He’s dehydrated. No, he’s sick. No, he’s… retiring! Holy fried Gator tail. No, he’s reconsidering. No, he’s coming back! Wait… no, he’s not coming back, he’s — well, he can’t come back because he never left, but he’s going to leave for awhile. How long? Not sure. Is he coaching the Sugar Bowl? No. Wait, yes, he is, and then he’s leaving, and the offensive coordinator will take over as head coach in the meantime, making him a head coach in waiting to be a head coach again.

Run that by me again?

It’s a fitting penultimate twist to the bottle cap of football weirdness. Yes, Florida still plays Cincinatti in the Sugar Bowl, a team whose head coach is most certainly gone in the final sense. Don’t ask me to give you a name on the Cincy coaching or player roster other than “Pike.”

In the last 24 hours, Lane Kiffin surely felt the highest of highs… only to wake up feeling the lowest of lows. No, the meanest sonofabitch in Cell Block E isn’t getting paroled, and the guards don’t give you soap on a rope in the prison showers. Nut up, Mouth.

I’m sure Mark Richt and Steve Spurrier also felt a fluttering lightness of being, but gravity being the real bitch she is, made the Flight of the Wallflowers a parabola.

In any event, if it’s not one thing this season, it’s another. Tell me that wasn’t the most joyless way to ride a 22-game win streak, hold #1 week in and week out for what seemed like an eternity, and grind out close, ugly win after close, ugly win you’ve ever endured. You can be honest, fellas. That was tense.

Flu, quarterback regression, Facemask-gate, Dunlap snoozing at the wheel, a class of juniors celebrating the NFL two games too early, chest pains, and then Meyer does his best Billy Donovan impression. Really, why do we do this at Florida? This must be rather unique — two coaches in two different high-profile sports, both with two national championship rings, depart and then cram their foot in the closing door just at the last second. Well, it’s a U of F tradition, now.

Of course, the reality is that Meyer is living a real life, not for the pundits or endless hordes of media or fans, and he did the best he could with a very difficult situation. I think Gator Nation is very understanding of the realities of what Meyer endured and this doesn’t even count as a blip on the radar in terms of our relationship with our head coach. The rest of the college football institution will probably be less forgiving, but that’s because this is all a big soap opera that plays out on TV to those folks, rather than happening to real, breathing human beings with complex thoughts, emotions and motivations. We are all imperfect, and Meyer deserves our full support and understanding.

I hope this is the right thing for the Coach and his family. His health and well-being comes first. I know it’s heresy to say it here in the south, but when you start fearing the job will kill you, it’s time for all of us to take a step back, take a deep breath and remind ourselves that this is a game played by college kids. A game.

There may be apathy in Gator Nation regarding both the venue and the opponent, but I for one think it will be fun to play a football game against a good football team with pride and a BCS bowl victory at stake. Hey, this is why we play.

And it’s worth saying: it’s great to be a Florida Gator.

Go Gators!