Hope you do good, boy. Hope you do good. That's all they say to the faceless coach they've got right now. That's all they say to him as they pat him on the back at Denny's, at midnight, when he's there eating his only meal of the day. But you ought to hear what they say behind his back or what the other SEC coaches say or what his quarterback said last January.

That quarterback's exact words were, "Who is Ron Zook?" He wasn't kidding, either. That quarterback's exact words were, "I'm not gonna play for a defensive coordinator." That quarterback was so far gone to the NFL that his parents had come to campus to move him out. That quarterback even asked his old coach, the one in DC now, "Will you draft me?"

Thing is, that quarterback takes it all back now. Rex Grossman not only knows who Ron Zook is, he knows Zook's cell phone number. He dialed it almost 90 straight days last spring -- Sunday nights included -- and now what we have is one less mystery in the world. Rex Grossman not only knows who his coach is, he knows his coach's sleep pattern (four hours, max) and he knows his coach's pet peeve (trash on the ground). Rex Grossman not only knows who his coach is, Rex Grossman is the one person who can get the rest of Gator Nation off his coach's back.

The first time Florida loses this year, the name Steve Spurrier is going to come up, followed by wistful recollection. The second time the Gators lose, the name Ron Zook is going to come up -- followed by profanity. It is a tricky situation to be in, exacerbated by September dates with Miami and Tennessee, but at least Ron Zook had sold the quarterback. If anybody had to buy in, it had to be that quarterback.

***

Rex Grossman was sitting at a bar in the Bahamas when he saw on TV that Steve Spurrier -- the coach he compares to Bear Bryant -- had ditched the Gators. He didn't know that Florida's AD had already left him a message. "Trust me," Jeremy Foley had said on Grossman's voice mail, "we'll get you a good guy. But you've gotta trust me."

The first two names on Foley's list were Mike Shanahan (who has two Super Bowl rings) and Bob Stoops (who has an NCAA championship ring). The third and last name was Ron Zook (who has a wedding ring). Grossman, runner-up last year in the closest Heisman vote since 1985, had endorsed the first two. He considered each a household name, and he'd always loved household names. That's why he'd come to Florida. From the beginning, Grossman thought Spurrier was a "movie star," a "celebrity coach," and he still howls about the times Coach wore Oakleys to stay incognito -- and got mobbed anyway.

But Shanahan and Stoops turned the job down, and that is why Grossman has just had the most cathartic off-season of his life.

He could easily be playing for the Redskins right now. But what Grossman now knows with a convert's certainty is that Zook -- never a head man on any level, never mobbed on any level -- was the Florida coach he'd been looking for. It's taken him a while to see it, about seven months, but that's what happens when you're borderline arrogant. Rex Grossman wears a gold Rolex and a smirk. If there is a more confident college football player in this country, then have him show up at Grossman's Gainesville house to play video games. Grossman has a 55-inch screen and he will take on anyone. He's just gotten EA Sports' NCAA Football 2003, and his first victim was Gators wide receiver Taylor Jacobs.

Grossman: "You can pick any team you want." Jacobs: "Okay, Miami."

Grossman: "Why not Florida?"

Jacobs: "Because you know that I throw to me."

Grossman: "Well, I'll take Texas Tech."

Jacobs: "Texas Tech?"

Grossman: "Yep. I'll even beat you with Texas Tech."

He wasn't lying. "Oh my god, Rex 21-skunked me," Jacobs says. "When you're up by 21, the game's over. And, dude, I'd been practicing for weeks."

But this is Grossman. This is the same person who throws the best deep ball in the nation, the same person who, at 17, nearly pulled off the athletic miracle of his life. He had signed up to play in a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, back home in Bloomington, Ind., but his two teammates were hungover and overslept. So he played 1-on-3. "I asked Rex if maybe he'd let me play with him," his father, Dan Grossman, says. "But he said, 'No, I can do this.'" He made a bevy of three-pointers and trailed only 14-13 against a team that had a fourth player on the bench, subbing in and out. If a late three-pointer hadn't rimmed out, Rex actually would have won. To this day, Dan Grossman says, "That was the most fun thing I've ever seen him do, including almost win the Heisman Trophy."

Rex just has an air of entitlement about him. He is Rex Daniel Grossman III, whose grandfather -- Rex I -- was an ornery linebacker for the Baltimore Colts. His father, Rex II (who goes by his middle name), played QB and linebacker at Indiana U. and later became the favorite eye surgeon of a certain red-sweatered Hoosier hoops coach. Between them, Rex I and Rex II made a boatload of money, which is why Rex III grew up with a pool in his backyard and yearly beach trips to Mexico and ski trips to Colorado. That's also why he drives a Cadillac Escalade around campus and lives in that sweet house.

Fact is, only one person has ever been able to consistently humble Rex III -- been able to get inside that regal head -- and that person is the ballcoach, Spurrier. Grossman may admire Spurrier, but he also recalls a coach who reeked of sarcasm. "If he's not yelling at you, he's the funniest guy you've heard in your life," Grossman says. "But after I've been through him, I can deal with anything."

Grossman says Spurrier was "king of the offense" -- nobody was a close second -- and the coach kept Rex so on edge that the kid was afraid to not stand next to Spurrier on the sidelines. Even after a freshman season in which Grossman threw 21 TD passes, Spurrier still made him beat out Brock Berlin last fall for the starting job. And then, at last year's Orange Bowl, the ballcoach broke Grossman's heart.

