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Everyone not wearing scarlet and grey should know that Urban Meyer is the fakest major college coach in America.
He wags his finger about player discipline, morality and the top one percent of one percent — meanwhile his players are out allegedly committing felonies. Alleged felony battery and an investigation for a double shooting? Meyer referred to all that as "very minor stuff" when it came to Aaron Hernandez's tenure in Florida. Now Meyer's culture has reared its ugly head at Ohio State.
It didn't take long.
The latest Urban Meyer player to reportedly run seriously afoul of the law? Starting running back Carlos Hyde, who was suspended after being accused of punching a woman at a club, according to a police report.
(Update: Yahoo! reports that video evidence clears Hyde of this charge.)
Hyde, who had hoped to become the first Urban Meyer running back to rush for 1,000 yards in a single season, isn't the only Buckeye in trouble. Starting cornerback Bradley Roby has reportedly been charged with battery. Tight end Marcus Baugh also had legal issues.
Pop quiz: You know what Urban Meyer usually calls his arrested players?
Team captain.
Raise your hand if you could have ever foreseen Urban Meyer players having major off-the-field incidents. (Every college football fan not rooting for Ohio State raises his or her hand.)
Some people ask, why are you so hard on Urban Meyer?
The answer's simple, because Urban Meyer is completely and totally full of it. He wins football games by any means necessary.
That's fine, more power to him. If he just admitted, "You know, I care about winning football games more than I care about anything in my life," I'd just nod and move along. Then all the player arrests, going on ESPN and asserting that his family comes first when they would later find out that he's returning to coaching on ESPN, all of it would make a lot more sense.
We'd all know that deep down Urban Meyer cared so much about winning that nothing else mattered to him.
But Meyer's not content with the truth being out there.
He has to be the most hypocritical coach in major college football. He has to claim he's winning the "right way." No matter what you do, everyone has worked in a profession with a hypocrite, a person who tries to control his image to such an extent that he himself actually starts to believe his own lies.
That's Urban Meyer.
He's so much of an enabler that he even enables himself to believe his own lies.
Read the article about Hyde being suspended. The Columbus-Dispatch — whose writers have thus far been carrying the water for Urban Meyer — even includes this handy line: "Meyer has a strict policy regarding violence against women."
Gee, thanks.
Without your "strict policy regarding violence against women" what would all of our laws that govern the same thing be worth?
Nothing.
I'm not even kidding about that.
Because Urban Meyer makes his own rules, breaks them, and then calls out media and fans for daring to notice. Often this works with local media, who are usually so afraid of being shut out on big stories that they walk around all moony-eyed as Urban talks. But slowly that infatuation wears off for both media and fans. "Wait a minute," they start to realize, "Urban Meyer just told me that one felony plus one felony equaled zero felonies. That can't be right."
Urban Meyer puts winning above everything — including the law. And if you put winning above all else eventually your program falls apart.
That's what happened at Florida.
Meyer won battle after battle with felons. Using Tim Tebow as a media distraction, he ran up a 26-2 record in Tebow's final 28 games. Even as the program fell apart, Tebow kept the Gators from sinking into football oblivion. But then what happened once Tebow was gone? Urban lost his team, and he'd lost the war. His program's foundation was built on quicksand, it sank into the Swamp.
Meyer looked the other way until his locker room was unrecoverable. The Gators fell completely and totally apart. Ask Will Muschamp about the culture he inherited at Florida. He'll dodge the question.
Then Meyer skipped away at the last possible moment, just as the program went underwater. Actually, he tried to skip away before the final 8-5 season. Urban left Muschamp to try and drag his players out of the mess he'd left behind.
There's a reason Urban Meyer doesn't stay anywhere for long.
It's because his will to win burns so intensely it consumes everything around him, turns foundations to ash, leaves an empty victory behind. A body without a backbone can't stand. Neither can a program without one. Urban Meyer will win, but his program will die.
Then what happens?
That nasty indigestion kicks up again.
Better keep ESPN on speed dial, Urban. Before all is said and done at Ohio State, they're going to have to bail you out again.
