Note: Published with permission from Jeff Snook
COLUMBUS – One day, perhaps two at the most, remains.
Now that Ohio State has announced that its board of trustees will meet in a special session Wednesday at 9 a.m. to discuss football coach Urban Meyer’s future, the end of this three-week ordeal, much of it played out in public in messy detail, is nearing its conclusion.
The college football world, with the season about to kick off next week, sits and waits.
Fans outside the state of Ohio sit and wait, fully expecting Meyer to be fired, or at least suspended for a lengthy period. You can excuse them. Their knowledge and exposure to the facts of this investigation and entire case of alleged domestic violence by an assistant coach has been limited to what the national media and ESPN has provided.
Ohio State football fans, on the other hand, having followed things a bit more closely, expect Meyer to be reinstated within days.
Meyer himself sits and waits in his Muirfield Golf Course home, likely watching every miserable minute pass as he’s away from his team, but fully expecting to be exonerated when the findings of the investigation are made public.
He has known the truth all along. By now, at least six others, and the school’s board of trustees as well, know it, too.
When the final determination is announced by university president Michael Drake, I believe he will do one of three things: Issue a one-game suspension, a two-game suspension or an immediate reinstatement with “time served.”
The latter would result from Meyer’s nearly three-week sentence in purgatory, while the investigation was conducted.
A possible suspension wouldn’t have anything to do with covering up domestic violence, I am told, but rather a result from some soap-opera type findings relating to his staff members that occurred at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center in recent years.
Following any of the above outcomes, you may be reading the following headlines this week- at least from media outlets in the other 49 states — “FOOTBALL FACTORY OHIO STATE CHOOSES WINNING COACH OVER DOMESTIC VIOLENCE”
Those in the national media didn’t care much about the facts in this case from the beginning, so why would they start now?
That term “paid-administrative leave” equated to guilt in their collective eyes.
They wanted blood, and for the past three weeks, they sucked on it like a thirsty vampire.
The blood was Meyer’s.
They jumped on the original report of domestic violence accusations out of the gate and rode that report and the accuser’s validity like Secretariat.
They just didn’t reach the finish line with the outcome they desired. They won’t get Meyer’s scalp, not this time around anyway.
And they wanted it so badly, considering what they already knew about him from his time at the University of Florida, where he has since admitted mistakes regarding player discipline. There is little doubt he may have given out too many second or third chances to the wrong Gators. But the Meyer who moved to Columbus in December 2011,wasn’t the same man.
For the past six-plus years, he has ruled the Ohio State program with an iron fist. In fact, he has been tighter on discipline than any head coach in my lifetime and that includes Woody Hayes. At times, even Woody was oblivious as his boys were acting like boys, as long as they didn’t break the law or miss a class.
Now that it appears Urban Meyer will return to the sidelines, the college football world may lose its collective mind.
What was most important in this whole mess was the fact this wasn’t the Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein cases, each involving multiple accusers. This was one single, solitary accuser. And from the moment Meyer was placed on administrative leave, the media dropped the ball by not poking around to verify if she was reliable and credible.
We now know she wasn’t.
And don’t take that from me, or even her mother, or her ex mother-in-law, or her ex-husband, whose own credibility has taken its own beating through recent media reports. Take it from the Powell police department. Take it from the six-panel investigative committee the university appointed.
They all discovered the truth, and it will be revealed shortly.
She had an ax to grind with her ex-husband and she wanted to grind it with any means possible. And she never cared about collateral damage. If the head football coach — who once employed her ex-husband, who paid her $5,000 per month in alimony and child support – lost his job and had his career, legacy and also his life ruined, then all the better.
She recently said through her attorney that she was “taking the high road.”
If the high road involved helping make intimate photos of an ex-husband accessible to the media, along with $2,200 in receipts in…well … let’s just say “unmentionables,” then I don’t want to see what her version of the low road looks like.
Let’s be honest here: When you share two children with your particular target, and they are only 8 and 6 years old, this illustrates an immediate need “for professional help,” as her own mother has stated.
Know this: The investigative committee discovered it all.
On certain days, committee members must have wanted to take a long shower when they finished their work.
During the first week of the investigation, it spent time on what Meyer, athletic director Gene Smith, and others at Ohio State did in relation to her claims of domestic abuse. Most importantly, they learned what the Powell police department already knew. Then they delved into every gory detail of fired assistant Zach Smith’s relationship with her.
During the second week, a few soap-opera type issues that may have occurred at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center popped up. Affairs are nasty to begin with. Intra-office affairs can be even worse.
We all know Zach Smith wasn’t a saint here. I am not defending him. He cheated on his wife, which may or may not have set her plan into motion. He probably drank too much at times. Maybe he took photos of himself he never should have taken.
But the Powell police, and the investigative committee, evidently found no evidence he committed domestic violence.
And he is no longer employed at Ohio State.
Now should his boss have been aware of his private life, his arrest for operating a vehicle while intoxicated (charges were reduced) in 2013? Or the intimate details of his private life?
That’s up for valid debate.
