The Urban Curse

Somehow, Urban Meyer still has two restaurants and a legion of fans in Columbus.

Urban Meyer in happier times.

Like a lot of children in America, I came of age viewing sports through the lens of good versus evil. Unlike a lot of sports fans, I grew out of that phase when I learned to read books that weren’t peppered with pictures.

Athletes and coaches approach their craft like the rest of us do our jobs. When you understand that, suddenly a team shitting the bed on a random Saturday against an inferior opponent makes a lot more sense.

It’s not like any of us bring 100% execution to the table every day for our employers, unless you’re one of those sick freaks that had internalized billionaire propaganda and believe nonsense like “hustle and grind” are the key to success under capitalism.

That’s why I’ve never understood why sports fans will go to lengths to defend men associated with their favorite programs. How naive do you have not to understand that money and fame easily corrupts the human mind and a lot of the dudes for which we cheer on the weekend are even bigger scumbags than us in their day-to-day life?

(None of this, obviously, applies to the Cleveland Browns who employ only the best human beings outside of our criminal owner who should be in jail for corporate fraud.)

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Yesterday, Diana Moskowitz of The Defector dropped a devastating report on the fallout for Courtney Smith, the ex-wife of former Ohio State wide receiver coach Zach Smith, whose abuse of Courtney led directly to the overdue implosion of the Urban Meyer era.

Moskowitz’s story deserves to be read in full.

I’ve publicly feuded with Smith in the past, in large part because I’ve met Courtney and always found her credible even before she showed me the most cursed Google Drive in existence during our three-hour chat in Dublin, which is now a matter of public record:

Any doubts Courtney had about her plan to leave evaporated the night in June that she found Zach’s other Google account. On this Google Drive she said that she found photos of naked women, as well as text messages between himself and other women, and photos of his erect penis in all sorts of locations, including the hotel where Ohio State stayed before home games (you can tell because not only is the interior of the hotel familiar, but the folder name included the phrase “game day”), inside the Ohio State Woody Hayes Athletic Center (you can tell because, just beyond his erect penis, you can see an image on the wall of a football player in an Ohio State uniform), and inside a White House bathroom during the team’s victory visit to see the president (you can tell because he made sure to put a Seal of the President of the United States next to his penis). He also included videos of himself jerking off in the work shower in a folder called “work shower.” 

Outright grifters like Kyle Lamb had no problem painting Courtney as a lying whore who had it coming while other ostensible media outlets simply went with, “Well, who’s to say who is telling the truth here?” Needless to say, Ohio State fans by and large followed their opinion leaders into that abyss since not even the university could do the right thing as an institution.

And sure, even if they admitted that Zach Smith was a loose cannon who had zero business coaching college students, nobody was ready to indict Urban Meyer for hiring the man and retaining him despite numerous red flags that would get normal people like us fired from our jobs very easily.

“I’m glad Urban is gone,” I tweeted in December 2018 when he announced he was doing what he did best in his coaching career—quit as soon as the going got tough. I probably would have forgotten about that by now like 99% of my other shit posting, but I got attacked by commenters on Eleven Warriors and my former boss for having “The Worst Take of 2018.”

Now it has become personal on this issue, because that’s how my petty little mind operates. If I’m going to Hell, I’m taking them with me.

Urban Meyer’s Jaguars got baptized by the Houston Texans on Saturday, and it’s probably dawned on Urban by now how it’s harder to coach football when teams have an equal amount of athletes on their sidelines. It’s also a lot harder to control a locker room when you’re dealing with unionized millionaires and not college students dependent on a scholarship you can pull on a whim because they want to kneel during our nation’s fight song.

But other than Smith, nobody comes off worse in the article than Urban, his wife Shelley, and the institution of Ohio State:

In fact, monitoring the 2015 case would become a family affair for the Meyers. By the fall of 2015, Courtney had told Shelley Meyer about how much she feared Zach. The two texted back and forth about it, according to Ohio State, with Shelley saying, “I am praying for you!!! I wouldn’t listen to him anyway. He doesn’t talk to anyone about you. I know the truth. Please take care of yourself and let me know what I could [sic] help.” Shelley Meyer also contacted Powell police to try and get information about the case. Powell police told her she would have to wait like everyone else.

