He's not supposed to be here.

Florida State bred. A once natural nose tackle and chip off the Bobby Bowden playing and coaching tree walking into his office at the University of Miami each morning and staring through new glass at the biggest, grandest U logo you have ever seen adorning the east wall of the Carol Soffer Indoor Practice Facility.

But the Todd Stroud story extends far beyond such trivial matters as where he once played college football.

"One to three years," the nurse practitioner said to him in matter-of-fact fashion almost five years ago.

She was young, maybe 28 years old. She probably had no business giving a man in his 50's like Stroud a prognosis of how long he might be able to live with Amyloidosis, a rare blood disorder that is not exactly cancer because it produces no tumors, but takes lives in very similar fashion.

The bottom line is that Amyloidosis occurs when a substance called amyloid, an abnormal protein that is produced in bone marrow, builds up in someone's tissue or organs. It affects different organs in different people, choosing indiscriminately between the heart, kidneys, liver, spleen, nervous system and digestive tract. It is supposed to lead to organ failure. There's no cure. Treatments can help manage symptoms, limit the production of amyloid protein and extend a life for what until Stroud came along and thus far defied it was believed to be a very short time.

"I'm like `Well, I'm screwed,'" Stroud remembers thinking as he sat across from her. "I was frozen in time. I didn't even tell my wife right away. I didn't know what to do."

He laughs.

"I'll tell you what not to do," Stroud said. "If someone tells you that you are sick, don't go to Google and look it up."

Those one to three years have morphed into five years and counting and a healthy-looking, in playing shape, old-school football coach entrusted with the most physically demanding position group on the Hurricanes' defense.

This wasn't really the plan either. Stroud, dismissed as part of Terry Bowden's staff at Akron after last season and headed to a reunion at Temple with former FSU buddy Manny Diaz, was hired by Diaz at Miami instead in January for a newly created off the field job of "chief of staff."

"Basically I was going to do a lot of stuff that Manny doesn't want to do," Stroud said. "I was going to be Assistant Head Coach off the field. Go to meetings he can't attend. Keep an eye on the academics. Go down to the weight room.

"I have done every job in football through the years. My resume is very unique. I have coached high school, Division 3, Division 2, Division 1 and done every job there is in those. I have coached offense, coached defense, been a defensive coordinator, been a strength coach. I have a lot of diverse experience."

Then another curve ball was thrown in his direction. Miami Defensive Line Coach Jess Simpson decided to leave to return to the NFL. Diaz was ready to promote Stroud back into an on-field coaching job. Needless to say, Stroud didn't hesitate to accept this challenge either. It took about a second.

Stroud cranked up the video tape and began studying his new Miami defensive line pupils, finding the same thing that everyone else did as the 2017 season drew to a close.

The Miami defensive line performed pretty darn well last season when Gerald Willis was playing at an elite level in the middle and freeing up Joe Jackson and Jon Garvin on the outside and linebackers Shaq Quarterman and Mike Pinckney in the middle. But when Willis sat out the bowl game against Wisconsin and Jackson also was limited, Miami totally fell apart on defense. Both those guys are gone permanently to the pros now, which means Stroud has until August 24 to get Pat Bethel and Jon Ford and Nesta Silvera playing at a much loftier level than they finished last season. Ford and Silvera have already been improved in the first two weeks of spring practice.

Don't expect Stroud to be the least bit daunted by the task for obvious reasons. No challenge seems tough when you have stared down death like he has and come out on the other side.

"I don't sweat the small stuff anymore," Stroud said. "When you have been through that, you really don't. You listen better and you teach better. I have more patience than anybody on the planet. There are just no emergencies anymore."

As a nose tackle for Bowden at FSU in the early 80's, Stroud beat Miami twice, was part of the early epic battles that defined one of college football's greatest rivalries and carry over to this day.

"We beat Miami in 1982 and 1984," Stroud remembered. "They beat us in 1983 and 1985."

Stroud was the Seminoles' team captain as a senior. He never missed a game in four years and earned the team's Courage Award.

His travels as a coach have spanned all areas of the country. He got his start as the defensive line coach at Central Florida in 1986 and then became the defensive line and strength and conditioning coach at Samford from 1987-93.

Then he was off to Auburn as the head strength and conditioning coach where he helped the Tigers to an 11-0 regular season. He parlayed that accomplishment into the head coaching job at West Alabama, where the impossible task of winning (6-25) chewed him up and sent him back to the weight room, this time at Memphis from 1997-1999.