I can’t picture the head coach of any program addressing his receivers coach with a conversation along the lines of, “You need to get your guys high-pointing the ball better. Their routes are sloppy right now, so get it fixed. You check in on your recruits lately? You don’t have a DUI do you? And one other thing, have you been faithful to your wife this week?”
For the work ethic and focus that makes Meyer so great on the field (a 73-8 record overall, 6-0 against Michigan and one national title at Ohio State), there has to be a downside. It may be somewhat of a detriment in monitoring the minutia in assistant coaches’ and other staffers’ personal lives. He relies on others for that, and perhaps they let him down.
While an assistant may be in his office, uh … doing things not exactly translating to winning football games, Meyer spends most of his time down the hallway doing just that, holed up watching tape and trying to figure out the weakness of an opposing defense. Or tweaking his beloved special teams.
He always has used the term “laser focus,” and in covering the game for more than 35 years, I have never seen a football coach who does that part of it so well. But maybe, just maybe, that comes at a cost. A head coach focused on winning and how to win, can’t possibly monitor the personal life of every assistant, every staffer and every graduate assistant, can he?
Especially their lives behind closed doors, and specifically, closed office doors.
And maybe his loyalty also came back to bite him here.
Assistant coaches are people who reflect society. They have marital problems. They argue with their wives. Sometimes, they even commit adultery.
But if some of it filtered into Ohio State’s football facility, it is not a good look.
Let’s get to the relevance of it all, and what Urban Meyer deserves and doesn’t deserve now.
First of all, he didn’t deserve to be called “a fraud” and “a liar” on national television. And for those still claiming he lied to the media at Big Ten media days in Chicago on July 24, Meyer explained that he was answering the report claiming Zach Smith “was charged” with domestic violence, when he answered, “I don’t know who creates these things.”
There is no argument that he needed to be clearer and more extensive with his explanation. He needed to add, “… in regard to Zach Smith being charged” or something to explain what he was responding to. Still, many reporters in attendance, and the hundreds that weren’t present, assumed he was lying when he said, “There was nothing there.”
Now that the investigation is complete, Meyer surely does not deserve to be fired, according to the facts and evidence in this case.
I don’t even believe he deserves a one-game suspension, according to the facts and evidence in this case.
And if Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith informed Drake in late July that Meyer indeed did the right thing back in 2015, as according to this contract states he must, then he likely didn’t deserve to be placed on paid leave for all the world to suddenly assume his guilt.
What he deserves now, according to the facts and evidence in this case, is to have his name cleared publicly and thoroughly.
Ohio State must make public every ounce of information the committee gathered: Every interview, every transcript and every corroborated fact. If anyone comes out of it looking less than stellar character-wise, then so be it. And if another staffer at any level is given a pink slip because of confirmed wrong-doing, then so be it.
Because in all fairness to Meyer, when someone of his public stature is placed on leave and fingers are pointed, it makes the biggest headlines on the front page. Subsequently, the evidence resulting in his vindication cannot be placed on the back pages in small type.
Especially after the mess was played out for almost three weeks from the moment ESPN broke into its 6 p.m. Sports Center and announced to the nation Meyer had been placed on leave. Three weeks is an eternity when the nation widely presumes your guilt.
No matter the outcome, the damage is already done to Meyer for those who will always believe he got away with something, consistent with his past at Florida. This outcome won’t change their minds. Neither will the facts.
Forty-years after that infamous cold, foggy night in Jacksonville at the Gator Bowl, there remain those – mostly outside the state of Ohio – who don’t give a flip about Woody Hayes’ lifetime of good deeds, his players’ nearly 100 percent graduation rate, his unlimited philanthropy off the field or his five national titles on it.
To them, he was nothing but on old, angry football coach who threw a right cross at an opposing player. And no amount of good work before, and redemption after, would change their minds.
Some legacies, you understand, are complex.
What’s most important is the afterword in Hayes’ story. After a few months of solitude in his Upper Arlington home south of Lane Avenue, he re-entered public life and redeemed himself over and over and over again. He continued to help thousands of his ex-players navigate through life’s bumpy road. Dozens of academic scholarships were named for him. He continued his philanthropy and constant visits to lonely patients at area hospitals. He knew every nurse by name. He also took an office at the ROTC building on Neil Avenue and lectured on military history. He drove home to anyone who listened what he knew all along: That life is only worth living if you are giving back to those in need, or as he put it, “paying it forward.”
What he didn’t do was pay attention to his many critics. He was a student of U.S. history, and he realized all great men had them. Abe Lincoln and Billy Graham had them. If you think about it, any man or woman of relevance has them. And Hayes had plenty.
So, if he could pick himself up and dust himself off from that embarrassment, Meyer can surely do that here – no matter what his critics hold onto. Not that he’s fighting back from any real wrong-doing, but rather the perception of wrong-doing.
Because it became clearer by the day during the past three weeks that, while opposing coaches oversaw their respective practices, schemed and planned for the 2018 season, Urban Meyer deserved to be back with his football team.
And now he may deserve something else ….
One big, fat apology.
