The dedicated, diligent, maniac of a competitor known as former Jacksonville Jaguars coach Urban Meyer, had some basic problems when putting together an NFL deadline. According to a report from The Athletic’s Jayson Jenks and Mike Sando, Meyer was not familiar with the best players in the NFL — you know, the players that football coaches design their entire game plans around. One of those players is arguably the best in the NFL, Aaron Donald.
“Who’s this 99 guy,” Sando and Jenks reported that Meyer said to a Jaguars staffer. “I’m hearing he might be a problem for us.
Meyer left the Jaguars in disgrace. He was such a disaster there that he didn’t even make it through one season before getting canned. In this report, he was accused of belittling players and coaches on a regular basis, calling his staff losers, and once telling his players, that if he cut them, they wouldn’t get a job making more than $15/hr.
Also, this former educator once told Trevor Lawrence ,when the quarterback was breaking down a route to John Brown, that Lawrence needed to slow it down for Brown. “These boys from the South, their transcripts ain’t right.”
Do you know what Urban Meyer is up to these days? Some news broke about it on Wednesday, but with the Deshaun Watson rumors, Kyrie Irving’s 60-point game the night before, and the NCAA Tournament, it was an easy story to miss. The news: Meyer is back in college football.
He’s not coaching, but he is back in a familiar place — O.H-I.O. Meyer is not employed directly with Ohio State athletics, or the university, but he will absolutely be working to bring in talent for one of the two places he recently left in shame. He will be on the board of a new non-profit that taking advantage of the new NIL rules to Ohio State football and basketball players to work with charities, according to the Columbus Dispatch’s Joey Kaufman.
Here’s what Meyer had to say about NIL just last season with the Jaguars.
“[It’s] wild stuff man,” Meyer said to the media. “The guy never played a snap and gets $1.5 million. I imagine getting him to go to Sociology 101 is not easy. Once again, that’s not my issue.”
Ahh yes, Meyer, ever concerned about his players’ gen-ed courses, as shown by his statement about Brown. In this new role at least he doesn’t have to pretend to be anything. He just has to get that nonprofit to roll in enough talent so that Ohio State’s loss to Michigan in November doesn’t happen again for at least another eight years. A win-win, for Meyer and Ohio State — especially since this news didn’t really register last week.
The organization will get rolling at the end of March, and it was co-founded by former Buckeye quarterback Cardale Jones, and Ohio State Booster/local real estate developer Brian Schottenstein whose goal with this organization is for it to become the largest NIL fund in America. And the name of this nonprofit, THE Foundation (excuse me while I clean up my desk, I just vomited.)
It really is the perfect place for Meyer to get back involved with football. He’s technically not directly involved with the program. However, he gets to use his greatest skill to help the place that he loves, “He’s recognized as one of the best recruiters in college football history,” THE Foundation tweeted out on Wednesday. He stepped down as Ohio State’s coach following the 2018 season. That season he was suspended three games after an Ohio State investigation revealed that Meyer was untruthful about how long he had known about accusations of former assistant, Zach Smith, abusing his ex-wife. Overlooking an alleged abuser for so long that it took Smith’s ex-wife getting a domestic violence civil protection order for him to get fired, and lying about what he knew should make people at Ohio State wary about dealing with Meyer, but hey, he sure knows how to land those 5-stars.
Still, if this all makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and a chill down your spine makes you briefly Harlem Shake in your chair, that’s because you have a conscience. It doesn’t matter the douchey name of this foundation, or whatever the percentage is of douchey people involved with it, nothing can make this sentence sound right: Urban Meyer is on the board of a nonprofit organization that is getting major college athletes money to do charity work.
Excuse me, my stomach is beginning to feel unsettled again.