Tate Casey was a student athlete who felt like he was being faulted for, well, being a student.
While Casey, now a fifth-year senior, dressed for all 13 games last season, his job was to play only in an emergency, as he was still recovering from right elbow surgery. If tight ends Cornelius Ingram or Aaron Hernandez went down, Casey would go in. But they didn't, and Casey barely saw the field.
This probably doesn't seem like a big deal-but if Casey had decided to sit the season out and have the surgery earlier, he would've been almost guaranteed a medical hardship waiver and another year of eligibility. Basically, just putting on a jersey and standing on the sidelines could have cost him an extra year of healthy football.
He kept his grades up in the fall and continued to prep like he was going to graduate in the spring. Casey applied for a hardship after the season, but it wouldn't be easy as he was ready to graduate and had actually dressed for games.
After 10 to 12 rough drafts of an essay explaining why he deserved the hardship, he delivered it to the compliance office.
"It's one of those things you can't bullshit," Casey said. "Pretty much straight from the heart."
Apparently his heart was in the right place. After a spring and summer A semester during which he had to pick up two minors and get all As, he was granted his hardship.
"It was the worst eight months that I think I've had since I've been in college," Casey said. "It's one of those things where it's really out of your control.
"(The committee) doesn't know you from Adam, you don't know them from Adam. They're reading a sheet of paper that's your story. Whatever you put in there better be pretty good stuff. It can easily be approved or denied just that quick."
There was another problem, though. Ingram and Hernandez were still well ahead of him on the depth chart. Casey added 20 pounds of muscle in the offseason, but significant playing time was about as far away as his home state of Texas.
That's until Ingram tore the ACL in his left knee and went out for the season. UF coach Urban Meyer had talked all offseason about the two-tight end sets the Gators were going to use, and suddenly Casey was slapped in the face with a bucketful of opportunity.
But that bucket was also filled with the pressure of replacing a team captain and someone Tim Tebow calls a "freak" of an athlete.
Good luck, Aaron and Tate.
"My stomach went weak," Hernandez said of his reaction to learning that Ingram was out. "It was silence because it happened to someone who's a great person. Never drinks, smokes, anything.
"It puts that more pressure on everyone."
But it's pressure neither of them is backing down from.
"We'll be damned if it's going to be our position that lets the team down because of that," Casey said.
So far, so good. While neither Casey nor Hernandez is as athletic as Ingram, they do have solid route-running skills, and both are capable of rumbling down the field with the ball after a catch.
"Can Tate do all the things CI does? Not necessarily," tight ends coach John Hevesy said. "But can CI do all the things Tate can? I'd answer the same way. There's different things that CI brought to the team that Tate couldn't, and there's a few things that Tate can bring that CI couldn't."
To prove his point, Hevesy mentions what happened in 2006, when defensive linemen Steve Harris and Joe Cohen stepped in for Marcus Thomas and Carlton Medder became a starting offensive lineman.
That transition was fluid, and now the Gators are hoping the same thing happens here.
"We've lost a guy that's going to catch 10 balls a game," Hevesy saids. "We've lost a guy that's going to play 50 plays a game. Those plays got to be made up from somewhere. We've got to do our spots to get those reps."
