Urban Meyer and the disease of unearned loyalty

One of the most powerful coaches in sports protected an assistant overrun with red flags. Why?

1. For years, Urban Meyer kept an alleged domestic abuser on his coaching staff. There was a press conference on Wednesday night in Columbus about that, Ohio State’s investigation, and how Meyer and athletic director Gene Smith will serve short suspensions for their leadership failures. Someone asked Meyer if being away from football had been hard on him personally. We’re glad someone is thinking about Meyer’s feelings in this trying time.
2. Why? Why keep that staffer who also had so many performance issues, now public? The staffer missed recruiting visits and check-ins — unbelievable at a football program anywhere, much less at Ohio State. The report mentions the staffer’s history of “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 cyber crimes.” The university-commissioned report concludes that despite this, Meyer never wrote Zach Smith up or put him on a performance improvement plan, and instituted “no disciplinary action until July 23, 2018.”
3. During that press conference on Wednesday, no one asked why, with all the resources at his disposal, did Meyer protect that staffer at all? Why risk this — a situation in which many believe Meyer should be fired, an ugly airing of Ohio State’s business, and a presser performance by Meyer that arguably only made his school look worse — for an underperforming wide receivers coach? What made him worth protecting at all?
4. In Meyer’s paraphrased words, the staffer was kept on “because Zach was Earle Bruce’s grandson and Bruce had been a close mentor to Meyer.” Not because he was effective, brilliant, giving, an asset to morale, or hard-working. Meyer admitted he did not fire the staffer because of a personal connection.
5. That connection and its power did not, by the way, extend to the staffer’s wife. Per the report, Meyer didn’t believe Courtney Smith’s account of abuse in 2009. He was skeptical of her account in 2015. The staffer, meanwhile, continued to receive a generous salary, benefits, and the benefit of the doubt.
6. Meyer granted him that because he felt like he owed his mentor something. Bruce was fired at Ohio State after the 1987 season, but not before helping a young graduate assistant named Meyer. (Later, Bruce would coach at Colorado State, where players alleged Bruce had abused them, and in one player’s case, hit him with a closed fist during practice.)
7. When Meyer had no choice but to act, he had few good answers about how it got to this point. Wednesday featured no fewer than four different excuses for Meyer’s behavior. That list included medication that gives Meyer “memory issues.” It included the loyalty argument. It included a lack of verifiable information making any action whatsoever difficult. Most damning, it included Meyer admitting that he did not give any credence to a woman’s claims that she was abused, then kept the staffer around despite all the other red flags.
8. Meyer went to all those lengths because of a tradition of men getting credit simply for being born in a certain arrangement to other men. (Note: not women, who aren’t extended the same instant credit.) The staffer got a bizarre form of power he’d never earned from anyone. He then rode it until the reality of who he was exceeded that fantasy of loyalty.
9. A capital-letters Leader of Men should demand accountability from his peers on a universal standard — not a standard that depends on financial status, for example. Ohio State is clearly not there yet, because no one who earns less than $400,000 a year could sign off on a description of themselves as “not deliberately lying” without being laughed off the stage. The rich get different laws in this country already, but 2018 has a new benefit: they get to use a different language, too.
10. Those men get allowances because a lot of the time when someone says “loyalty” or “I wanted to believe the best,” what they mean is that they want the questioner to stop. What Meyer wanted to happen at Big Ten Media Days, when he accidentally lied about the staffer’s situation, was for reporters to believe he had it handled. Because he was in charge.
11. In a club of men, Meyer acted on club rules. Those rules apply to men only, and then only men roped off from other men by circles of influence. Those circles in coaching get pretty exclusive quickly. No case for easing the rules could be less compelling than the Ohio State staffer in question. Yet the second most powerful man in his profession risked it all for that staffer, made allowances he made for no one else, and protected him to the point of provoking a public trial of his own character.
12. Why? Because he was a man with a connection to another man, and that system of connections mattered more than the entire world outside it. It was worth Courtney Smith’s well-being and the horrible message it sent women at Ohio State and beyond. It was worth reminding anyone outside the bubble of influence that a job in college athletics goes first to the connected, and that the connected have different, easier rules.
13. For years, Urban Meyer kept an alleged domestic abuser on his coaching staff. Whatever happens — whatever Meyer might have said at the press conference, whatever happens during the suspension, whatever trivial details of the team’s performance might seem important — that doesn’t change and can’t be forgotten. It will be, but someone needs to keep saying it anyway.