When Illinois and Ohio State meet at Ohio Stadium on Saturday, the teams will battle for the Illibuck, a wooden turtle meant to represent a once-live turtle. But the matchup will mean so much more for two head coaches who have known each other for nearly 30 years.

Illinois’ Tim Beckman and Ohio State’s Urban Meyer will be on opposite sidelines for the first time since January 2007, but their history goes back much further. After graduating from Berea High School, in Berea, Ohio, in 1983, Beckman attended Kentucky for one year. One of Beckman’s close friends at Berea was Bill Davis, whose father was the vice president of player personnel for the nearby Cleveland Browns. Davis played football at Cincinnati after graduation. When the two friends parted for separate schools, Davis found himself rooming with an aspiring football player coming off of two unsuccessful years in minor league baseball. His name was Urban Meyer.

Beckman met Meyer through Davis, who is now the linebackers coach for the Browns and says he considers Meyer one of his good friends.

“That’s where we first met,” Beckman said. “Through that, the relationship built. When Urban became a graduate assistant at Ohio State, I was a graduate assistant at Auburn. We used to meet at coaches conventions and stuff like that.”

Although they remained close friends throughout the years, Beckman and Meyer never coached on the same staff until 2001, when Meyer accepted the head position at Bowling Green. Beckman had been at Bowling Green as the defensive coordinator since 1998, and he remained on the staff when Meyer took over.

Meyer also brought wide receivers coach Billy Gonzales to Bowling Green. Gonzales was a wide receiver at Colorado State in the early 1990s, when Meyer was his wide receivers coach. Gonzales would coach under Meyer’s tutelage for nine years before leaving for LSU after the 2009 season and eventually being named co-offensive coordinator under Beckman at Illinois.

In two years at Bowling Green, Meyer won 17 games and achieved a national ranking in his second season. After the 2002 season, Meyer left for Utah. Beckman said he had an opportunity to follow Meyer to Utah, but with a recent death in the family, he did not want to move his wife across the country.

In the years since they last coached on the same sideline, Meyer’s career has skyrocketed. His resume includes a 113-23 record, an undefeated season at Utah and two BCS national championships with Florida. In his first year in Columbus, Ohio, his Buckeyes have started out 9-0 with a No. 6 ranking.

“I think he’s extremely disciplined, he’s extremely motivated,” Gonzales said. “He was a psychology major, one of the things he always does is, he does a darn good job of getting into the heads of the players that he’s coaching.”

After six years with Bowling Green, Beckman left to become the cornerbacks coach at Ohio State. He remained in Columbus for two seasons, including 2006, when the Buckeyes met Meyer’s Gators in the BCS national championship.

“We had met defensively with them that summer,” Beckman said. “Myself and coach (Luke) Fickell went down and met with coach (Greg) Mattison and their defensive staff. It was kind of ironic that we played them in the national championship game (later that year).”

Beckman said he often talked with Meyer and his staff about how to improve their respective programs. The Gators handled the Buckeyes 41-14 in the 2007 title game. Gonzales said the Gators knew they weren’t going to get many big plays against Beckman’s cornerbacks.

“If you take a look at the game, there were a couple of plays that we made, but we never really threw the ball deep,” Gonzales said. “It was a game that we had to control from a dink and a dunk type of situation.”

After the 2010 season, Meyer took a leave of absence from coaching. He became an analyst for ESPN and devoted more time to his family. But Gonzales knew it wasn’t the end of Meyer’s coaching career. Having played under Meyer at Colorado State, Gonzales knows the family well. He has pictures of himself holding Meyer’s oldest child, Nikki (who now plays volleyball at Georgia Tech), when she was a baby. He says he only talked to Meyer a few times last year.

“His daughters and his son mean the world to him,” Gonzales said. “I think that you take a look at what he tried to do is get out and see Gigi, Nikki and Nate, get out and get a chance to see what he’s missed over the last 15 to 20 years of their lives, trying to scramble and put everything back into one year. It doesn’t make up for everything, but I tell you what, it sure as heck helped revive him.”

Beckman talked to Meyer often last yea while Meyer was away from coaching. When they spoke, Beckman said Meyer critiqued his Toledo football team’s play, but their conversations weren’t limited to football. Beckman speaks highly of Meyer as a father. He said every football coach understands what Meyer was struggling with when he temporarily left the game.

“I think that every football coach goes through that,” Beckman said. “It’s tough when I’ve only seen my son play one high school football game this year.”

Saturday’s matchup will be the first time Beckman, Meyer and Gonzales all meet on the same field since the 2007 BCS title game. Once again, they will be battling for the same trophy, only this time it is a wooden turtle.

Sean can be reached at [email protected] and@sean_hammond.