The camera phone footage of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ now-fired coach, Urban Meyer, shows him sitting comfortably on a bar stool as a 24-year-old woman grinds into his crotch. The previous night, his team had lost to the Cincinnati Bengals, their fourth defeat in as many games, and Meyer told the squad he was staying behind in Ohio to spend time with his grandkids.
Once the video of his alternative arrangement leaked and a media storm blew up, the married 57-year-old chose to address the issue with some of his players. His second mistake of the week.
According to his version of events, a group of partygoers tried to force the born-again Christian onto the dance floor of the establishment he owns (Urban Meyer’s Pint House in Dublin) and that was how he came to be in such a suggestive, compromising position. An excuse so preposterous that the moment he left their presence, the footballers burst into uncontrollable laughter.
Professional athletes who’ve been famous since their mid-teens, dealing with all the good and bad that celebrity brings, they couldn’t fathom their boss trying to make them believe such a ludicrous yarn.
Not the first or last time he has treated the grown men in his charge as gullible children, at least part of the reason why one of the most successful college grid-iron coaches of the modern era presided over one of the worst NFL campaigns ever, before his dismissal.
A season laced with dysfunction, most of it has emanated from the man supposed to be running the show. With 11 losses from 13 games, the Jaguars have scored a combined total of 64 points in their last seven outings and the players were reportedly mutinying against a coach who blames everybody but himself, and was ultimately shown the door with three outings left.
Last week, NFL.com's Tom Pelissero published a damning portrait of the Meyer regime in Jacksonville, including a detailed account of a bizarre staff meeting in which he reminded his assistant-coaches that he was a serial winner and they were losers.
Labouring the point, he asked each one to recount any time in their careers when they had won something and to defend their mediocre resumes. Pathetic carry-on given the fact he hand-picked most of the hires and his recruitment policies earlier in the year were actually the first sign he was ill-equipped to make the leap from college to the pro game.
In February, he hired Chris Doyle as the team’s Director of Sport Performance, a dubious character who had left his previous role at the University of Iowa following numerous and specific allegations of bullying, discrimination, and racism by several former players.
In a league where 70 per cent of players are African-American, Meyer initially defended the appointment, claiming to have personally vetted the hire, a man he knew well for over two decades. But, as the number of accusers proliferated in a matter of hours, Doyle resigned one day into his new role. That was seven months before the Jaguars’ first competitive game under the new boss.
Throughout that debacle, Meyer seemed to think his almighty imprimatur would surely stifle criticism of his questionable choice. The type of hubris developed during a collegiate career that yielded three national titles at the University of Florida and Ohio State University. On those campuses, his word was law because the locker-rooms were full of young men petrified their scholarship might be rescinded on the whim of the despotic coach.
Power dynamic
In the NFL, the power dynamic is a little different, the players older and more experienced, and less willing to tolerate his practiced brand of hypocrisy.
Some of the stalwarts in the Jaguars’ locker-room played for him in college and the others were all well aware of the disparity between the sanctimonious public persona he evinces as a devout Christian and an appetite for serial rule-bending that earned him the sobriquet “Urban Liar”.
The man who professed how much he cared for the young lads on his rosters yet fostered an atmosphere of complete lawlessness (especially in Florida) where dozens of them, including future murderer Aaron Hernandez, were regularly in trouble with the police.
At his behest, every effort was made to cover up his players’ transgressions to ensure they never missed a game on Saturday. Indeed, when the true extent of Hernandez’ criminal proclivities became apparent after he committed suicide in prison, Meyer absolved himself from blame by claiming to have held Bible study classes with his protégé throughout his troubled student years.
Like Ohio State University appointing Meyer to co-teach an undergraduate class on Leadership and Moral Character after he retired as their head coach in 2018, that stuff would have been funny if it wasn’t so disturbing.
Imagine giving that particular gig to somebody who kept Zach Smith on his coaching staff for years after he learned about his history of violence against his wife. Who better to lecture freshman students about morality than somebody suspended by the same college for lying to them about when he knew the true extent of the terrible suffering Smith inflicted on his spouse?
Since the Jaguars were willing to ignore so much that reeked in his career in order to give Meyer the chance to wake up their moribund franchise, they received exactly the execrable season and embarrassing coach they deserved.