Shelley and Urban Meyer have insisted that she never told her husband about what Courtney was telling her. Perhaps. But the Meyers also have been very open in the past about how key Shelley was, according to her own husband, to keeping his college football program’s running. In a glowing Sports Illustrated profile, S.L. Price wrote that Shelley sat in on all of Urban’s negotiations during his hiring at Florida and “quickly became the program’s go-to resource for gray-area discipline problems.”

“It’s not uncommon for me to have a player meet with her, because she believes in counseling and I still don’t know if I believe in it yet,” Urban said of his wife, making sure to point out she was also a clinical nursing instructor. “All the way from learning disabilities to behavioral disabilities to substance issues, she is an absolute proponent of counseling. I’m more, Let’s get ’em up at 5 a.m. and make sure that doesn’t happen again. So there’s a balance there. I trust her.”

The Meyers are simply a symptom of a disease, yet it’s nauseating even all these years later to recount the lies they told us because they thought we were dumb and could get away with it.

And make no mistake, most of us were that dumb and they would have gotten away with it if Meyer hadn’t quit because his feelings got hurt that Ohio State suspended him for three games instead of canning his ass like he deserved.

[Ohio State football “leadership coach” Tim] Kight wrote back with a suggested statement, which reiterated how often domestic disputes are “he said/she said,” and called Zach’s violation of the protective order a “bad judgement.” Meyer wrote back saying he heard, incorrectly, that there was no protective order, forcing Kight to correct him based on what he had read about the case. Meyer said that someone from his staff had checked with the police and there was nothing in 2015, and the problem was Courtney’s lawyer was releasing stuff, which, even if that were true, ignored how much Zach’s lawyer talked to the media from the day the story broke.

“Scary,” Meyer wrote to Kight, never indicating what he actually had to be afraid of.

“Faith and courage,” Kight responded. “Remember Elijah and Jezebel?”

“Absolutely,” Meyer wrote back. “Fatigue, doubt, fear overcame by Faith.”

This is usually the ham-fisted writing you see from television writers who want to convince their show’s fans that the main character is an amoral scumbag who should not, under any circumstances, be cheered.

Ohio State fans couldn’t even pass that simple morality test. Look how many leathery freaks continue to flock to Urban’s pint house in Dublin or the his new horror show in the Short North. None of this stuff matters to them because Urban won us a championship and never lost to Michigan. (Hey, nobody’s perfect, right?)

I believe the Curse of Urban Meyer has fallen upon Ohio State. Until we reckon with Meyer, we must assume God has abandoned our program. Kerry Coombs, an Urban Meyer henchman, is still coaching our defense despite them not even being able to line up properly. Urban’s son-in-law makes six figures to fetch coffee. They are tumors which must be eliminated unless Ryan Day wants to go back to coaching quarterbacks in the NFC West next year.

Ohio Stadium’s field looks like it belongs outside a dilapidated high school in rural Ohio with an enrollment of 110 students. The game day experience has been completely stripped of anything cool, unique, or affordable for anyone who makes less than $75,000 a year.

This is the price we paid to protect Urban, and it wasn’t even good enough for him, which again is why he quit to “spend more time with his family” like we all don’t know the only thing that gets him off is winning football games, which is why he moved to Florida’s asshole to try his hand at professional coaching. He probably won’t even last a season.

Take all the pictures down. Shutter his businesses. And dissociate any former player that is dumb enough to think Zach Smith is a guy worth spending time around. Only then will we return to glory, and not a second sooner. That’s the price when you make a deal with the devil.

THOSE WMDs. The cold world of the extremely online Liverpool fan… Why trying to be happy makes you unhappy… The question Michael K. Williams asked me before every season of The Wire… the unwritten rules of Black TV… The revolt of New York City’s delivery drivers.