Don’t worry, Coach, Timmy’s got your back.

You think we’re outraged over The Hurdle being dissed on ESPN?  That’s nothing compared to what’s getting stirred up down in the Sunshine State after noted straight shooter Urban Meyer elected to drive and kick a winning necessary somewhat needed meaningless field goal with his team up by twenty with twenty five seconds left in a home game against a team coming off a 5-7 season and starting a redshirt freshman quarterback in his first game.

You’d think somebody who’s been around the block with Florida like Randy Shannon would understand.  But noooooo.

“I’ll just say this one statement,” Shannon said on Sunday. “Sometimes when you do things, and people see what type of person you really are, you turn a lot of people off. Now, whatever you want to get out of that, I won’t say it again. But it helped us. It helped us more than you’ll ever know.”

Meyer took the right approach in responding.  He patronized Shannon.

“It was a great football game,” Meyer said. “Why don’t we talk about the players that played a great, hard-nosed football game and quit measuring up to worrying about Florida. I learned a long time ago just coach your team and take care of yourself. Special teams, offense and defense occupies all our time. So I’m good, we’ve got to move on.”

Yeah, just coach and move on.  That sounds like the kind of wisdom a man learns through his own life experience, doesn’t it.  It reminds me of something Meyer said recently.

In his new book, “Urban’s Way,” Florida coach Urban Meyer makes it clear that Georgia’s excessive celebration following its opening touchdown last season was a “big deal” and something that he will remember “forever.”

“That wasn’t right. It was a bad deal,” Meyer says in the book, which is scheduled for a September release. “And it will forever be in the mind of Urban Meyer and in the mind of our football team. … So we’ll handle it. And it’s going to be a big deal.”

Well, the head coach may be magnanimous in victory, but the GPOOE™ is not pleased.  At all.

“(Meyer) has tried to work guys into being better people on the field, off the field, never says anything bad about anybody, always tries to do the right thing. He tries to take young boys and make them into men and do the right thing. We play with character and strength on the field and off and I don’t think you usually see many cheap shots or anything wrong that we do. Yeah, maybe we’re going try to score through the whole game. That’s our job. We like playing football.

Whatever.  (Although I will give Tebow credit for not losing his perspective over the Celebration the way his head coach did.)

From our selfish standpoint, you’ve gotta appreciate the likely psychological effect of the field goal call on the lead up to this year’s Georgia-Florida battle.  Meyer undercut all of the righteous indignation he ginned up over last year’s WLOCP with the field goal.  And don’t think the media won’t bring it up if given the chance, which the media will create by asking Meyer and his team about the Celebration.  It’ll be too much of an opportunity to ignore.

Gamesmanship is gamesmanship, whether it takes place at the beginning of a game – when at least you’ve got the opportunity to respond to it – or at the end.  Just ask LSU.

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UPDATE: Mike Bianchi questions Meyer’s manhood.

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UPDATE: Leave it to the fine folks at Gator County to indulge in some hair splitting.

… Ho hum, another coach making himself the victim, grasping at something to inspire his team.

Look it up, Randy. Kicking a field goal at the end of the game is well within the rules — not like telling your players to run on the field and celebrate, intentionally drawing an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.

And if you want to bring up the Georgia Incident of last year and the fact that Meyer is on record as saying he would make “a big deal out of it” on Nov. 1, consider the fact that what the Bulldogs did was not legal — and that Meyer never uttered a word about it until he did an interview for his book.

The “Georgia Incident”.  Sounds ominous.  No wonder Meyer can’t forget about it.