Five nights before the game, Grossman and his center, Dave Jorgensen, were out on South Beach and violated Spurrier's midnight curfew. They had been surrounded by half-naked women, and at about 11:45, Grossman had said, "You wanna go?" To which Jorgensen replied, "You wanna go?" Grossman eventually turned himself in at 12:30, figuring he'd have to run extra laps -- like the players who'd missed curfew the previous night. But Spurrier benched him for the first 24 minutes of the biggest game of his life. Grossman eventually led the Gators to six straight touchdowns in their 56-23 win over Maryland, but to Rex, the Orange Bowl proved only that Spurrier's mind games never end. And this is exactly why Grossman -- even though he started all 11 other games -- never felt like the real Florida quarterback. Never felt like the true BMOC. Never felt like the king of the offense, or even a close second.

Which is why Zook, who didn't need Oaks to hide from anybody, had a chance to keep him. Even though Grossman said he was "95% sure" he was going pro when Spurrier left, part of him still wanted to be king of the Florida offense. Part of him still wanted to be the first Florida quarterback in decades to be bigger than the Florida coach. So the real question was: Would this Ron Zook guy let him?

***

	Don't let the look fool you -- Rex is all about the new ballcoach.

Here's how Ron Zook got Rex Grossman to stay: He kidnapped him.

On the day Zook was hired -- after he'd just spent two seasons as the New Orleans Saints' defensive coordinator -- he led Grossman into the Florida locker room ... and hyperventilated in front of him for two hours. "The guy was bursting," Grossman says of Zook's monologue. "I asked which direction the program was headed. And he just kept talking."

There were other factors in Rex's decision to stay -- the hiring of Marshall's innovative offensive coordinator, Ed Zaunbrecher, and the decision of Orange Bowl MVP Jacobs to stay -- but never underestimate the power of a coach with no name. He'll say anything. In that two-hour meeting, Grossman got to know a coach who was everything Spurrier was not. A coach whose high school job was pumping gas. A coach who got his pilot's license before his driver's license. A coach who, as a player, walked on at Miami of Ohio and had to wear leftover equipment that didn't fit.

He was a coach who once nearly fell out of a high school press box shouting instructions to his defense. A coach who hasn't been back to a press box since. A coach who was Spurrier's defensive coordinator at Florida from 1991 to '93, but was demoted to special-teams coach in 1994. A coach who didn't pout, but just turned those special teams into maniacal units that blocked 12 kicks in two years. A coach who was then hired away to run the Steelers' special teams. A coach who used to head-butt Steelers players before every kickoff -- while they were wearing helmets. (A coach who ended up with two black eyes one game.)

This is how Zook sold Grossman and, after he was done with the quarterback, he went statewide to sell Gator Nation. In a little over a month, the coach visited more than 20 Gator Club functions and 80 Florida high schools -- a chore Spurrier generally left to his staff -- and he'd barely fit in his one meal a day at Denny's. Hope you do good, boy. Hope you do good. "Yep, that's what they said at restaurants," Zook, 48, says. "Well, I hope I do good too. But I know what they were thinking."

The problem was Gator Nation didn't know him any better than Grossman had. They didn't know that Zook will do whatever it takes to stay out of the Music City Bowl. Or that he'd already gone into Miami's backyard and recruited Miami players. "I was talking to a kid down there, and I asked him, 'Who else is recruiting you?'" Zook says. "He said Miami. I said, 'What did the Miami coach say?' And he goes, 'The Miami coach said, "You don't want to go to Florida -- he's a first-year coach."' And I say to the kid, 'Um, wasn't Larry Coker just a first-year coach? And how did he do?'"

So that's why he went to these Gator Clubs, to prove he was no wallflower. But back on campus, Zook found he had a new problem: a self-absorbed quarterback. Grossman, not long after his decision to stay, asked Foley if the school would sell his No.8 jersey on campus. That had been done only once under Spurrier -- for Danny Wuerffel briefly in 1996 -- but Foley okayed it, and Grossman had a little sniff of power. His mind then began to drift. NFL scouts had indicated he'd be the third QB taken in the draft -- behind David Carr and Joey Harrington -- and it was Spurrier's Redskins, of all teams, that ended up taking the third QB, Patrick Ramsey. "I could run that Redskins offense right now," Grossman says, and he couldn't help but second-guess himself.

It was around then that he started skipping classes, three to be exact. He'd never been serious about school, anyway -- his major is travel and tourism -- but once this got back to Zook, there was going to be a lecture. He may have sweet-talked Grossman into staying, but now Zook needed to establish order.

So he kidnapped Grossman again. He sat the QB down in his office for another two-hour chat. Then he gave Grossman his cell phone number and ordered him to call every day, through the end of the semester, to prove he could live up to an obligation. If Zook didn't answer, Rex was required to leave a message. "I still didn't really know him," Grossman says. "But to have to call him every day, it was kind of fun. We'd shoot the s--."

Zook began confiding in his quarterback, and Grossman recalls the day Zook returned from an SEC coaches' conference, seething. Spurrier never attended those functions, as if it was beneath him, and Zook got the impression -- from what was said -- that other SEC coaches wanted payback this season. "You could sense they were thinking, 'Ding dong, the witch is dead,'" Zook says. "It just stuck in the back of my head that they were thinking, 'We got 'em now.'" It was right then that the coach and his trust-fund quarterback got on the same page. After hearing about the SEC coaches, Grossman began working out more, staying in at night more, talking more to his coaches, watching more film. He purposely moved into a house across from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium and, just the other week, mom Maureen asked Dan, "Has an alien gotten inside Rex's body? He's a different person."

His parents say Grossman had never been this committed under Spurrier, that they'd never seen him so spirited. It took seven months, two kidnappings and a huge cell phone bill, but the coach with no name had done it.

He'd turned Rex Grossman into the king of the offense.

This article appears in the September 16 issue of ESPN The Magazine.