This time it is not Michigan over on that other sideline. It is not Michigan State or Penn State or Wisconsin or even Alabama, whom Urban Meyer beat not so long ago on his way to bringing a national title home to Columbus, Ohio, establishing himself as at least No. 1A in the hierarchy of college football CEOs.
But this time it's not Nick Saban, ol' No. 1, that Urban Meyer is up against. This time it's precedent.
His own. Ohio State's. That of corporate collegiate athletics itself.
This time it is Meyer's own resume he's up against, a resume that includes six years in Gainesville, Fla., where he won two national titles and gave the lie to the notion that he was some sort of mega-disciplinarian. In six years at Florida, some 30 Gator football players wound up on police blotters on Meyer's watch. This does not suggest he ran a particularly tight ship -- and it certainly doesn't help his case now that the now ex-wife of one of his now ex-assistants has come forward with allegations that all the wives on the OSU coaching staff -- including Meyer's -- knew her husband knocked her around back in 2015.
In other words, if Shelley Meyer knew, Urban Meyer knew, too. And yet he kept quiet and retained the assistant, Zach Smith -- even though Meyer already knew Smith had a history of domestic violence, because the Meyers staged something of an intervention at Florida when Smith, then a Gator graduate assistant, knocked his pregnant wife Courtney around there, too.
In any event, this would be a direct violation of the terms of Meyer's contract at OSU, which includes language requiring him to report any staff violations of Ohio State's sexual misconduct policy. This on top of the fact that, as a supervisory university employee, he is required to report knowledge of domestic violence by any university employee.
Instead, Meyer, who's been placed on paid administrative leave by the university, said he didn't know nothin' 'bout nothin' last week when the subject came up at the Big Ten's media day. Which, if OSU's investigation indicates he did know something, means he's a liar, too.
And if that investigation does bear out Courtney Smith's allegations?
Well, Meyer is done. Ohio State's precedent virtually guarantees it.
This is the same university, after all, that fired another national championship-winning football coach over some free tattoos. Jim Tressel's ouster involved transgressions far less grave than domestic abuse. There is a vast gulf of difference between a few football players getting 'tatted up in violation of some picayune NCAA reg and a man beating on his wife. The former is never going to land you in criminal court, for one thing.
And so Ohio State's hands are pretty much tied here. And if there is any wiggle room, the fact all of this is taking place against the backdrop of a widening sexual abuse scandal virtually eliminates it.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed against OSU by former wrestlers who claim the school looked the other way while Dr. Richard Strauss sexually abused them during their time in Columbus. In other words, OSU now has its very own Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar. As the victims in those two cases did, the former wrestlers allege Ohio State had "a culture of institutional indifference" about student safety.
Indifference about student safety, indifference about spousal safety ... you sense a theme here, right? And it's one Ohio State is surely desperate not to encourage. Who wants to be tagged as Wife Beater Coddler U., especially in the wake of Penn State and Michigan State? And if that's what happens, how much harder do you think it will be for the university's suits to defend against the Strauss lawsuits, even if one doesn't technically have anything to do with the other?
Perception, after all, is 9/10ths of the law, or something like that. And the perception, suddenly, is that the folks at The Ohio State University are no different than those awful people in State College and East Lansing.
A mere football coach would seem an easy sacrifice to erase that perception. Wouldn't it?
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