The Front Row with Jim Litke December 5, 2011

Even as he was introducing Urban Meyer as the Buckeyes' new head football coach last Monday, athletic director Gene Smith went out of his way to say their first real conversation about the job was eight days earlier, and Meyer confirmed it a few moments later in response to a follow-up question.

"I got, like, a ridiculous number of letters and emails. You're not talking about that, right?" Meyer said.

As for the rumors and a handful of reports that had the Ohio native and one-time Buckeye assistant pegged for the job soon after Jim Tressel walked away in disgrace last May, Meyer said with a chuckle, "Yeah, but it was some 12-year-old in an Ohio State sweatshirt." Then flexed his muscles to squeeze out a few extra laughs.

If signing the best available coach in the business was that easy - and a reported 6-year, $40-million contract certainly didn't hurt - keeping Meyer on the job until the end of the deal could prove a lot tougher.

He insists he's no longer the control freak who fired off messages to his staff at Florida from a pew in church on some Sundays, nor the perfectionist so consumed by losing that he dropped 20 pounds in little more than a week trying to make sure he didn't lose again. He says he feels great and that the health scare that prompted his decision to retire and then un-retire in the span of 24 hours is behind him, that a year working in the TV booth instead of on the sideline taught him that balancing football, family and fitness was not an impossible act.

At one point, Meyer even reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out a contract he negotiated with his wife and kids - "tougher than any contract I've ever signed in my life," is how he put it - to make sure he kept his priorities straight.

"I've been to a place and I don't want to go back," Meyer said.

During his year on the outside of college football looking in, Meyer said he was troubled by many of the same issues that bothered him at the end of his run at Florida - "trying to cure NCAA issues, agent issues, drug issues."

"I tried to do other people's jobs, maybe to a fault," he conceded.

In the midst of that bizarre gone-tomorrow, here-today drama at Florida two years ago, Meyer's close friend, Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley, talked about what it was like working in the office next to the coach:

"Every single facet of this program, every detail, every player issue, staff issue, game-planning, just an unbelievable amount of preparation, then recruiting - it never ceases," he said. "Is Urban Meyer going to be coaching football when he's 60 doing it the way he's doing it now? No. I knew that when he signed the new contract. ... You can't keep up that kind of pace."

Meyer is only 47 and says he's not that guy anymore.

"I don't want to be a guy that sleeps in the office," he said.

This time we won't have to wait six seasons to find out.

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at [email protected]. Follow him at http://Twitter.com/JimLitke.