Brady's bitter barbs will be sweet music to Urban's ears
By Mike Freeman
CBS SportsLine.com
If you are a fan of the Florida Gators, you should be in love with Tom Brady right now.
Send him flowers, give him a kiss, gently smack him on the ass.
Because he may have just helped your Gators win a national championship.
Just in case you missed it: The former Michigan quarterback, who believes Florida is about as talented as a jar of extra-thick mayonnaise, went gonzo bonkers on the team, blasting the Gators as a sucky, unworthy bunch of inferior Studebakers, the NCAA equivalent of the horse and buggy.
"Anyone who has seen (Florida) play realizes it is a no-brainer," Brady recently said, according to various media reports. "Florida is not very good. I watched the game (between Florida and Arkansas in the SEC title game) and that other (Arkansas) quarterback completed like three passes the week before. They have 18 guys out there throwing passes for Arkansas."
Wow. Just ... wow. Dude: Bitter much?
Brady is the best quarterback in football. He is a Hall of Famer. Surrounded by babes and D-cups and Lombardi Trophies. Fine. But do rings and gorgeous gems give Brady license to make such nonsensical and disparaging remarks about a championship-worthy team?
On Wednesday I asked former Florida basketball player David Lee, now starting for the New York Knicks, if he had heard Brady's remarks. He had not. I read him the quote. Lee quickly transformed from one of the more friendly people you will ever meet into Mr. Stone Face.
"Where did he go to school?" asked a rhetorical Lee. "Michigan, that's where. Tell Tom Brady to be quiet."
And Lee played basketball at Florida. Imagine what the football team thinks of Brady's remarks.
I have been told that Florida coach Urban Meyer is already preparing to use the Brady quote as a significant source of motivation for the team. In fact, among Gators players, the quote is spreading quickly. According to a source close to the program, as players began studying game film of Ohio State, some were already discussing what Brady said and were intensely angered by it.
"It should bother them," Lee said. "I know it would bother me if someone said that about Gator basketball."
Of course in such a huge game, what Brady says shouldn't matter. If you are a player for Florida and cannot muster enough motion and fury for this key moment in your athletic career, then you are among the walking dead.
Yet in college football, fervor matters. It is a far more passionate and gut-wrenching sport than the business-like NFL. The men who play it also listen to their head coaches more than the pros do; they buy into propaganda more easily.
It is not that college players are suckers. It is just how college works. It is how college has always worked. The power of manipulation and symbolism looms large on campus.
And there is not a better college coach in America than Meyer at pulling motivational ploys. He is the king of the Jedi mind trick, the hocus pocus shell game, the firing up of young minds. Obi-Wan Meyer.
Meyer is going to tell his team, over and over again, no one outside of north Florida wants the Gators in the title game. That everyone expects them to get bum rushed. So let's shock the world, he will say. He will play the Gators-vs.-the-universe card, using Brady as an ace of spades. Oh, will he play it.
And you know what?
He's right.
Brady and others should just quiet down, for goodness sake. The Gators earned this spot. More than that, they are there, it's over, decision made, goodnight. How about we all move along now? Nothing left to see here. Just play the game and shut up.
And before Ohio State fans start energizing their Pentium processors for an e-mail blitz accusing me of flagrant homerism, I am not a Gators backer. I despise some of the thin-skinned Gators fans and their e-mail harassment schemes. Not to mention the bully AD and his associate sidekick, as well as some of the Gators media sycophants in Jacksonville and Gainesville who are part troll and part suck-up.
Still, I hope the Gators win just so people can reflect on their positions about how Florida does not belong in this game and Michigan does, like there is some sort of ordaining process, like this is how the Vatican picks its Pope.
It's irritating seeing people act like Florida should be thankful, yes sir boss, thank you boss, can I can I get you anything boss for allowing me to sit at this table. Yes, sir, boss.
By the time Meyer is done, he will have so skillfully used Brady's bodacious words as an inspirational hammer, the team will think people are rooting against them somewhere in China.
His ability to get players to do his bidding is one of several reasons why I have long predicted that Meyer would win multiple national championships with the Gators. It is not that I have been a worshiper of Meyer; it is that I appreciate a coach who can bend the will of players with little resistance from them. Or without them even realizing it.
If you took DNA from Steve Spurrier, Lou Holtz and Bill Parcells and recombined it in a vat of genetic soup, you would get Meyer.
After all, we are talking about a man who while coach at Utah put BYU logos inside his team's bathroom urinals and tossed BYU jerseys on the floor so his players could walk over them.
He has created things like "The Pit" and "Hell Lifts" and a leadership council while at Florida. They're all designed to motivate and stimulate various aspects of Gator mind and body. Meyer has simply been brilliant as Florida's coach.
Now, it is Tom Brady who will be an easy target for Meyer's ploys.
So, Gators fans, get your thank you cards ready.
You are going to be deeply in lust with Tom-Tom come next month.
