The new Corch

Here’s a glowing Bruce Feldman piece about what keeps Urban Meyer up at night.

Marotti says that in the early years of his Ohio State tenure, Meyer would return from vacation armed with ideas to help make his guys better football players. Now, Meyer is consumed with finding ways to help his players better navigate what the head coach sees as a very volatile world around them.

“It’s probably 80–20 now,” Meyer says, explaining where his focus lies between real-world issues and football-related matters. “When I was younger, it was probably 30–70 more football.

“This is a topic of conversation among my colleagues in the profession now. It’s constant now. Fifteen years ago, no. Back then it was, Tell me about the spread offense. Tell me about punt return. Now it’s about the mental and well-being of your players.”

This, of course, begs the obvious question:  what took you so long?

When Meyer now talks about his responsibility as a coach to educate players, he has stories from his past to back up his philosophy. One of the names that comes up is Avery Atkins, the highest-ranked recruit in Meyer’s first signing class at Florida: “Could’ve been a first-rounder. Pushes a girl. I kick him off the team. The streets take him over in Daytona.” Atkins was found dead from a drug overdose in his car in the summer before Meyer’s third season at Florida, and Meyer beat himself up for years, wondering if he could’ve helped Atkins had he remained around the program longer.

“I lived with that for three or four years thinking, ‘Wait a minute, we lost this kid on our watch,’” he says. “That’s when we started giving kids second, third and fourth chances. I would not get rid of a kid, and it bit us a little bit.

“I went 20 years in my career and never really had stuff like that. I was convinced at the time that if he’d have stayed in our program, we would’ve gotten him right, and how do you ever let that happen on your watch? Tim Tebow and I used to talk about that all the time, and he looked at me and said, ‘We did everything we could. You can’t hold that on your heart.’ But it was an accumulation of those events and thinking, ‘This is serious business now. This is not flunking a class or missing a class. This is real life.’”

Barf.  You wanted to win, dude, and you didn’t care too much about what it took.  Plus, you had Huntley Johnson there to clean up the messes that came along regularly.  So now you’re a little more selective about character issues?  Bully for you.  Nobody should be throwing any parades for doing what you should have done all along.

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Today, in posturing

Hey, remember when Ohio State AD Gene Smith got all holier than thou about coaches’ salaries?

Though Ohio State pays its coaches in the upper echelon of salaries, it has avoided paying what Athletics Director Gene Smith believes to be unnecessarily large salaries for coaches.

“I don’t even put Texas A&M in our sphere because I’m considering Urban [Meyer]’s situation with three years left on his contract,” Smith said during Ohio State’s Board of Trustees’ Talent and Compensation Committee meeting Thursday. “Talking with [Susan Basso, vice president of human resources] and [Joanna McGoldrick, associate vice president of total rewards], that’s not even someone that we’re comparing with because it’s so ridiculous.

“It’s the same way with Alabama and their total salary. Take it off the sheet because it doesn’t matter. Because it’s just no value to it. It’s a reactionary type of management.”

Good times.  You know what’s coming next, right?

Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer will be paid $7.6 million for the 2018 season under a two-year contract extension approved Thursday by a committee of the university’s governing board.

The deal, subject to approval by the full board at its meeting Friday, will give Meyer a $1.2 million raise over what he made for the 2017 season, according to a release from the school.

For those of you out there doing math, TAMU is paying Jimbo an average of $7.5 million a year and Saban makes a little over $7 million a year, too.

Good thing Gene’s not reacting.

Commanding the tide to stop

This ought to work about as well as it did for King Canute.

The salaries and contract lengths of football and men’s basketball head coaches and assistant coaches have dramatically increased in recent years and only continue to grow.

Texas A&M made waves in the offseason when it hired former Florida State football head coach Jimbo Fisher to the same position, signing him to a fully guaranteed 10-year, $75 million contract, according to ESPN. Alabama spent $11,132,000 on football head coach Nick Saban last year, according to USA Today head coach salary database.

Though Ohio State pays its coaches in the upper echelon of salaries, it has avoided paying what Athletics Director Gene Smith believes to be unnecessarily large salaries for coaches.

“I don’t even put Texas A&M in our sphere because I’m considering Urban [Meyer]’s situation with three years left on his contract,” Smith said during Ohio State’s Board of Trustees’ Talent and Compensation Committee meeting Thursday. “Talking with [Susan Basso, vice president of human resources] and [Joanna McGoldrick, associate vice president of total rewards], that’s not even someone that we’re comparing with because it’s so ridiculous.

“It’s the same way with Alabama and their total salary. Take it off the sheet because it doesn’t matter. Because it’s just no value to it. It’s a reactionary type of management.”

Corch’s contract expires in three years.  Assuming the man wants to keep coaching at the time, I’ll be curious to see how reactionary Smith’s management is then.

(h/t)

Today, in big deals

One of today’s more surprising developments is that Clemson flipped a five-star offensive lineman from in-state Ohio State. Somehow, I don’t think that’s gonna stick in Corch’s craw nearly as much as this will:

Dabo Swinney told Jackson Carman during his recruitment that Urban Meyer is on the back end of his career in terms of years left. “It wasn’t a major factor, but it was an underlying one,” Carman said.

— Ari Wasserman (@AriWasserman) December 20, 2017

Urban Meyer is five years older than Dabo Swinney.

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UPDATE:  Oh, my.  This story just gets better.

3. Carman previously called out OSU’s coaching staff in public, then got into a Twitter fight with Kirk Herbstreit.

He thought Ohio State should bench QB J.T. Barrett for Dwayne Haskins…

Herbstreit, a Buckeye himself, did not like that…

And Carman didn’t like that Herbstreit didn’t like it:

Herbstreit’s last word on it:

“And then he says he’s gonna go to Clemson or USC. Good, that would be a great decision for you. I think it’d be better for Urban Meyer to not have a guy like that on his roster.”

Well, Carman has now followed through on that threat. But it wasn’t because Meyer decided he wasn’t welcome at Ohio State.

I wonder if Herbie’s heard about Seat 37F yet.

Corch’s advice to Dan Mullen

Hunh, go figure.  When I saw this header, my thought was “always have an escape plan ready when you can’t replace Tebow and Harvin”.

If we measure a man by his pettiness…

… then Corch is the greatest college football coach of our era.

Seriously, does this look like the face of a man who enjoys what he’s doing?

Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

The art of Corching

I posted something a few days ago about how Urban Meyer has mastered keeping his team in the playoff picture.  Here’s another example of how he works it, courtesy of Phil Steele.

College teams that have outperformed opponents season averages on both offense and defense combined.
1. Ohio St +282.9
2. Alabama +259
3. Auburn +231.3
4. Oklahoma +230
5. Clemson +200.1
6. Georgia +190
7. Wisconsin +184.2
8 Okla St +181
9. Penn St +148https://t.co/eLe0jy0hs6

— Phil Steele (@philsteele042) November 24, 2017

You can go a long way pounding the crap out of most teams.  Even the lousy to mediocre ones.

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UPDATE:  HOT TAKE ALERT!

Pittsburgh's upset win over Miami bolsters Ohio State's College Football Playoff chances. https://t.co/GniOqlFllV

— Eleven Warriors (@11W) November 24, 2017