Tuesday, September 7, 2021

The education of Urban

 You can see how this plays out, or at least you can if you fancy yourself a student of  history. The reading of the tea leaves could not be more clear.

Urban Meyer was a hugely successful college football coach, the best in the business not named Nick Saban, the master of a culture in which every program is a small fiefdom ruled by an all-powerful potentate.

He has, however, never been a head coach in the NFL. Which has a culture all its own.

In this he has been proceeded by a whole lot of others who go by names like Lou Holtz, Steve Spurrier, Chip Kelly, and, yes, Nick Saban. All of them were, or are, icons of the college game. And all of them, to one degree or another, crashed and burned in the NFL.

And so it's easy to look at Urban Meyer's tenure so far in Jacksonville and sense what's coming down the wind. He may still be 0-0 as an NFL coach, but his naivete about the professional game is already showing.

He signed Tim Tebow, a 36-year-old failed quarterback, and tried to make a tight end out of him because Tebow won him a national title at Florida and Meyer figured he knew the guy's skill set better than anyone.

He brought in a goon named Chris Doyle as his director of sports performance, which lasted nanoseconds after it was revealed Doyle had been talking racist trash on numerous occasions at Iowa, which is why Iowa fired him.

He does some other college-y things his players, who are grown-ass men, haven't appreciated, like conduct illegal workouts (for which he was fined). And most recently, he said right out loud that, yes, a player's vaccination status might be a factor in deciding whether to keep that player or cut him.

Now, Meyer was dead right about that. If we're ever going to get a handle on the Bastard Plague, then we've got to weed out the nitwits. So if you want work as a pro football player, you should have to be vaccinated.

Those who run a workplace, after all, are responsible for the health and well-being of their workforce. They aren't always, of course, nor do some even think they need to be. But they do need to be, and it should cost them hella dough if they aren't.

So, yeah, Meyer was right. And the Blob suspects there isn't a coach in the NFL who doesn't agree. 

None of them were dumb enough to say it out loud, however.

This is because, unlike college, the players have a say in what happens to them. To a college guy like Urban Meyer, this is of course an utterly foreign concept. And so he said out loud what he shouldn't have, and the NFLPA now has duly opened an investigation into Meyer's roster cuts.

And so Urban Meyer's education goes on. For as long he lasts, no doubt.

No comments:

Post a Comment