Urban Meyer is too toxic after Ohio State scandal for Chris Ash now | 8 observations

Posted August 23, 2018 at 11:51 AM | Updated August 23, 2018 at 12:17 PM

Ohio State Meyer Football

Paul Vernon | AP

By Steve Politi | NJ Advance Media

Ohio State looked at a laundry list of reasons to fire its head football coach, then looked at his winning percentage.

Is anyone really surprised at what happened next?

Urban Meyer is still head coach in Columbus, Ohio, and based on his body language during a horror-show press conference late Wednesday, he believes that even his three-game suspension is too much of a punishment for what transpired in his program.

That he failed to properly report to the compliance department allegations in 2015 that assistant coach Zach Smith had abused his wife? Didn't matter. That he didn't reveal to his boss, Gene Smith, that Smith faced similar allegations when he was an assistant coach at Florida in 2009? Didn't matter.

That he blatantly lied, again and again, to the media about what he knew and when he knew it at Big Ten Media Day? That's when a sad saga takes a turn toward hilarious.

Ohio State slaps Meyer with suspension

Mitch Stacy | Associated Press

Put it this way: Even the White House hasn't come up with an excuse this lame for brazenly spreading a falsehood to a group of reporters.

"While those denials were plainly not accurate, Coach Meyer did not, in our view, deliberately lie," the university's report concluded.

Everyone involved, from the president down to athletic director Gene Smith and certainly to Meyer himself, comes out looking bad in this one. It is abundantly clear that is Meyer's winning percentage wasn't .901 over his career, and if he hadn't added a shiny national championship trophy to the university case, Meyer would have been fired.

But he wins football games, and Ohio State decided that this is more important that its institutional integrity. Again: Anyone surprised?

There is a lot to unpack from the Ohio State saga -- and, yes, some of it directly impacts Rutgers, which was in the news for the wrong reasons as well on Wednesday. Here are eight observations:

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