On paper, it’s hard to imagine anyone doing better than Urban Meyer did as the head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes. In seven seasons, Meyer’s Buckeyes went 83-9, won five bowl games, and a national title. And while Meyer’s short-lived tenure in the NFL was nothing short of disastrous, he has his place as one of the better college coaches of his generation. Heck, he isn’t the first college coach to flame out in the National Football League.
That’s not to say that he deserves another chance as a head coach and the opportunity to be the leader of 120-plus young men, but the NCAA seems to abide by the “forgive and forget” motto when it comes to embattled head coaches. Auburn quite literally just hired disgraced former Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze to lead their program, so at this point, nothing is off the table.
So with that, we should be expecting a premier college football program to give Meyer a ring following this season, right? Not so fast. That’s according to On3’s Andy Staples, who told Brandon Contes on the latest episode of the Awful Announcing Podcast that he doesn’t see Meyer succeeding in this era of college football.
“No, I don’t think so. I think he’s not really built for this era of college football,” Staples said. “His whole thing of, ‘I’ll send you home on the first bus out of town,’ like that doesn’t work with the quality of player that he tends to recruit because that kid’s gonna go, ‘You know I had 99 other offers, coach. I will be happy to go to one of them. Then you don’t have me. You go get somebody else, but I’m gonna be pretty good.’ It’s more like what he dealt with, with the Jags than what he dealt with when he was the coach at Utah and Florida and Ohio State the first time around.”
That’s certainly an interesting perspective and perhaps points to why Meyer hasn’t received any interest—at least publically—from top college football programs around the country. That could change in an instant, but it seems the era of the game that includes NIL, the transfer portal and realignment may have passed Meyer by.
