FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Early Wednesday morning, both Florida coach Urban Meyer and Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops met with the media for the last time prior to today’s 7:30 p.m. BCS national championship kickoff.

It was probably nothing one or the other hadn’t said before, though a few interesting nuggets always seem to drop.

Neither one believes he’ll coach forever. Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno will always have them on longevity.

Back in Gainesville, Meyer gets the family involved around the football offices the same way Stoops has welcomed family around the Switzer Center.

Both seem to think the Sooner defense has been given short shrift since arriving in South Florida. And both appear to have an affinity for the other. Before they knew each other very well, Meyer was looking for career advice.

“Everything I (had) heard about Bob Stoops is why I kind of entrusted a phone call to him four or five years ago,” he said. “Not because the relationship was that tight, it was just because I kind of admired what he did.”

They’re all good stories and nice thoughts. If nothing else, it’s nice to know two apparent good men will be leading their teams into Dolphin Stadium tonight. And it’s nice to think, win or lose, such a thought could be pervasive. Because, win or lose, Meyer and Stoops seem to be much of what’s right about college football.

The cold hard truth is very different. The cold hard truth is it’s about who wins and who loses.

Because if Florida wins, Meyer becomes what Stoops was once upon a time and what Pete Carroll has been since Southern Cal won an AP and consensus national championship back-to-back (the same two seasons Stoops’ Sooners lost the BCS championship game at the Sugar and Orange Bowls). He becomes the best, most fantastic and celebrated coach in all of college sports.

For OU, it’s about what would be lost.

The Sooners fell short their last two national championship games and in their last four BCS bowl games. The last quarterback to win any bowl game for OU was Rhett Bomar and the last time the Sooners won a game in January was the 2003 Rose Bowl.

It’s only the national championship they’re playing for tonight and yet it might be the undercard for the Sooners, who have spent the week defending their defense and who will be looked upon as college football’s hardly-ever-ready-for-prime-time-players should they lose handily or, perhaps, lose at all.

Don’t think for a second Florida opening a 3-point favorite and the line heading toward 5 the day before the game doesn’t have a whole lot to do with previous Sooner big-stage flops. A lot more, anyway, than DeMarco Murray being unavailable.

It was similar in January 2004 when OU, bandied about as maybe the college game’s best ever team, first fell shamefully to Kansas State at the Big 12 title game and, having backed in to the national title game, lost the Sugar Bowl to LSU.

OU went from being famously fantastic to famously fraudulent. The Sooners are still trying to get their good name back.

Stoops won it all coaching under Steve Spurrier at Florida. He came to Norman and two seasons later claimed the program’s seventh national championship.

“Yeah, initially I thought they were pretty easy,” he said to laughs at Wednesday morning’s press conference. “And then you lose one and you realize they’re not that easy.”

Only now he’s lost two of them and back-to-back Fiesta Bowls, even as a heavy favorite over Boise State and West Virginia.

Now this.

This question also made the rounds.

Tonight’s winner becomes the first head coach to claim two BCS national championships. What would that mean?

“Well, nothing,” Stoops said, “unless we’re the one that wins it.”

Wrong.

Winning will mean plenty. Should it happen, it will feel like everything. National championships don’t grow on trees and it would be the Sooners’ eighth.

But losing will hurt so much more.

The price of greatness is high when all it yields is second place. It’s still higher when you keep returning to the same place only to fail. It’s still higher when you’re once again looked upon as the not-so-great pretender.

OU needs to win this game.

Clay Horning

366-3526

cfhorning@normantranscript.com