DIFFERENT PATH, SAME RESULT
As Meyer’s tumultuous tenure in NFL comes to an end, there’s no reason to think Longhorns gig would have gone much better
On another timeline, Urban Meyer remains employed today.
Instead of citing health issues as a reason to turn down Texas’ reported overtures last December, he told the Longhorns he was available. UT, blinded by the championships on his résumé and ignoring all of the well-documented red flags, made Meyer the highest-paid coach in college football. And this week, he’s the guy bragging about a top-five recruiting class.
That version of history is less titillating than the one we have, because it robs the sports pages of Meyer’s memorable midseason bar encounter, and it keeps the staffer with the allegedly aggressive pet monkey out of Austin, and it maybe even makes the upset of the year disappear.
For all his faults, it’s hard to believe Meyer would have lost to Kansas.
But it wasn’t just the level and the location that made Meyer a disaster in Jacksonville, where he was fired Thursday 11 months into his five-year contract. His methods and his priorities had been problematic before, and they were almost certain to become problematic again, no matter which sideline he stalked.
So the lesson here isn’t solely about a coach such as Meyer being ill-suited to work in the NFL.
It’s about him being ill-suited to coach anywhere anymore.
Chances are, some school will be willing to test that theory someday, just like UT supposedly was last winter. Back then, per multiple reports, including one in the Austin American-Statesman, university officials were trying to decide what to do with then-head coach Tom Herman when Meyer let them know his health would prevent him from taking Herman’s place.
When he accepted an NFL job in Jacksonville instead, it looked like a bad idea from the beginning. When he’d won national titles at Florida and at Ohio State, it had been during a time when college football coaches could act as dictators, answering to nobody.
At least 31 of his players at Florida were arrested from 2005 to 2010, but in the end he stepped down not because a boss held him accountable, but because he said the stress of the job was becoming too much. At Ohio State, he held so much power that he convinced himself he could publicly misrepresent the lengths he went to protect the job of an assistant coach accused of domestic violence.
This is not the sort of coach who feels the need to explain himself.
And this is not the era for that kind of coach.
It’s true that Meyer was even less of a fit for the NFL than he’d be in the new player-empowerment era of college football. His players with the Jaguars were adults, and many of them were millionaires, and they weren’t about to buy into a my-way-orthe-highway approach without some pointed questions.
One of Meyer’s first hires in Jacksonville was a strength coach who’d been accused of making racist comments and mistreating players at Iowa. That surely didn’t do much to win over a locker room, and it’s doubtful that bringing in a 34-year-old Tim Tebow to try out for a position he’d never played before engendered much goodwill, either.
You’ve probably read about the other stuff, too. He barked at his team about commitment, then skipped a ride on the team plane after a loss and got caught in an embarrassing video at a bar instead. A kicker, Josh Lambo, told the Tampa Bay Times that Meyer cursed at him and kicked him. The NFL’s website reported he berated his assistants in a staff meeting, made them defend their accomplishments and referred to them as losers.
None of that works in pro football, especially not with a 2-11 record. And while there might have been a time not so long ago when it worked in college, those days are fading fast.
A decade ago, Meyer could have treated his quarterback at Florida like mud on his shoe, and what was the kid going to do? Transfer and sit out a whole year? Not likely.
Now, college players know the balance of power still tips toward the coach, but not as dramatically as it once did. Now they have control of their own names, images and likenesses, and they have the option of leaving for another program and playing right away, and they have social media followings that might be interested in their coach acting like a tyrant.
So if Meyer had chosen to go to UT instead of Jacksonville, would he have won more games? Sure.
Would he have kept his job into 2022? Probably.
But would going back to college football have ended well for Meyer? Nothing in his history gives us any reason to think it would have.
Not on this timeline, or on any other.