Stroud ran the strength program at North Carolina State from 1999-2004 before becoming defensive line coach there from 2004-2006. That's where he got to know Diaz well. Diaz was a graduate assistant in Raleigh in 2000 and 2001 and then coached linebackers and defensive backs there from 2002-2005. When Chuck Amato was fired after the 2006 season, Bobby Bowden hired Stroud as strength coach from 2007-2009. When Bowden retired, Stroud went to Colorado State for two seasons before landing on Terry Bowden's staff at Akron.

So he has been around a bit, seen and learned so many things.

"I can tell you what is going to happen before it happens," Stroud said. "I know what happens in the spring. I know what happens in the summer. I know when someone is about to get in trouble.

"I have seen everything. And that's an advantage."

Fair enough, but nothing prepared Stroud for that moment in May 2014 when he sat across from that young nurse and was told he was about to die.

"I was having some problems, the kind of problems that you just associate with aging," Stroud said. "I started having uncontrollable gas. Indigestion. They treat you for that. They look at a guy like me -- I run every day, I lift every day -- they dismiss a lot of things. I am fine. I'll be fine. They aren't finding anything. There was nothing knocking me out.

"Then I get erectile dysfunction. I get a hypothyroid. They said wait, there is something else going on here. They looked at my blood. They still couldn't find it."

Stroud was anxious to get out of the doctor's office and back to Akron in time for practice. But the doctor huddled with Stroud's wife of 30 years, Marianne, and together they insisted Stroud take a urine test before he left.

Marianne has her own amazing, death-defying story. She was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2011, three years before her husband became sick.

People react differently when they are told that they are going to die. Marianne decided she was not living in the present the way that she should or wanted to.

She started throwing everything out of their house. Their clothes, their shoes, their furniture, boxes of other stuff. She put their big house in Fort Collins, Colorado up for sale. They moved to a smaller town house. This total life reorganization was something Marianne could control and manage while she fought her battle with cancer, a disease she could not.

“Instead of waiting until we retired, I wanted to start living the life we dreamed out," Marianne said at the time. "Our daughter said our house got radiated. But I just said, ‘We're doing it now.’”

Marianne had her thyroid removed. She spent a week in the hospital and was quarantined for an entire month, leaving care of their three teenage daughters and young son in Todd's hands as he shuttled between home and Colorado State football practices. She became cancer-free, but like Todd must still undergo regular testing to make sure the cancer doesn't come back.

His job as a football coach, watching him lead young men throughout his career, helped her stay positive through the ordeal.

“Just leading by example all those years made it easy to emulate him,” she told the Akron Beacon Journal. “He's always been so strong, so it was easy to physically copy in a way."

Mariane was qualified to be the expert inside that doctor's office as the puzzled physician struggled to figure out what was wrong with her husband.

She could barely recall him even getting a headache through the years. Now there was no explanation for all of the swelling in his body, the puffiness around his eyes, the cut on his lip that still wasn't healing after a year. His hair was falling out. Marianne pulled out pictures four years apart and compared the hair lines. And then there was that cough. Todd didn't have the flu, but he would constantly cough. It was a daily signal that something was going quite wrong.

There also was one other startling clue of trouble. When Marianne and Todd would go out running, she would beat him. That was the most unheard of thing of all. Stroud wakes up at 3:45 a.m. every morning to run and lift weights. He is in the kind of shape most people dream about, but never attain.

So Marianne and the doctor demanded he take that urine test that day before he headed back to work at Akron. That may have saved his life.

"So I get the urine test," Stroud said, leaning back in his office chair and gazing out the window at Miami's spanking new practice facility. "It came back with a ton of protein I was passing in my urine. They did a bone marrow biopsy to check for bone marrow cancer. It came back negative. I was fine. So I do a kidney biopsy next.

"A couple days later, I was recruiting in Orlando and got a call from the doctor. You need to come back to Akron right now. My real doctor wasn't there, which is why I was sitting there with a nurse practitioner. She said `Mr. Stroud I am very sorry to tell you that you have Amyloidosis. We found it in your kidneys, it's in your digestive system.' Basically, you typically don't pee out hardly any protein in your urine. If you exercise real hard like I do, you might pee out a gram or two. I was peeing out 17 grams a day. That's death."

Stroud asked her what his treatment would be. She told him high dose chemotherapy. He was ready to take it on. But he couldn't get an appointment for four weeks.

"Four weeks, you believe that?" Stroud said. "So I'm like OK, let me make sure I go back to the office and screw jogging and lifting weights anymore. I don't need to eat healthy. Give me a cigarette and some beer. Whatever. I'll see you in a month.

"It was a real struggle for about a week. I am a man of faith. I'm not really scared to die. I'm afraid to leave my family. But I found a wonderful doctor at the Cleveland Clinic and they recommended a stem cell transplant. They gave me six months of chemotherapy in an hour. They put you in a room with 40 people and you all get it done at the same time. It essentially kills you. It knocks you like a bus hitting you. You just stay in your room until your numbers come back up. Then they let you out."

