Urban Meyer's legacy is winning, and the rest is up for debate

Urban Meyer’s second retirement, at age 54, felt more like a sigh of relief than a wail of mourning. At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, he came across entirely relaxed as he vacated his position as the head coach at Ohio State. 

We saw the end literally unfolding over the course of this season in Meyer’s increasingly pained expressions on the sideline, the result of a cyst on his brain. There was no pleasure in Ohio State going 11-1 this year, and that perception of this team may have actually helped keep the Buckeyes out of the College Football Playoff.

But then, this was the way Meyer always seemed to coach, both at Ohio State and at Florida, the location of his first retirement. It was as if winning was an act of desperation and necessity more than a path to joy.

A few years ago, I spoke to a high school football coach who bore witness to a recruiting battle between Meyer and Alabama’s Nick Saban. The difference between the programs, Meyer told that recruit, was that “Alabama wants you, and Ohio State needs you.

Meyer will long be compared to Saban, simply because they competed in the same era and often competed for the same recruits. They were the two best coaches of this age in large part because they were the two best salesmen of this age. The difference is that Saban — whether you believed him or not — was more of a corporate presence, cautious and less emotional. In contrast, Meyer was the players’ coach and more of a hardcore salesman, willing to push harder and micromanage and promise more to get what he required to win.

Fair or not, Meyer came across as a football coach who sold a football vision to football players, and in an age when we started to see through the façade of amateurism in ways we never had before, that made him perhaps the epitome of coaches in this era. The fact that his final scandal reflected the same level of near-myopic defiance only solidified that perception. Maybe Meyer did the right thing in the end when he fired troubled wide receivers coach Zach Smith, but it felt like pulling teeth to get him there.

I have no reason to believe that Meyer ever thought he was doing the wrong thing, even when it came to Smith, or before that, as Yahoo’s Pat Forde explains regarding Meyer's counseling of a troubled Aaron Hernandez at Florida. (Down in Gainesville, he’s still known as “Urban Liar.”) 

“You have to have genuine love and care for that student-athlete,” Meyer said at his farewell press conference on Tuesday, and I’m sure he thought he was taking that approach. But despite his insistence that this be his legacy, I'm almost certain that’s not what we’re going to remember about his tenure.

What we’ll remember, instead, is the record.

And Meyer's is undeniably extraordinary: He won a lot of games and lost very few. He won three national championships and dozens of recruiting battles, and he restored Ohio State to national prominence. But underlying all of that was a sense of naked ambition, a sense that all that winning was never quite enough and a sense that he needed the winning more than he needed all the genuine love and care. I’ve compared him before to Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy, who won four national titles before burning out amid a controversial final season. I think that comparison feels even more apt if this is truly the end of Meyer’s coaching career.

Meyer seemed to imply that he would recalibrate his priorities when he took the Ohio State job, but it seems clear now that he couldn’t recalibrate and still win at the same level he had at Florida and Utah and Bowling Green. There was no other way for him to coach. 

I have no idea what he does next or if he holds to the promise he made yesterday that he won’t coach again. He will be remembered as a great football coach with a winning record, but I’m not sure if it was ever enough to make him — or any of the rest of us — truly happy.