Postmortem: The Gators that time will forget

A season in review. Today: Urban Meyer's Florida farewell.

It's a testament to Urban Meyer's reputation as a molder of sleek, fast assassins that, even as late as the start of October, Florida's absence from the national elite was barely conceivable. Literally no one this summer could imagine the Gators, even in a rebuilding year, dropping from the top ten or relinquishing their death grip on the SEC East, and it's not like Meyer hadn't earned the benefit of the doubt.

The speed of Florida's re-entrenchment among the elite will be the stuff of myths soon enough. But before they'd ever heard of him in Gainesville, Meyer had turned lifeless offenses at both Bowling Green and Utah in fire-breathing attacks that finished in the top 10 nationally in total and scoring offense. At Florida, even if it was the defense that anchored the run to the 2006 BCS championship, it was the offense that stole the show: Between Meyer, Tim Tebow and a revolving assortment of big-play blazers, the Gators led the SEC in yards and points three years running from 2007-09, including the neutron bomb they dropped on the rest of the conference en route to an even more decisive BCS triumph in '08.

In the grand scheme, four years doesn't amount to much. But those four years – encompassing 48 wins, two SEC titles, two national titles, a Heisman Trophy winner and 10 future first round draft picks – will define an entire era at Florida, a supernova that can shine alongside any run in the history of the sport.

The 2010 season obviously stood apart from that, almost from the very first botched snap against Miami (Ohio). OK, so it's a transition year. Everyone gets a mulligan. With Meyer's abrupt resignation, though, and the subsequent recasting of "the Urban Meyer era" not as a long, sustained run of success with peaks and valleys but as a brief, white-hot blaze of glory, the past three months suddenly look a lot less like a mulligan and a lot more like a gasping death coda that never should have happened. It's like Paul McCartney releasing "Wonderful Christmastime" as the Beatles' last single.

In retrospect, it's impossible not to ask: Why didn't he go ahead into the light when he had the chance? Meyer knew it was over, didn't he? No part of the death machine he'd assembled remained in place. Tebow was gone, along with Harvin, Spikes, Haden and one half of the Pounceys. His right hand, Dan Mullen, was gone to resurrect Mississippi State, with immediately obvious consequences even in 2009. His left hand, Charlie Strong, was gone to resurrect Louisville. Meyer himself was the only common thread to that legacy, and he had literally driven himself beyond the brink of collapse. Blowout losses to South Carolina and Florida State to end the season may have seemed a little extreme, but how could anyone, anywhere have possibly expect this to end well?

The answer, of course, is that no one really expected it to end. Again: Literally no one foresaw the Gators slipping from their perch among the SEC and national elite. That includes Meyer, too, who was not only back after last December's brief dalliance with retirement; the joke throughout the offseason was that he never really left, doctors be damned. The man is obsessed! He built the machine; he will sustain the machine. And those chest pains? They weren't even because of his heart.

In the end, Meyer's reputation stands, even if the program he couldn't quite quit doesn't, at least not in any recognizably devastating form. Injuries and suspensions took their toll. Steve Addazio and John Brantley bore the fans' scorn for the demise of the once-fearsome offense, reduced to experimenting with true freshmen in the shotgun in search of any semblance of a spark. LSU converted the flukiest fake field goal ever. In hindsight, revisionists concede that Meyer really checked out a long time ago, and could go on working on other people's terms.

Maybe. Meyer could have spent the entirety of 2010 thinking "I'd rather watch my daughter play volleyball than call this recruit." Or, maybe he was all-in and willing to endure the rebuilding year right to the bitter end, up until the moment he lifted his nose from the grindstone last week. Maybe there was a breaking point – losing to Mullen's athletically inferior team in the Swamp, in a defensive struggle? – or maybe the losses gradually wore away his will to go on.

It may be a long time before we know that; it may be a while before Meyer completely sorts it out himself. He may be back in a year or two, boring through the grindstone somewhere else. But five years from now, ten years from now, 2010 will exist in a kind of limbo: Before the real transition, whatever form that takes, but certainly not of what came before.

- - -
Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

Mandy Moore Shannon Elizabeth Maggie Gyllenhaal Foxy Brown Ivana Bozilovic