He worked out with hand weights while he waited in the hospital and also found a treadmill.

His orders upon discharge: Stay away from work for six months and wear a mask to help his weakened immune system protect from infection.

All Stroud could think about was the four football practices that he missed. He walked out of the hospital and went straight to a position meeting with his players. He didn't wear a mask. He didn't tell his boss, Terry Bowden, what he was supposed to be doing.

"I didn't really even coach from a golf cart," Stroud said. "It was brutal. I had no hair anywhere on my body. I looked terrible. I shouldn't have done it, but I made it through.

"I owed it to the kids. I had a room full of kids waiting on me. That's my commitment. You never know you are going to miss it until you get removed from it. I missed four practices in those two weeks and those were the longest four days of my life. Those were the only practices I have missed in 32 years. All you can think about is getting back out there."

Stroud's players helped him out by constantly washing their hands when they were going to be around him. The air conditioning in his office would blow cold, so Stroud used a portable heater at his desk.

“I guess you are as strong as you are when you have to be, when the obstacle, the adversity is so huge,” Marianne told the Journal at the time. “He got to find it inside himself, too. It’s like falling in love again with your husband, finding things in him you’ve never seen before, the strength, the determination.

“After the stem cell chemo, he’d get up in the morning and he’d be puking. He’d continue on his [workout], get in the shower, go back and puke some more. When you’re going through it you think, ‘Can you make it another day?’ It took him to his knees, but he would stand straight back up every time.”

Things progressively returned to normal for Stroud. The stem cell treatments were effective. Stroud had six more months of chemotherapy. He would go in every Monday night after football practices and recruiting calls. Once they were done, he didn't need to go in again for two more years.

There will be times here at Miami when you see him walk across the Greentree Practice field to the new Lennar Medical Center on the opposite side to get checked or receive chemo treatments. It's a minor inconvenience.

"My heart is like a 25 year old," Stroud said. "I have been able to keep my energy and keep working. I have not missed a day of work in four years.

"There are more chapters to be written in this story. I am a healthy sick guy. Even when my numbers go up, I don't feel bad. I have stayed in such good shape through my life and there is no question that has something to do with it. I still think I can bring a lot to the table as an older coach with 34 years of experience. I still have a lot of energy."

The Hurricanes went 7-6 last season and that is the new urgent problem in Stroud's life now along with his fellow members of a new coaching staff. The challenge of making Miami a nationally-proud program again will provide an outlet to try to let his wisdom become an asset in each step along the way.

"It's just what I do," he said. "It's all about the kids at this point in my life. Its helping kids, influencing them. You make an impact on them every day through what you say to them and what you do. That's why I am in it and have been in it so long. Coaching is a great profession. It brings you to a lot of interesting places and you meet a lot of interesting people.

"We are driven to make this thing right again. I think we have a great leader. I have never been around an individual in this business as smart as Manny Diaz. He is extremely intelligent. Well thought out. He studies it. He studies people. He is phenomenal. He knows people. He knows football."

Defensive line is obviously one of the more physical positions in football and coaching it is not a finesse game either. Stroud lost his nose tackle body long before his illness. But that won't stop him from getting in the trenches with massive guys like Ford and Silvera as he teaches the techniques to help make them better players.

"I am not scared, believe me," Stroud joked. "I am still a demonstrator. It's the position I played and it is second nature. It comes real easy. I don't even think about being an older guy. It energizes me. Age is just a number.

"I have coached in four decades now. The kids really haven't changed. They want discipline, they want structure, they want to be told what to do. And they need a leader. That's kind of what I do."

He is working hard these days to simplify the game for his linemen so by August 24 when Miami lines up against Florida they can cut loose. He doesn't want them to have to think and become slow. He wants to build depth so he has a legit two-deep rotation.

Those are the on-field challenges as he continues to allow modern medicine to keep up its own chase and craft drugs that will continue to help him stay healthy. He believes a cure is on the way.

"I don't even think about it anymore," Stroud said. "I promise you, I do not think about being sick a single day. Every day is a great day. I have not had a bad day since about a week after the diagnosis. I really haven't. I've just been blessed."

Bobby Bowden called him the day after it was announced that he was joining Diaz in Miami. He was hoping to hear some "dadgumits" from the old coach about what the heck a Seminole was doing down in Coral Gables trying to beat Florida State. But Bowden played the call straight and was full of congratulations.

"It's different being at Miami, but if you have been coaching as long as I have you have been to so many different places and been exposed to so many different cultures," Stroud said. "I have gotten used to it pretty quick.

"My loyalties are with the Canes now. Believe me."