave them. Another day, another sign from heaven.

Meyer clearly believes everything he says. There can be no question he loves his family and provides for them and is concerned about his children’s health and education and well-being. There is also no question that he believes in his religion.

But believing what you say and actually following up on it are different things. When your daughter says, “I get my daddy back,” that should be like a slap in the face telling you that you’ve been spending too much time in the office. And when you find yourself texting recruits on your cell phone during church services, as Meyer has confessed to doing, then your faith does not come before your job. If it did, you’d leave the phone in the car.

Meyer said a lot of things Sunday, but none of them told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to admit it. Or maybe it’s because he refuses to recognize it.

But it’s really simple. Urban Meyer is a football coach. That’s what he was born to do. It’s what defines him. It’s what makes him complete. It’s what fulfills his most basic drives and desires.

Yes, all the other things he talks about are important, but nothing is more important than being what he is: a coach.

If it were otherwise, there wouldn’t be a leave of absence because there wouldn’t be a decision to make. Meyer wouldn’t be very specific about the heart problem that has been afflicting him for four years, but he did say he’s been advised it could become dangerous to his health.

He’s got plenty of money to retire now if he wants, and there’s plenty more doing football analysis on TV. So there’s no reason to keep coaching and keep putting his health at risk. If it really were about family, he’d be an ex-coach now and not a coach-in-limbo.

Meyer said he’d have to figure out how to make the job less all-consuming than it has been. But he also admitted that whenever anything goes wrong, whether it’s a lost game or a player who flunks a course, he assumes it’s his fault. And then he refuses to rest until he figures out how to fix it.

This is how great football coaches are. They don’t delegate. They’re consumed by the job in a way that few people can understand or appreciate. They try to control everything. And they don’t get home much.

Meyer didn’t become perhaps the greatest coach in college football by not sweating the small stuff. He didn’t do it by putting his feet up and putting problems off for another day. He didn’t do it by cutting back on the time he spends with his team. He didn’t do it by accepting defeat.

And he especially didn’t do it by putting his family or anything else ahead of his job and his obsessive need to win and be the best and do right by his players and his employers and his fans.

He’s a great coach and an awfully good man. But this one is still about him and not the team. And that’s not right.

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