Imagine waking up a veteran college head coach at a blue blood program and getting out of bed to attack days filled with recruiting, practice planning, player development, staff meetings, and everything else that goes into steering the ship that is a modern college football program.
Then, after some ongoing health issues that ultimately lead to a decision to step away from the sidelines, all that changes and you no longer find things like that on your schedule that demand that same type of aggressive mentality. That's where Urban Meyer finds himself these days.
ESPN released a piece recently on the transition that Meyer finds himself in, how it has been difficult, and how people on campus have helped in that transition phase.
Meyer shares with ESPN, that the new role he has as an assistant athletics director for athletics initiatives and relations has required him to retrain his whole life.
"I'm retraining everything. That's probably been the hardest. Morning's are the hardest. I'm an early riser. I want to go attack something, and sometimes there is nothing to attack."
It's important to point out that the piece does note that Meyer is no longer on daily medication for the cyst and is living pain-free now, but if it were to give him issues again like it did last fall, his doctors gives him steroids and the pain goes away again in a month or two.
The article also says that when it came time for Urban to pack up his office, he found it too emotionally painful. So a longtime administrative assistant of his did it, filling up about 25 boxes of memorabilia and memories.
Perhaps most telling - Urban hasn't unpacked those boxes yet. Read into that what you will.
Meyer admits that he knew he made a mistake pretty quickly after stepping away at Florida, saying he wasn't ready to really step away, but adds that he really thinks this time is different.
What does Gene Smith think? Will Urban coach again? Here's what Smith told ESPN:
"He's relaxed now," Smith said. "I don't know what that means if he goes back to coaching. People were discarding that. Maybe over time it's not an issue, but that's something people shouldn't discard because that was serious. ... There's nothing he is doing now that would cause that level of intensity and give him those types of headaches."
For what it's worth, my one Bold Prediction for 2019 said Urban Meyer returns to the sideline...with a rather interesting potential landing spot.