Give him SIX!
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When so many of your "offseason" days involve "voluntary" workouts under a hot Florida sun, the creature comforts are important. Whether it's the cool feeling of the faux leather living-room lounge chair or something as simple as the right flavor of Gatorade, the rewards don't have to be extravagant to matter.
For the members of the Florida football team, one of those little luxuries has been taken away.
Urban Meyer is in their heads again, using psychological warfare to get his message across. Which is why you can hear crickets chirping in the Gator locker room.
Usually at this time of the year, that locker room is full of laughter and sweat, a meeting place for the football players whether they be living on or off campus, freshmen or seniors, black or white. They love hanging around in the place where they will experience so many emotions in the fall.
But they have been kicked out.
Meyer, who has engaged in a number of unconventional ways to motivate his football team, has come up with a locker-room lockout.
Players cannot use their lockers to change clothes. Heck, they can't even use the clothes the athletic program provides for its student-athletes to use during workouts. It's almost like a semi-pro tryout camp - bring your own shorts and cleats.
It was after the spring practices that Meyer told the team that the locker room was no longer their second home, no longer a refuge from the humidity.
They would have to find another place to hang out (and hopefully it's not The Palace). In his mind, the players have earned nothing more than scholarships. They have proved nothing, a mantra we have heard from Meyer before (see: Deshawn Wynn).
This is just me talking, but the players have proved plenty - that they can lose games late and that they can't win a bowl game. But they have also proved that they want to win, that they are as tired as anybody in the Gator Nation of losing five games a season.
They have bought into the Meyer Plan. He has said himself that there has been less resistance than he expected.
But Meyer knows what all coaches know, that those fourth quarters are not won in the final minutes of a game but in the hours put in before practice begins, that his team will get a lot more out of the next 100 days than his first 100 days.
Therefore, Das Boot.
The football team isn't alone in being expelled from the bowels of the stadium. Handsomely-framed pictures of Gator greats hanging in the hallways have been taken down and - amazing as it might seem - not by South Carolina players.
The players, who were instructed to do the heavy lifting themselves, have even removed the giant Gator head traditionally slapped by gloved hands before the team runs out of the tunnel on game days.
The good news for the football team is that each player has a chance to earn his way back into the locker room during the brutal days before practice begins in August. (Sources close to the situation have confirmed that Florida will dress in the home team locker room for the opener against Wyoming and will not be running onto the field to "Heeeeeeere Come The Gators" from the portal in Section 32).
You do the right things, show up on time and work hard and you'll be dressing inside the stadium rather than in your dorm room. You'll be wearing the Gator Nike instead of a Burrito Bros. T-shirt.
The players have to fight for the right to be Gators. This is simply another step in the Meyer philosophy of using more than a pat on the back to reward the guys he feels he can count on. The quarterly Champions dinners, the leadership committee with its color-coded ratings, they are all set up to identify and cultivate winners.
Some of Meyer's ideas have been superficial - such as naming the student section and teaching everyone the words to the fight song - actions that really won't help the team win football games. But we all know that every year at the SEC Media Days in Birmingham, each coach talks about how his team has never worked harder than it did over the summer.
Florida's coach wants to - and in his mind has to - be able to say that with conviction.
Meyer's first big orange-and-blue victory is far on the horizon, while most of his players have won in Tallahassee, Baton Rouge and Jacksonville, but Meyer isn't concerned with rewarding yesterday. It's about rewarding today.
And for the players, tomorrow.
