Ohio State Buckeyes

8:00 AM ET

If you listen closely enough, you can hear college administrators across America flipping through this new Ohio State playbook that just arrived in the mail:

Place highly successful but besieged football coach on paid leave.
Hire important-sounding people with supposedly unimpeachable integrity to investigate him.
Call their probe independent every day and twice on Sunday.

And then wait for said probe to run a dizzying series of end-arounds on the truth to save poor Supercoach's job.

Only here's a message for those administrators who think Ohio State just set a wonderful precedent for the next Touchdown Tech forced by public disclosures to put its most visible representative on trial: Don't do it. Don't sell your university's soul for the sake of a few extra glorious Saturdays in the fall. Don't reduce your fine institution to a practical joke by taking a futile stab at crisis management, and by keeping the coach who protected his staff and program at a significant human cost.

The nation isn't laughing with Buckeye Nation, but at Buckeye Nation. Or at least at the university officials who decided that Meyer deserved a mere three-game suspension for allowing wide receivers coach Zach Smith, an alleged repeat domestic abuser and confirmed serial screwup, to remain on his staff for as long as he did.

Remember, it didn't take long for Meyer to show his employers that they had settled on a pathetically inadequate penalty. In the immediate wake of the announcement, Meyer read his initial statement of regret with all the emotion of someone reading a grocery list. He was asked in a news conference if he had a message for Courtney Smith, the woman who first accused her then-husband Zach of abuse while she was pregnant and Zach was an assistant under Meyer at Florida in 2009. The Ohio State coach didn't even have the decency to speak her name while spreading his message "to everyone involved" that he is "sorry that we're in this situation."

Rarely does a public figure so clearly declare exactly who he is and what he stands for, or doesn't stand for.

Deep down, Meyer had to know he deserved to be fired. He had to know that a mediocre coach with a mediocre record wouldn't have lasted long enough for Oho State to run an independent investigation that could never truly be independent, and could never truly return a recommendation and/or verdict independent of Meyer's 6-0 record against Michigan.

He escaped for the obvious reasons. Before the Big Ten season got underway, THE Ohio State University diagrammed THE most predictable play call of the year by sparing Meyer's job and enabling him as much as he had enabled his wide receivers coach, whose workplace conduct would've gotten him kicked out of most frat houses around the country, never mind the offices of a state institution. So Meyer exercised his restored clout at his presser when pressed about Courtney Smith, and apologized to his face-painted base about a "situation" that distracted "everyone involved" from the central mission of winning football games.

The major college sports machine churns on, stopping for nothing and nobody in its path. Just another sad and disturbing development at another big-time school with a moral compass gone awry in pursuit of victory and the desired revenue streams attached. You need a scorecard to keep track of this scandal and that one. If it isn't federal agents chasing the money men buying talent in college basketball, it's a Maryland administration trying to explain how an overheated football player could die on the watch of the alleged educators hired to coach him.

Once upon a time, Urban Meyer ran a football program at Florida defined by dominance on the field and so much noise away from it. The New York Times reported that Meyer's players were arrested at least 31 times between 2005 and 2010. Aaron Hernandez had caused Meyer so much trouble in Gainesville that the coach told one NFL team that it would be unwise to draft him. "Don't f- - -ing touch that guy," was the way the Florida coach put it. Meyer told the NFL team Hernandez was too big of a character risk to employ despite the fact that Meyer himself had benched the tight end for a grand total of one game out of 40 at Florida.

While working for ESPN in between coaching jobs, Meyer told one former NFL executive and media analyst that he was "tired of dealing with the police all the time" and that he yearned to "coach good kids." But in Meyer's world, the kids weren't a bigger problem than the man recruiting them.

Ohio State's elders knew what they were getting when they hired Meyer in 2011 - a national championship coach, one of the best of his generation at identifying and developing talent. But they also knew they were getting a head coach who ran a reckless program, and who didn't live by the codes of honor he talked about, wrote about, and posted in capital letters on team facility walls. This was a man, after all, who needed to sign a contract with his wife and children promising that he wouldn't again get swallowed whole by the monster that is elite D-I sports.

So in keeping Meyer, Ohio State covered for Ohio State and tried and failed to wish away the work done by an enterprising journalist, Brett McMurphy, who published damning texts and photos. In fact, to read the university's own 23-page summary of its findings is to read a clear-cut case for the coach's termination.

Investigators did not believe Urban Meyer's claim that Courtney Smith met with him (along with her husband) in 2009, and did not believe Meyer's claim that Smith recanted her allegation at the time. Investigators also did not believe Meyer's claim that he had no communication with his wife about the 2015 texts and photos Courtney shared with Shelley in discussing another alleged assault by the assistant coach.

Investigators also determined that Meyer had discussed with a staffer adjusting the settings on his phone to delete texts that were more than a year-old (his examined phone turned up no messages older than a year), a reaction they concluded often "evidence consciousness of guilt." Investigators said they were concerned and troubled by many of Meyer's actions, or inactions, in this case, and their summary makes it clear to a right-minded reader that Meyer violated contract language calling for termination for bringing the university "into public disrepute, embarrassment, contempt, scandal or ridicule or failure by Coach to conform Coach's personal conduct to conventional and contemporary standards of good citizenship..."

But as the investigation closed, the home team's assigned judge and jury excused and rationalized Meyer's behavior at every turn, even suggesting that the blatant lies he told during July's Big Ten Media Days were unintentional and the possible result of medication that might've affected his memory. This conclusion was almost as shameful as the report's list of Zach Smith misdeeds while working for Meyer, including "promiscuous and embarrassing sexual behavior, drug abuse, truancy, dishonesty, financial irresponsibility, a possible NCAA violation, and a lengthy police investigation into allegations of criminal domestic violence and cybercrimes."

How does Meyer not get fired for that list alone?

How? By understanding that winning conference and national championships is more important in his business than anything else, that's how. In a telling message cited in Ohio State's summary, Meyer reminded his staff after Smith's firing that the team and the players must come first. "Zero conversation about Zach's past issues. We need to help him as he moves frwd. Team and players!!"

We need to help him, not her. Team and players first. Buckeye Nation above all.

This is the reality of major college football, and of major college sports, where unworthy athletic cultures are preserved at all costs. It's going to be tempting for future administrations dealing with future scandals on other campuses to follow the Ohio State script, cook up a ridiculous investigation, and reach for a reason, any reason, to hang on to a winning coach.

But university presidents from coast to coast should understand that Ohio State has been severely diminished here, along with Meyer, who can never again be taken seriously on anything. The school's overriding message to its world-famous football coach was pretty simple: Just keep beating Michigan. And right-minded observers everywhere scoffed at the absurdity of it all.

In the end, the people running Ohio State just made fools of themselves. Was the pain really worth the gain?

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