Urban Meyer’s missed signs
Coach kept getting raises for troubled assistant.
Marc Tracy, Serge F. Kovaleski and Joe Drape COLUMBUS — The warning signs flared: delinquent payments for university travel expenses, a $600 night at a Florida strip club with at least one high school coach, a rash of missed meetings on recruiting trips for football players and late arrivals at practices. But Zach Smith, the Ohio State assistant coach at the center of it all, not only kept his job but got raises along the way.
Even before these episodes, described in a university report released last Wednesday, he had been accused in 2009 of throwing his pregnant wife against a wall while an assistant at the University of Florida, though no charges were filed. At the time, like he did recently at Ohio State, Smith had a powerful benefactor looking after him: Urban Meyer, a living legend of a football coach whose mentor was Smith’s grandfather, Earle Bruce, another revered Ohio State coach.
The question, however, is whether Meyer, 54, one of the best-known and highest-paid coaches in college football who has won three national championships, looked the other way or was cut a wide berth by those who dared not challenge him regarding an individual so close to him.
The report, conducted by investigators commissioned by the university, led to the university’s trustees and its president, Michael V. Drake, suspending Meyer for three games for mishandling Smith’s recurring professional and behavioral issues, including domestic violence allegations, drug abuse and poor job performance.
“Repeatedly,” the report said, “Zach Smith’s conduct was met with reprimands and warnings by Coach Meyer, but never a written report, never an investigation and no disciplinary action until July 23, 2018,” when Smith was fired after his former wife, Courtney Smith, got an order of protection against him. She spoke out in a news report about their relationship, saying Zach Smith had shoved her against a wall and put his hands around her neck in 2015.
Meyer knew about it, though he gave conflicting accounts about when he found out, and neither he nor the athletic director, Gene Smith, reported it to the proper school administrators, the report said. (Gene Smith has been suspended for two weeks.)
Taken together, the report, other documents that the university released and interviews cast Meyer as either largely oblivious or forgiving of the growing litany of problems around Zach Smith.
“I followed my heart, not my head,” Meyer said after the university report was released.
Yet it was clear investigators were flummoxed and frustrated by his explanations and by apparent efforts by people around him to protect one of the most powerful figures in college football.
When a news report surfaced in July about Courtney Smith’s order of protection, Meyer’s reaction was to consult an administrator over how to delete old texts on his cellphone, which investigators examined and discovered was missing messages from over a year ago.
Without telling anyone at Ohio State about the 2009 allegations, Meyer hired Zach Smith at Ohio State before the 2012 season and either did not notice or looked the other way as his young assistant demonstrated increasingly reckless behavior, the report said, to several people on the football staff.
After learning of Zach Smith’s night in May 2014 at the strip club, Meyer revised the coaches’ manual that year to include a “morality clause” but he did not report the episode to the university’s athletic compliance department.
In February 2015, however, Smith received a $50,000 raise that increased his annual salary to $220,000.
Smith was regularly late to practice and workouts in the 2016 season. Word reached Meyer that Smith had failed to appear at scheduled recruiting visits at various high schools, “despite reporting internally that he had.”
Zach Smith told investigators that Meyer warned him that if he continued to be late and otherwise unreliable, he would be fired. In fact, Gene Smith suggested that Meyer do so.
Meyer did not.
Zach Smith’s problematic behavior continued, the report said. He took sexually explicit photos of himself at the White House during a team visit in April 2015, a few months after the Buckeyes won the national championship. He had a sexual relationship with a secretary on the football staff. He had sex toys delivered to Ohio State’s football offices.
Neither Meyer nor Gene Smith appeared to be aware of these things, the report said, though certain members of the football staff were.
In October 2015, Meyer was notified by Gene Smith that Zach Smith was being investigated for an accusation of domestic violence by authorities in Powell, Ohio, and could be arrested at any time. Gene Smith, who had learned of the investigation from another official after the campus Police Department learned of it, ordered him to come home from a recruiting trip.
Zach Smith denied the accusation. Meyer kept tabs on the investigation and spoke repeatedly to him.
If “you hit her, you are fired,” Meyer told him.
By June 2016 Meyer had directed Zach Smith to check into a drug treatment facility.
The following February, Meyer recommended that Smith receive a nearly $74,000 raise.
A university spokesman declined to make Meyer available to comment.
Zach Smith declined to comment. His lawyer, Brad Koffel, said, “It is a very tough environment to be Zach Smith right now.”