Florida got dumped on and ohio is picking up the rose scented poop.
From the Sporting News -
They’re giddy in Columbus, absolutely beside themselves that the man they call Urb has come home to save Ohio State.
Let me be brutally honest: Ohio State didn’t really want Urban Meyer as its next head coach. It wanted the thought of Urban Meyer.
Urban Meyer won two national titles at Florida, and he'll be expected to bring the same type of success to Ohio State. (AP Photo)
Because the Meyer they think they’re getting is long gone.
The Meyer they think they’re getting is the same man who was lying on his bedroom floor two years ago, the stress of coaching and recruiting and nonstop football crushing his chest and sucking the very life from his weak body.
The Meyer they’re getting is the man who called off a retirement, returned to the game, tanked a season and left the best job in America because he was burned out and needed to spend time with his family.
Then spent time doing his ESPN thing over the last year.
Let me be brutally honest, again: If Meyer truly needed to get away from football and “be with his family,” he would’ve walked away completely and definitively. Instead, he kept his toes in the pool by doing ESPN “work” of traveling to different programs and “interviewing” coaches—while learning from various staffs while the cameras were off.
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If you don’t think Meyer was preparing for this very moment, you’re the same guy who thinks Ohio State has institutional control.
Now think again, Ohio State fans, about the Meyer hire.
Are you getting the game’s best coach; the guy who turned around Bowling Green, who led the first non-BCS team (Utah) to a BCS bowl, who won two national championships in six seasons at Florida? Or the guy who left Gainesville with serious health issues, then came back because he couldn’t leave the game, then got out of Dodge when it was obvious the greatest player in college football history wasn’t around anymore?
I’m just not buying the burned out excuse. When coaches are burned out, they leave the game for years—if not forever. They get away from it; they find something else to fill the void.
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Meyer did none of that. He stayed as close to the game as he possibly could without actually calling plays and recruiting players. Until he signed his gig with ESPN, he still had an office at Florida and was “helping” (whatever that means) with the transition of new coach Will Muschamp.
Let’s not dance around this. Urban Meyer wasn’t burned out, and that leaves us with two undeniable facts: Meyer has health problems, and Meyer walked away from a program with every imaginable advantage of winning when the going got tough.
How else can we look at it?
That means Ohio State has thrown millions at a coach who could be forced to walk away at any moment because of health issues. And that the Buckeyes are regrouping after one of the greatest runs in school history by gambling on a man who may or may not be completely invested.
Meyer is an Ohio native, a former Buckeyes assistant and a man who reveres everything Woody and three yards and a cloud of dust. He’ll tell whoever wants to hear that this is his dream job; that he simply couldn’t walk away from the game.
Let me be brutally honest one last time: Meyer told a Miami radio station a few years ago that Notre Dame has always been his dream job. And he has walked away from the game twice.
This is the same coach who months before the 2011 season began was telling his former assistants that Penn State was the job he coveted—if JoePa were to leave. Once that job became radioactive, the backup plan fell into place.
Urban Meyer is a football coach, which means Urban Meyer has an ego. All coaches do. That’s why Meyer is coaching again.
Not dream jobs, not a native Ohioan returning home, not the draw of competing in the new Big Ten with its SEC-style championship game.
It’s pure ego.
Think again about the Meyer hire, Ohio State. The coach you think you’re getting is long gone.
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