Ohio State trustee resigns over Meyer investigation

An Ohio State trustee has resigned, saying a three-game suspension of football Coach Urban

Meyer should have been more “profound” for his mishandling of domestic violence accusations against an assistant coach and for tolerating years of the assistant’s misbehavior.

The trustee, Jeffrey Wadsworth, said in an interview on Thursday that he stepped down from the board shortly after the university announced Meyer’s punishment last week.

“I didn’t feel that I’d seen high-integrity behavior,” Wadsworth said of Meyer.

He said he was the “lone voice” of dissent in advocating for a harsher punishment, but declined to specify what he proposed or to speak in great detail about the closed-door negotiations, saying he wanted to respect the confidential words of board members.

“Most people were concerned about whether it was a several-game suspension or not,” he said.

“To me,” he added, “there was something altogether wrong about reducing it to a couple of games.”

Wadsworth, a retired engineering executive, is the first of the 20 board members to speak publicly about the outcome of a university investigation that concluded Meyer had failed to fulfill obligations to report allegations of domestic violence against assistant coach Zach Smith to other university officials.

The inquiry also found that Meyer had sought to delete records from his cellphone. And it found that Smith’s behavior, including failure to pay cellphone bills, a stint in rehab for substance abuse and “promiscuous and embarrassing sexual behavior,” raised several other red flags. Smith has denied ever abusing his former wife, who made the allegations.

Investigators found discrepancies between Meyer’s account of some events and others’, and in at least one instance suggested that Meyer had lied to them.

“You read the report,” Wadsworth said, “and there’s seven or eight things about emails, memory loss, hearing things five times, and to me, that raised an issue of standards, values — not how many games someone should be suspended for.”