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The Ohio State suspended Urban Meyer will participate in the first three games of the 2018 season of the Ohio State. He missed Buckeyes' wins against Oregon State and Rutgers, and he will miss third week's game against TCU (a tougher match and a trip to Texas), but Meyer coached in weeks 2 and 3 before leaving. the games themselves. Offensive coordinator Ryan Day is the interim head coach when Meyer is absent.
The short reason for the suspension of the head coach:
School investigators decided that he had mismanaged the allegations of domestic violence against his former coach, Zach Smith. But they did not think that Meyer's behavior was sufficiently flagrant to deserve to be fired by one of the most successful coaches in college football history.
Below is the longest reason, a summary of the key details we now know about how Meyer handled the allegations against his longtime assistant at Florida and Ohio State.
Smith's ex-wife Courtney Smith has repeatedly charged her with domestic violence since 2009.
In 2009, Zach Smith, then employed by Meyer in Florida, went to a party at Meyer's. According to the investigators, Smith returned home with a colleague who had been drinking and who intended to have her stay on the Smiths' couch. They said Courtney Smith "vigorously objected" and took the woman home. This started a disagreement. Courtney called 911 and alleged that Zach had picked her up and thrown her against a wall. Police arrested Zach for aggravated battery and later dropped the charge.
Meyer says Zach and Courtney met him in his Florida office and told him that Zach's arrest was based on false information that Courtney had given to the police. Courtney denies attending this meeting and Zach also reminded OSU investigators that she was not there. For the investigation team, Courtney Smith denied retracting her allegations. Nor did she ever respond to allegations in public interviews.
No charges were finally filed against Zach for the 2009 incident. When Meyer hired him to Ohio State in 2011, a university background check did not result in an arrest. Meyer did not tell anyone in Ohio State, because – he told investigators – charges would not have been filed and he did not think Zach had actually committed domestic violence.
Between October and November 2015, the police went twice to Courtney's home to investigate allegations of abuse against Zach.
That year, Courtney texted Meyer's wife, Shelley, about Zach. Shelley expressed her sympathy and fear for Courtney in her own messages, and Courtney said that Shelley had told her that she would inform the head coach of Courtney's allegations. Both Meyers told OSU investigators that Shelley had never informed Urbain of his text messages. But Meyer acknowledged, both in a public statement made in early August and to investigators, that he knew of an allegation in 2015.
In December 2017, police gave Zach a trespass warning after Courtney reported that neighbors had seen Zach knock on the windows of his house at 1:30 am.
The Smiths had been separated since June 2015. They officially divorced in 2016.
Meyer kept Zach Smith in his staff until July 2018, after a judge issued a protection order to keep Zach away from Courtney.
On July 20, an Ohio judge granted Courtney's request for a protection order to keep Zach away from her. In her application for an order, Courtney described a pattern of harassment and harassment over the years. Zach challenged this order.
The Ohio State investigation revealed that Zach Smith had not informed Meyer of the previous December intrusion warning. Meyer told investigators that he considered both the protection order and the intrusion warning when he decided to dismiss Smith on July 23rd.
In addition to Meyer's problems, the day after Smith's dismissal, he appeared to lie about his knowledge of a 2015 allegation of violence.
At Big Ten Media Days, in Chicago, on July 24, a reporter interviewed Meyer about a 2015 allegation against the former coach of Buckeyes receivers. Meyer replied:
2015, I received a text late last night, it happened something in 2015. And there was nothing. Again, there is nothing – again, I do not know who creates a story like that.
Although he was not publicly known at the time, Meyer was aware of a 2015 allegation, as he has said since. There was "nothing".
Mr. Meyer went on administrative leave on August 1, following a report that he had been aware of allegations – contrary to what he had just said to the Big Ten press a week earlier. OSU has opened an investigation.
Three weeks later, on August 22, an investigation report answered some questions, but the university decided to suspend the coach in September.
The investigators found that Meyer did not lie by saying that there was "nothing" about a 2015 allegation. Based on textual messages and personal interviews, the investigators concluded that Meyer was referring specifically to a police report (corrected after Meyer's comments) that previously indicated that Zach Smith had been arrested for felony in 2015.
The investigators did not fully apologize for Meyer's comments. They wrote that his comments "were more widespread than the falsely reported arrest" and that the coach had "falsely predicted not to have known about all relevant events regarding allegations of domestic violence in Canada. 2015".
Most importantly, investigators discovered that Meyer and athletic director, Gene Smith, were not following proper reporting protocols in 2015. But investigators thought the head coach and AD "were convinced that". they believed that they did not have sufficient information to trigger a reporting requirement or initiate disciplinary action. "
The investigators felt that Meyer's contract required him to report AD Smith's allegations of domestic violence. Both Meyer and Smith felt that "the lack of enforcement or prosecution" in 2015 meant that their reporting obligations were not triggered.
Ohio State has decided not to fire Mr. Meyer, despite a clause in his contract that could have canceled a $ 38 million buyback if Meyer had failed to meet reporting standards.
The report made it clear that the OSU head coach had kept Zach Smith on his team despite years of behavior that would have caused most people to be fired.
The Ohio State investigators released a report detailing – in addition to a handful of allegations of abuse – a liaison with an office secretary, a history of drug abuse, poor work and a $ 600 bill in a Florida club. School coaches during a recruitment trip. The investigators portrayed a deeply disturbed staff member who should not have been in his job.
Meyer had what investigators call a "special relationship" with Earle Bruce, former Ohio State head coach and Zach Smith's grandfather. The investigators wrote that Meyer's attraction to Bruce "would also have diminished his ability to deal with and clearly assess the severity of Zach's problems or to discipline him appropriately, despite the many warning signals issued by the behavior of Zach. Zach over the years.
Additively, the Ohio State did not think it was worth it to fire Meyer. But the university did not want to justify not granting him suspension.
Ohio State Football should just keep winning.
The Buckeyes are likely to be really good. Meyer's program has been a recruiting power, and the Ohio State is still the favorite to win the Big Ten with the most talented lineup in the league. The recent turmoil around the Buckeyes prompted Bill Connelly of SB Nation to drop them in his pre-season standings of 130 FBS teams, but only in third place. When it appeared that Meyer would hang Big Ten and make the playoffs better. "With only three games missing, they should easily win, most odds on the Ohio State have receded where they were before that story broke and even beyond," said Kevin Bradley, head of betting. sports at Bovada.
But the Buckeyes are still in an unusual position of Meyer's making.
The Buckeyes have two former head coaches from the current Big Ten schools (including a former NFL head coach) in defensive coordinator Greg Schiano and offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson. In most cases like this, any of them would be the obvious choice for completing the flowchart. But neither one nor the other is able to lead Ohio State, because both have their own past scandals.
Indiana fired Wilson because of his concerns about how he treated his players. At least one of his Hoosiers accused Wilson of forcing the players to hurt themselves.
Schiano was at Penn State when Jerry Sandusky was, and although there is no evidence that he concealed a crime, he was told under oath that someone said he had seen Schiano testify in front of Sandusky "do something to a boy in the shower". did at Penn State, he was accused of having leaked the results of drug tests from a player to reporters. He presided over the spread of MRSA among the Buccaneers and his players in Tampa Bay would have hated him.
Day is qualified to be an acting coach, but this state of Ohio has no other obvious choice, reflecting Meyer's hiring decisions.
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