Steve Addazio is leaning against a concrete wall and he’s talking offensive linemen, which is his real passion in football. Addazio likes big, tough guys who don’t mind some mud in their eye, a little blood running down their face or out of their nose, a couple of loose teeth and of course, that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you’ve just lowered the boom on a 300-pound defensive lineman into a dead roach. When the subject turns to Tim Tebow, Florida’s quarterback for the ages, Addazio gets animated. Tim Tebow is the best quarterback in the country but Steve Addazio knows that deep within Tebow is that inner interior lineman just waiting for a chance to plant a nose tackle on his back.
Quarterbacks are dainty fellows for the most part, which is why they have their own set of rules designed to keep them safe from those big nasty types that inhabit the line. Addazio likes the big nasties. He likes guys who get in there and grind away play after play, never minding that they’re turning themselves into a walking bruise, not to mention what they’re doing to the other guy.
He likes Tebow, whose idea of dainty is to take off running until he sees a safety or a Geno Hayes-type, at which point he becomes a heat-seeking missile, ready to lower his pads and deliver something close to an out of body experience. Tim Tebow is Steve Addazio’s kind of player.
“He takes more hits than the average quarterback out there in the run game and the throw game,” Addazio says. “He’s a bruiser. Each week he’s going to have those bumps and bruises. That’s just the nature of how he plays. He’s just so darn physical.”
Tebow, who wears his religious faith on his sleeve, is also one of those Old Testament kind of guys that Steve Spurrier used to talk about — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth kind of guy. He will take his lumps but for every one he takes, he delivers one that is even more punishing.
And sometimes, the payback has nothing to do with something that happened personally to Tebow. Tim Tebow loves his teammates. Loves them so much, in fact, that if you hurt one of his teammates, it’s like hurting Tim and that means payback.
An eye for an eye.
In Tallahassee last year, Florida State fans cheered when Percy Harvin left the field with a badly sprained ankle. Tebow took that rather personally. Tebow didn’t care if it might cost him a bruise or two, there was going to be payback.
“We’re at Florida State and he’s running the safety over, lowering his shoulder on him,” Addazio said. “There’s a price to pay for all of that. He’s a physical guy. He’s going to deal with those bumps and bruises because that’s just the nature of his play.”
Tim Tebow and Steve Addazio are cut from the same cloth. They remind you of a high voltage power line. You might not be able to see the actual electricity but you can hear it and you can feel it. As the focus of Florida’s offensive scheme the past two years, Tebow’s intensity has been well documented. Behind the scenes, Addazio has coached the offensive line that has opened the holes and provided the protection that has allowed Tebow to accumulate 110 touchdowns in his Florida football career. Addazio can go toe to toe with Tebow or anyone else when it comes to endless energy and passion for football that can’t be subdued.
As the offensive line coach, Addazio turns large, athletic big men into blocking machines that pound even the strongest opponents into fourth quarter weaklings. Addazio’s energy and intensity are the gas that fires up the engine in the offensive line. He is the kind of coach that linemen relate to but considering Tebow has that inner lineman that needs to be released periodically, Addazio is probably the perfect fit to be the offensive coordinator. Now that he will be calling the plays, Addazio and Tebow will be able to feed off each other but as fired up as they get, they both know when to back down and let reason and logic take over.
Tebow spent the previous three seasons talking about what play call is next with Dan Mullen, who has moved on to Mississippi State, where he is charged with turning around a football program that has lost more games than any school in SEC history into one that can win games and go to bowls every year and all without Tim Tebow. That leaves Tebow and the Florida offense in Addazio’s hands. Some might question the choice but Urban Meyer acted as if it was a no-brainer when he turned the keys to a Rolls Royce offense to a certified Connecticut tough guy after four years in the hands of a clean cut native son of New Hampshire. Mullen is a no wrinkles, shaves every morning and maybe once in the afternoon kind of guy whose hair is always perfect even when he removes his visor.
Addazio is a guy who looks like he’s in his element when he’s got eight hours of stubble and rivers of sweat pouring off his bald head. Add the bandage on his chin that protected stitches from where a cyst was removed and Addazio looked every bit the part of a tough guy Monday afternoon.
Whether the subject was Tebow or coaching up Matt Patchan or how the offense really isn’t going to change all that much with him calling the plays from the sideline as opposed to Mullen, who handled things from the booth, there was always that edge about Addazio as he talked football Monday afternoon. He was in his element, talking about what he does best. He oozed intensity.
Considering the Gators are trying to repeat as national champions and they have the weight of the world in terms of expectations riding on their shoulders, Addazio just might be just what the offense needs to stay fully focused and in perspective throughout this season. Florida has so many fast, skilled runners and receivers and so many big, powerful and athletic offensive linemen to go with a 1-2 punch at quarterback in Tebow and his backup, John Brantley, that maybe the only thing that can derail this Gator express is the Gators themselves. Complacency could do what perhaps no defense in the country can do but there’s very little chance for complacency to emerge from the shadows as long as Addazio is around.
When he talks, you almost get the feeling he was born ready for this moment. You feel that Charleston Southern and 7 p.m. Saturday just can’t get here quickly enough.
“I’m just anxious to get going here,” he said, his brow wrinkling and a vein just above his nose looking like it was about to erupt. “Every game to me is so exciting, you know what I mean? There’s such energy driven and such intensity that goes into every game … that feeling and that buzz. I can feel it start to mount right now.”
He says that’s how he always feels heading into a season and the added responsibility of calling the plays doesn’t change a thing. Until Saturday he will keep on coaching his linemen until he decides which five of six standouts is going to run out on the field for the first time and he will fine tune a game plan that is designed to slice, dice, pound and pummel Charleston Southern into early submission.
And Saturday, all the intensity that’s been building up since practice started on August 6 will be like an amoeba in that it will divide, multiply, divide and multiply again and again until Addazio gets the level right where he knows it needs to be to get the Gators going.
“I really can’t wait to get going,” he said. “I really can’t wait to see our guys flying off the ball and really going after people.”
In his heart, Steve Addazio knows this is what he was meant to do in his life. He is a football coach whose calling card is intensity that burns like the white-hot heat of a thousand suns in his inner furnace.
“When you lose that, you better go hang out and do something else because that fire is what it’s all about,” he said.