I can’t quit thinking about the time. I’ve tried to focus on the larger issues, like what happens when any coach loses a team’s trust, the fate of college coaches in the NFL or simply Urban Meyer’s legacy of stench on his way out every door.
It’s no use. My shallow mind wanders back to the time of his firing by the Jacksonville Jaguars. How does someone get fired at 12:36 a.m.?
Did he create another oil spill at 12:35? Was another bad, bar video threatening to be sent viral? Did Jacksonville owner Shahid Khan, a London native, wake up on the other side of the world and look at what was No. 1 on his to-do list?
Was it an auto-scheduled firing set last week?
Hiring Meyer always seemed like Kahn was that guy in the movies holding two lives wires to connect to something explosive. It could provide immeasurable energy if the right wire connected. The wrong one did. Boom. Urban Legend emotionally detonated.
You saw this coming for like a crash at an intersection. It couldn’t have ended in December simply because it came out that he kicked a kicker in August and told him to, “Make your kicks.”
Sorry, there’s more where that came from, much more, unless Kahn’s lawyer agreed it crossed the line of “for cause” in firing him and allowed Jacksonville to keep his contracted tens of millions.
This wasn’t just about hiring a college coach to the NFL. From Lou Holtz to Steve Spurrier, John McKay to Nick Saban, the road from college to the pros is littered with big names that didn’t pan out. But some make it: Jimmy Johnson, Pete Carroll and Barry Switzer won national titles and Super Bowls in diferent manners.
Meyer was a great recruiter in building national champions at Florida and Ohio State. But an actual talent evaluator? He chose Dwyane Haskins over Joe Burrow at Ohio State. He thought Tim Tebow, at 34, could earn a spot on the Jacksonville roster — and in a new position. Enough said?
Meyer’s larger problem was simple: He was a disciplinarian without any personal discipline. Leadership must be earned — and no one followed Meyer in the pro game. He was tough-guy demanding as his “plus-two mentality” suggested.”
What’s that? “If we ask you to go 10, you go 12,’' he said. “If we ask you to do five repetitions, you do seven. It’s a way of thinking.”
Such thinking lost credibility when Meyer was asked to fly two hours back with the team after a game and did a two-step to home in Columbus instead. The back end of that trip solidified him as a fraud: A video captured him, uh, dancing with a woman in a bar who wasn’t his wife.
This isn’t a marital-relations issue. It’s a credibility issue, just like as the staggering of stories he accumulated, big and small, in just 13 games: Hiring a weight coach with such racial issues the NFL’s Fritz Pollard Committee condemned it; having to quickly cut Tebow; having to apologize for his bar video; saying he wanted 250 yards rushing and passing each game — like he was playing Vanderbilt; ripping into receiver Marvin Jones beyond good sense; labeling his coaches as losers; and now kicking a player.
On the plus side of the ledger: A scant two wins. The Buffalo Bills and the Miami Dolphins. The Dolphins win was his first and involved a kicker, too.
“Come here, QB, and watch this kicker make this 53-yarder,’’ Meyer said to rookie quarterback Trevor Lawrence before the game-winning field goal.
His legacy is secure after his Jacksonville departure. He won two national titles at Florida, but will never put a restaurant there like Spurrier, another title-winner who failed in the NFL. Rinse and repeat at Ohio State.
Anyone can come back from anything in sports. Baseball’s Alex Rodriguez is the patron saint of comebacks in going fraudulent juice-user to spokesman for the game. But can Meyer return to coaching ever again? Would anyone trust him?
The clock didn’t strike midnight on the undisciplined disciplinarian. It struck 12:36 a.m. The odd career had a properly timed ending.
