Urban Meyer doth protest too much

If there’s one thing that drives Urban Meyer insane, it’s when people refuse to take responsibility.

Don’t look in the rearview mirror, Urban.

You might see Gainesville in 2010. Then again, you might not be able to spot it through the mushroom cloud that billowed from a collapsing football program.

There’s a responsibility deficit there, but we must first return to this week.

Meyer went off on Texas Coach Tom Herman for blaming the football disarray in Austin on the previous coaching staff.

“C’mon, man. I don’t know where that came from,” Meyer told CBS Sports. “It’s like a new generation of excuse. (Herman) said, ‘I can’t rub pixie dust on this thing.’ He got a dose of reality. Maryland just scored 51 points on you.”

Herman actually said “fairy dust,” though I don’t know if there’s a real difference on the dust spectrum.

Meyer also brought up another case of excuse-making, saying Will Muschamp “blamed us for Florida.” He rattled off names of players he left for Muschamp to work with.

Then he cleared his throat like a Shakespearean actor and made his case to the audience.

“That’s like, when I got here, everybody wanted me to say Jim Tressel left the cupboard bare,” Meyer said. “If I heard any assistant coach (say that), they’d be gone. You’re done.

“Those are your players. I hear TV guys (say), ‘Wait until they get their own players in there.’ They’re our players. What do you mean ‘their players?’ The minute you sign a contract, they’re your players…

“(Blaming players) drives me insane.”

To quote Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, “C’mon, man. The coach doth protest too much, methinks.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

The problem wasn’t that Meyer left Muschamp no talent. It was that the talent was encased in an atmosphere thick with entitlement, corruption and marijuana smoke.

Fumigating the place was Job One for Muschamp. Job Two was developing an offense that could score against 11 tackling dummies.

Muschamp failed at that, which is the main reason he was axed in 2014. Nobody can say he did a good job at Florida. But it’s also disingenuous to say the toxic situation he inherited didn’t make his job a lot harder.

Don’t take my word for it. Take Meyer’s.

When he got to Ohio State and recruited against Florida, he told a prospect’s parents what he’d do if his kid were torn between the Gators and Buckeyes.

“He wouldn’t let his son got to Florida because of significant character issues in the locker room,” according to The Sporting News.

Much has been written about Meyer’s laissez-faire approach to discipline, so there’s no need to rehash the Gainesville police logs from 2006-2011.

Suffice it to say that any place where Aaron Hernandez could go largely undetected for three years was not the kind of place you’d want to send your son.

Muschamp took pains not to publicly point a finger at his predecessor. After he landed at Auburn as defensive coordinator, he did bring up the situation.

“We changed the culture of the program that was labeled by the previous head coach as ‘ broken,’ ” Muschamp said. “He said it. I didn’t.”

That previous coach obviously took note of the comment. So when asked this week about Herman bellyaching about the mess he inherited at Texas, Meyer had to unload some of the mental baggage he’s been lugging around.

Urban Meyer takes Tom Herman, Will Muschamp to task for comments.

In the big picture, he’s right. Nobody makes a coach take a high-paying, high-pressure job at places like Texas or Florida.

So when they get there and find the mess is worse than they’d imagined, they shouldn’t make excuses.

But if ever a coach had a legitimate excuse for needing pixie dust to sprinkle on a pile of leftover garbage, it was Muschamp.

That’s what is really driving Meyer insane.