From Urban's Way by Buddy Martin: Meyer adopted Donovan’s idea of a new psychological approach on a season schedule—“It’s only a hundred and seven days”—as opposed to twelve games or six months. “A hundred and seven days! We used that big-game time, even on our highlight videos,” Meyer said. “I’ll never forget, later in the season, ‘Only thirty-seven days left.’ That’s when you get the guys’ attention. That all came from Billy. “And then they work up on the morning of the game and we had a big sign made: ‘Zero days left! It’s time to go play the game.’”
“One of the biggest misconceptions for these kids is that they think they understand competition,” Donovan said. “And what happens is that when they are highly touted—and they’ve been billed or dubbed as the next NFL star or next NBA star—there can be a lot of easy ways of going through and they’ve never faced adversity. “I think what Urban is doing every day is creating [competitive] confrontation out on the football field to show these guys, ‘When you leave this place, you’re not going to have somebody walking you to your job. There’s not going to somebody checking to see if you’re on time. If you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you get a pink slip and you’re being fired.’ I don’t want to say it’s tough love—it’s reality of the way it is.”
