Last week, Reggie Bush said that he and Matt Leinart would try to recruit Urban Meyer to be the next head coach of their alma mater, USC. The context is that Meyer has signed on to do TV for Fox, where Leinart has worked for years and Bush is now an employee as well.
Both Bush and Leinart have distanced themselves from that idea, the former calling his comment a joke. What’s not a joke is that Trojan head coach Clay Helton is on a very hot seat this year, and the program is desperate to return to the top echelon of the sport.
Naturally, people ran with Bush’s maybe-a-joke because spring practice is over and nothing is going on between now and conference media days. Plenty of cynics out there surmised that Meyer might do what he did before, taking a year off of coaching for health reasons before jumping back into the game at a premier program.
I have been wrong about a lot of things in my day, but I feel like I have a fairly good bead on Meyer. He’s not a mysterious person, as what you see is generally what you get. He’s manically driven, prone to hyperbole, violently allergic to outside criticism, and shown to be one of the best motivators the game has ever seen. I also think he’s done with coaching.
I’ve seen all kinds of theories about his departure from Florida and, recently, his exit from Ohio State. I still think the simplest answer is the best one. He really did drive himself to the brink of physical breakdown after 2009, and a year of making up how to delegate on the fly in 2010 didn’t work. Therefore, he stepped away from the game to properly recuperate and make a plan for how to be more of a CEO.
In Columbus, he did actually delegate more. The biggest tells are how the offense fell off after Tom Herman left and recovered when Ryan Day arrived. The Buckeyes had a pocket passer who was a mediocre runner in 2018. Not only did Dwayne Haskins vastly outperform John Brantley, but he became a Heisman finalist. To repeat: pocket-bound, non-running Meyer quarterback was a Heisman finalist. That’s proof he had relinquished some amount of control.
But what he didn’t, couldn’t, can never relinquish is stress. He’s wound so tightly as a person with so much of himself wrapped up in the avoidance of losing — not in winning, but in not losing — that the stress of the job ate him alive again.
What makes it different this time than last is the cyst that Meyer has on his brain. The pain it causes him has gotten worse in the last couple of years, and that made him fall to his knees during a game against Indiana last fall. He looked absolutely miserable on the sideline of other contests, most notably the Buckeyes’ near-loss to Maryland.
That condition is never going to get better. There are ways to manage it, including draining fluid from it like what Meyer had done in 2014, but it’s not operable. There is no path forward that both includes coaching and excludes awful, searing head pain.
So, I think Meyer is done coaching for medical reasons. I don’t think even a premier job like USC could draw him back into it.
I’m not sure anymore how much Meyer is worth the risk, anyway. He won games and championships for Florida and Ohio State, but he left serious reputational damage behind in the number of players arrested at UF and his handling of Zach Smith at OSU.
It probably wouldn’t have been better at Florida without him for the years following Ron Zook’s tenure. Both ESPN and the Sporting News reported that Jeremy Foley’s second choice after Meyer in winter of 2004 was Bobby Petrino. The Gators would’ve had a different amoral football robot running the program. Looking at how Petrino’s career has gone since then, UF would’ve won fewer games, had fewer players arrested, and been left with a bigger crater for his successor to dig out of after the head coach departed in a similar amount of time.
Looking at the major hires of that year, the ones that worked out to a great degree were Meyer, Les Miles, Mike Gundy, Steve Spurrier, and Kyle Whittingham. Whittingham and Gundy wouldn’t have been real candidates at the time, and there are reasons Spurrier wasn’t going to return to Gainesville that I don’t want to re-litigate here.
If Foley had wised up and not gone after Petrino in this hypothetical where Meyer I guess went to Notre Dame instead, he’d have had to hire the 28-21 coach of Oklahoma State who preferred a lunkheaded run-first offense to end up with someone who had a similar run of success as Meyer did. I don’t think Miles fit the profile Gator fans wanted at the time, even more so than Meyer and his unproven-in-a-BCS-conference spread option offense didn’t.
So, a Florida that didn’t hire Meyer would’ve either ended up being the first big cautionary tale of Petrino’s run or ended up with someone else who washed out fairly quickly. Instead, it got both big wins and a big reputation for lawless behavior by its players. Time smooths over some of that, but many people will never forget Aaron Hernandez or Ronnie Wilson’s AK-47.
In any event, I don’t think any amount of lobbying from Bush or Leinart will bring Meyer to Heritage Hall. I really do think Meyer is done for good. What I don’t know is how well he’ll adapt to broadcasting and not running a football team of any kind. It may be that he worked himself to a place where he will never be satisfied with life, either because of the faustian bargain that coaching is for him or the listlessness that comes with not fighting in the arena. I don’t think anyone owes him sympathy, but that’s a hell of a place for a life to end up.