Urban Meyer still has a job, but he's lost nearly everything else

There’s a photo of Urban Meyer that became a meme a few years ago and cycled back into the news the past few weeks when a Mississippi lawyer apparently trolled a crew of Urban Truthers protesting his innocence in the Zack Smith investigation by sending them a disc of vaguely edible substances known as a Papa John’s Pizza. The original photo is of Meyer sitting on a golf cart after a loss to Michigan State in 2013, picking forlornly at a limp slice of Papa John’s. For a long time, it became shorthand for an almost sentimental brand of coaching sadness.
           
For a while, I thought that photo actually humanized Meyer, which wasn’t always an easy thing to do. Meyer had spent years at Utah and Florida winning a ton of football games and exacting a merciless toll both on his players and himself with seemingly little regard for the consequences. A year before that photo was taken, Meyer spent some time with ESPN the Magazine’s Wright Thompson and told him, among other things, that he was “fearful I would become That Guy. The guy who had regret.”            

We still don’t know if Meyer regrets much of anything about his handling of the issues surrounding his former assistant coach, most notably the domestic violence allegations from Smith’s wife, Courtney, that reporter Brett McMurphy broke and that Meyer seemingly either forgot or outright lied about at Big Ten Media Days after the story went public. We know from what we’ve read of Ohio State’s independent report that Meyer appeared to want to keep things from the media by deleting texts from his cell phone. And we know that Meyer issued the most tepid apology imaginable at a press conference last night, after the school suspended him for the first three games of the season — apparently because he didn’t think he should have been suspended in the first place.            

For all the lip service Meyer gave Thompson about changing his outlook back in 2012, that press conference made me think Meyer hasn’t changed at all. Yet the world around him has. There’s a story Thompson tells about Meyer’s years at Utah, when he locked his players in a gym with nothing but trash cans for their vomit and then ran them until he forced “the unworthy to quit.” This, of course, is exactly the kind of thing that will likely lead to the end of Maryland coach D.J. Durkin’s career, after one of his own players, Jordan McNair, collapsed and died of heatstroke during a drill. And it’s the kind of thing that no longer feels acceptable in a sport where the balance of power between players and coaches has long been out of balance.            

There is no question that Meyer can coach and recruit football players. There is also, even at Ohio State, more lip service paid toward a new reality that takes personal behavior — and particularly behavior toward women -— into account. But the last few weeks were a reckoning; even though Meyer survived, his reputation has been tarnished. He’ll never be seen as anything more than a football coach — a man who appears to be too fixated on winning and losing to even contemplate the consequences of his own duplicity. Maybe the winning saved Meyer’s job for now, but it seems likely that history will view him as little more than a mercenary. And perhaps that's the only silver lining here: that maybe as a society, we’re moving toward a new reality where we’re less willing to tolerate that kind of coach.         

I studied that photo of Meyer again this morning, and when I look at it now I see something altogether different. I see a man sequestered in his own suffering, so fixated on himself that he has no real awareness of what’s happening around him.