Colin Sheridan: The myth of Urban Meyer got him to the NFL. Then his troubles really began

Urban Meyer was sacked from his coaching role with the Jacksonville Jaguars after a miserable start to the season

IF you’d never heard of Urban Meyer, you might think it was the name of a cocktail (can you fix me an Urban Meyer?), or even a moniker for a medical condition like Gilmore’s Groin (he’s laid low with a dose of the Urban Meyers).

After last week, his name could easily become a byword for either of those things. Who Urban Meyer actually is — or was — is the recently fired head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars, the worst American Football team in the NFL. He was fired, the team’s owner said Friday, because the team was so bad, and Meyer was offering no coherent courses of action to redress the pervasive uselessness of the franchise.

That’s the stated reason for his firing, but really, you could throw a rock in the air and hit any number of reasons why.

The most obvious one is that he seemed an unlikeable individual but such a character trait has never been a sackable offense. Not in professional sports, anyways.

When it comes to sports in the US, the cult of the coach is everything. From pee-wee football to the big leagues, “coach” is king. For almost 15 years Meyer enjoyed Christ-like status in college football, winning two national championships with Florida and another with Ohio.

Whatever rumours circulated about his methods, they would have likely been buried in the everglades had he not pulled an Icarus and flown too close to the sun in Jacksonville. It turns out its one thing leading — or scaring — a bunch of college kids but, but pulling the same stunt in the NFL is quite another.

Why then, did Meyer, the guy with the stellar college rep burn so quickly and so violently in the big leagues? It’s first worth considering that Ohio State’s athletic budget is $109,382,222 per annum. That would give any coach a good leg up. So much so, I reckon I might secure a winning record myself if you gave me a good offensive coordinator and a crash course in four minute inspirational speeches. To play college football, you need to be good, to play any position in the NFL, you need to be almost otherworldly. And so it is with coaches. Meyer earned about $7.5m a year at Ohio, “guiding” kids who earned diddly squat. He obviously had a good agent to secure the Jacksonville job. Being white certainly helped, too. Even so, when the Jaguars announced him last off-season, few learned commentators were confident it would end well.

Eager to please them, Meyer wasted no time in screwing up. A month after he was hired, he recruited and employed former Iowa strength-and-conditioning coach Chris Doyle, who had been fired after multiple Black players provided accounts of his racial bias and bullying. Doyle was also responsible for a 2011 incident in which more than a dozen Hawkeyes players developed rhabdomyolysis, a potentially fatal condition that’s caused when muscles are severely overworked. Doyle eventually resigned, but Meyer was only beginning.

One month into the season, Meyer chose not to travel home with his team (a huge no-no in American sports) following a loss to the Cincinnati Bengals. Later the same night, footage emerged of Meyer in a bar being, ahem, twerked upon by an unidentified lady.

In Meyer’s defence, he was just sitting on a bar stool, the twerkee, if you will, not the twerker. That said, for a coach who’s credo was built upon his fanatical distaste for losing, it was not a good look. Meyer had Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden to thank for shifting the focus off of him. Not long after the Meyer video, Gruden resigned amid a slew of leaked emails exposing him as a misogynist and homophobe. In that context, Meyer choosing to mourn a loss by not rejecting a stranger’s butt being ground into him seemed a little inconsequential.

Meyer, though, still had more in the tank. Last week, as speculation over his firing mounted, former Jaguars’ kicker Josh Lambo revealed that Meyer kicked him in the leg while he was stretching before a preseason game. Lambo was preparing for the game when Meyer came over to say, “Hey, dipshit, make your f**king kicks!” before kicking him in the leg. The kicking of the kicker perhaps gave the clearest insight into what made Meyer, the esteemed college coach and leader of young men, tick.

Still it wasn’t enough to get him fired. His team being so abysmally bad was.

Jacksonville’s on-field record this season (2-11) tells its own story. They have been a bad team for years, but this season under Meyer they have been historically so, and their awfulness has been compounded by their hiring of Meyer and his subsequent profligacy of the talents of rookie quarterback Trevor Lawrence, a generational prospect around whom a franchise like Jacskonville could potentially build a championship team. Lawrence has gone backward this season, and the world and its mother seem to believe that Meyer was a big reason for this.

Which brings us to the cult of the coach, which, though hardly exclusive to American sports, has unrivaled status there. Shankly, Busby, Mick O’Dwyer, Heffo — each of them left huge legacies and an industrial complex of quotable soundbites, but there is something uniquely obsessive with the American relationship with “coach” that has undoubtedly led to the creation of the likes of Urban Meyer. The myth-making owes much to the uber-competitive nature of high school and college sports. Young women and men at vulnerable stages in their emotional development, needing a north star to guide them. Parents, the natural actor for such a role, are often too busy or too absent or too unqualified to fulfill their natural obligation. So, coach steps up, sometimes with the carrot, sometimes the stick, and myths are inevitably made.

Meyer’s firing represents the pulling of the thread that may yet see the sweater unravel.