The ghosts of words

The Blob is not generally one for tooting its own horn ("Oh my God, you have a horn now?" you're saying). But with Urban Meyer now on the griddle for possibly coddling an alleged serial wife beater  and then quite likely lying about it, the Blob is reminded of something it wrote several months ago, when Meyer went on a radio show and got all hardline-y about the latest college basketball scandal.

"If you intentionally lie about committing violations, your career is over," Meyer said during a radio call-in show in Columbus back in September. "You're not suspended for two games (or) some of the silly penalties you have, you can't talk to a recruit for a week and a half or something like that. No. You're finished. That will clean up some things."

A little warning klaxon immediately went off in the vicinity of the Blob ...

Here's the thing about tough talk, I wrote then. It very often comes back to bite you.

This is not to say Meyer is going to wind up getting caught lying to the feds someday. Not at all. But his allegiance to zero tolerance in this case has a few holes in it, because he's not always been so fond of it. When some 30 players get arrested on your watch while at Florida, and several more have at OSU, whatever message you're sending about keeping your nose clean in Meyer's program would seem not to be getting through. Or at least isn't being delivered with the kind of tough zero-tolerance talk Meyer used yesterday.

And now?

Now, if he out-and-out lied about Zach Smith at the Big Ten media day last week, Ohio State must fire him. And the school must fire him because Urban Meyer himself said so.

Chomp.