By George

I'm tired, and I'm cranky.

Coming off the long 4th of July holiday weekend, I stuffed myself into a middle seat on a Delta freightcar on Wednesday for the 90-minute flight to Atlanta, a journey that was repeated in reverse - with a window seat this time - about 30 hours later. Two flights in two days, coupled with enough rain in central Florida to blow my golf plans for the foreseeable future, have left me fighting off a cold and desperate for a full night's sleep. Hence, tired and cranky.

One bright spot: I bought a copy of Chuck Klosterman's book, "Killing Yourself To Live," at Hartsfield Airport and finished it by the time we landed in Orlando. If you have ever argued about the relative merits of one rock band versus another, fondly remember your summers in between semesters at college, and chuckled at the writings of the late Hunter S. Thompson, you'll love Klosterman's writing. Plus, he's a basketball guy at heart, and he randomly sprinkles NBA references into his narrative. So there's that.

ANYWAY, I flew to Georgia for a reason (read that book and you'll see why the previous sentence is insightfully clever). After many weeks of planning, the Sun Sports crew caught UCF head coach George O'Leary at his vacation home on Lake Oconee, halfway between Atlanta and Augusta, for a lengthy interview. We'll be producing another episode of "Under The Lights" on O'Leary and UCF football this August. Based on what I heard this week, I'm already looking forward to it.

Background: when O'Leary was the head coach at Georgia Tech, he found a little patch of heaven on Lake Oconee on which to build his summer retreat. The property is attached to the massive Reynolds Plantation development, home to five EXCELLENT golf courses and one Ritz-Carlton hotel, all of which I enjoyed with my wife a couple of summers ago. O'Leary shares lakefront real estate with Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer and Maryland coach Ralph Friedgen, among others. It's a tight little circle up in the Georgia lake country, a place where a coach can find a little peace and quiet among friends and family.

The cast for this production includes Friedgen, Sharon O'Leary (his wife), Trish O'Leary (daughter), Pete O'Leary (his older brother, a former cop from Long Island), and the coach himself. Your interviewer is, well, me.

Brother Pete and Coach Friedgen mostly told George stories, of which there are plenty. Pete's got a doozy about schoolboy George getting caught playing with matches after being specifically warned against it by Momma O'Leary, who had threatened to send him off to reform school for a second offense. Little George, taking his mother at her word, tearfully packed his bags, put on his hat and coat, and sat on the front steps waiting for the paddy wagon, while suffering the taunts of his sister - there were eight kids in George's house - who said simply, "he's gotta go." Hearing Pete tell the story is enough to make a TV guy fall off his chair laughing.

Friedgen, who worked with O'Leary on the Georgia Tech coaching staff, has a great one about hopping a flight with George to go see a football recruit play a basketball game in New Jersey. It was the dead of winter, and Friedgen didn't want to go. George, in a recurring theme, talked him into it.

So the plane is on final approach, and O'Leary notices that something is wrong. The captain leaves the cockpit and starts poking his head through a hatch in the floor of the cabin - never a good sign. They wave off from Newark and pass over LaGuardia, then Westchester. O'Leary correctly surmises that the landing gear won't lock into position. The plane banks over Long Island Sound and starts dumping fuel. Emergency vehicles are marshalling on the ground below them. There's gonna be a belly landing, no question about it.

Just before the crew asks the passengers to assume the position, George O'Leary turns to Ralph Freidgen - who, as you'll recall, never wanted to be on this damn plane in the first place - offers his hand, and says solemnly, "good luck."

Friedgen's response is completely and totally unprintable, but it involves performing an impossible physical act. Thankfully, both men can laugh about it now. Obviously, the plane landed safely.

Two words that have come up over and over again in the course of these interviews are "loyalty" and "trust." From his family, to his longtime friends, to figures like UCF President John Hitt, former AD Steve Orsini, and NFL coach Mike Tice - who played high school football for O'Leary on Long Island and later hired him at Minnesota - there is no shortage of people who will gladly eat dirt for George O'Leary. I asked his daughter for a reason, and with a shrug, she said, "he gets what he gives." O'Leary himself told us that over the course of his coaching life, he's figured out that helping someone achieve a goal - like, for example, supporting Friedgen when it came time for Ralph to leave George's staff at Tech and take the Maryland job - will often come around. Maybe that's pragmatism, but it's as good a reason for loyalty as any. You get what you give, and what goes around comes around. At the end, we call it loyalty.

The concept of "trust" is a loaded question when discussing the football side of George O'Leary. In truth, we were hesitant about bringing up the Notre Dame situation. Our cameraman offered me five bucks if I even spoke the word "resume'" during the interview. As it turned out, I didn't have to bring it up, because O'Leary did so on his own.

His stance on the Notre Dame "debacle" (his brother's term) is well-documented: it was a long time ago, it was a young man's mistake, it was dumb. What was intriguing was how he responded to the firestorm, which was by returning to this same lake house in Georgia. From all across the country, his forces assembled - Pete from New York, other brothers from other directions. Mike Tice was one of the few phone calls O'Leary would take. Loyalty. In situations like these, you learn quickly who your friends are.

After a day or two of group therapy, however, O'Leary basically kicked everybody out of the house. He had, in his words, "become something I despised," which he explained as a man feeling sorry for himself. O'Leary despises excuses. He has no time for those who consider themselves victims. The Notre Dame deal set him back for all of a week, after which he made the choice to move forward. See, you can't trust people who feel sorry for themselves, and George O'Leary is very, very big on trust. So he quit feeling sorry for himself.

One thing leads to another. His mother, who was quite obviously the soul of his household before she passed, used to tell him that God never closes one door without opening another. The next time Mike Tice called, it was to offer him a job on the Vikings' staff. Couple of years later, UCF - the "sleeping giant" of 45,000 kids in the heart of the most fertile recruiting grounds in America - knocks on the door. 0-11 one year, a bowl game in Hawaii on Christmas Day the next, "a year ahead of schedule," according to O'Leary. Everybody and their brother is picking UCF to win its division in Conference USA this year. Looking ahead, the dirt has already been turned on campus for a new football stadium. Texas will open with the Golden Knights in the fall of 2007, and good luck getting a ticket. So here we are, on the shores of Lake Oconee, with a basement full of Georgia Tech memorabilia, sipping Diet Cokes with Sharon and Trish, shaking our heads at how it all played out.

Sometimes this job is pretty cool.

At around the same time that the O'Leary "Under The Lights" episode debuts, we'll start cranking out our fourth season of "Chevy Tailgate Saturday" college football programming, with Terry Norvelle and Brady Ackerman joining me on the set to preview the upcoming season. On Saturday, September 9th, George O'Leary will take his UCF Golden Knights on the road to face the Florida Gators at the Swamp. The two programs have only met once before. It was 1999, and the Gators rolled the Knights to the tune of 58-27.

Here's my first fearless prediction for the 2006 college football season: this year's game will be closer. A hell of a lot closer than most Gator fans think.

A few months ago, in yet another interview, UCF's John Hitt cited top-25 upstarts like Louisville and Fresno State as programs that UCF can hope to emulate. While in Georgia, Pete O'Leary told me that his brother has an even higher goal, one that he shares with nobody outside his circle. I'm going to respect Pete's confidence in me and keep it to myself. All I can tell you is this: I'm looking forward to seeing how this chapter in George O'Leary's football career plays out.

And as I discovered on the shores of Lake Oconee, I am not alone.