Urban Meyer is a bad person. It’s not just that he is a hypocrite. It is that he is a hypocrite that does not want do the job he was hired to. The Jacksonville Jaguars are undeniably suffering from a failure of leadership, but being fair to Urb, he is only half of the reason.
The other half is Shad Kahn. The Jaguars’ owner doesn’t seem to care about his football team. Shad Kahn is a weirdo. I like weirdos and want to root for him, so I wish this wasn’t the case. And look, maybe he does care to a certain degree, but he certainly didn’t put much effort into finding a coach to turn around the fortunes of a team that ended 2020 by losing 15 straight games. I don’t think it was hard to see that Urban Meyer was going to fail in the NFL, and instead of doing any sort of due diligence or homework on the guy’s shortcomings, Kahn zeroed in on Meyer and winning headlines instead of football games.
Watching Urban Meyer fart his way from one misstep of his own making to the next, I couldn’t help but think about our industry. Like coaching, the media is also awash with egos. For every person looking for an answer, there is someone else looking for a problem that they can shout they know how solve. Sometimes, the right problem matches with the right solution. Other times, the problem is completely ignored in favor of getting handshakes and high fives.
How many of us know or maybe even have worked for a PD with a resume that you can instantly recognize did not result in a lot of knowledge? That long resume is filled with multiple stops in top 30 markets before the PD landed the job he or she is currently in and after knowing that person for a bit, it becomes clear that the past jobs are what is making them attractive for the next job. A hiring manager in say St. Louis can be underwhelmed by a candidate and still justify hiring that candidate to themselves because the resume lists stops at stations in Baltimore, Houston, Las Vegas, and Miami. They can then go to their manager and their staff and say “look at this guy!” and on paper, those people will be impressed.
The hiring manager gets the handshake from his/her boss. He or she gets the high fives from the airstaff. Best of all? The hiring manager didn’t have waste too much time or work too hard to look like a genius!
It’s a win in the moment. It’s only a win for one person though. And if that new PD comes in and either doesn’t know how to deal with his or her new staff or simply doesn’t have the knowledge to garner the staff’s respect, the win is short-lived and ultimately meaningless.
We see this happen on air too. A station either lets an older talent walk or lays them off. The station across the street senses an opportunity and swoops in. That talent goes from being out of a job to in the spotlight with a competitor. The PD gets to stick it to the competition. The market manager gets to tell the sales staff that they have a new voice with established market familiarity to take to clients. In the moment, everyone feels good.
But what if the PD and market manager were blinded by the potential for a short dopamine burst that they didn’t consider why this talent was suddenly available. Are their ratings in free fall? Did they make everyone else in the building miserable? Do they want a paycheck that the station cannot justify?
These are all going to be problems sooner rather than later. All it took was a little bit of research and maybe one or two conversations to see that. Instead, the thrill of a short-term win has the potential to turn into shooting yourself in the foot and creating long-term problems.
Right now, off the top of my head, I can tell you that Urban Meyer looked the other way on a number of guys that were regularly in trouble with the law when he was at Florida, he hired Kevin Wilson to his staff at Ohio State even after multiple Indiana players accused the former Hoosiers coach of physically and verbally mistreating them, he did not intervene when his former assistant Zach Smith’s wife came to him complaining that Smith was abusing her. Then when the allegations became public and Meyer was forced to address them at a press conference, he apologized to “Buckeye Nation” but not to Zach Smith’s then-ex-wife.
Again, THAT IS OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD!
If I knew all of that, chances are Shad Kahn knew at least some of it and the people he pays to help him make the best decisions for the Jaguars undoubtedly knew all of it. Maybe Shad Kahn overruled everyone raising objections. Maybe no one cared. The Jaguars have a long history of being very bad and this was a chance to get Jacksonville back on their side. Hell, the city is full of Florida fans that will tell you the Gators ain’t been the same since Urban left.
When Urban Meyer hired Chris Doyle to be his assistant strength coach and no one said boo, despite the fact that Doyle was a pretty open and unapologetic racist to his players when he was at Iowa, that should have been the moment everyone in teal said “Oh shit. This isn’t going to last very long.” The moment Urban Meyer complained that he didn’t like free agency because it’s not like recruiting, someone in the Jaguars front office should have said “Oh shit. That is exactly what Nick Saban said when he was in Miami.” The second news got out that Meyer refused to meet with his whole team after video leaked of a lady dancing on his crotch inside of his Columbus restaurant, everyone covering this team should have said “Oh shit. That sounds an awful lot like how Bobby Petrino treated his players on the way out of Atlanta.”
It isn’t hard to find warning signs. People can change, but it takes hard work and a desire to get and do better. If all of the warning signs are there that a potential hire is going to be a problem and you make the hire anyway, anything bad that happens is on the person that gave their stamp of approval.
Long ago, a very good college football reporter told me that Nick Saban was more respected amongst his peers than Meyer was because smart people in that profession recognize that Nick Saban doesn’t care if you think he is an asshole whereas Urban Meyer was, at that point anyway, obsessed with his reputation. That was back at the beginning of the last decade when the two were going back and forth for SEC and national championships.
By the time Shad Kahn made Urban Meyer his head coach, Meyer had a very different reputation. The only people that believed the guy valued the leadership and accountability he has been peddaling as his brand for nearly a decade now are the ones that call it “THE Ohio State University.” The rest of us knew he was full of shit.
If Shad Kahn didn’t, Shad Kahn needs to call it a day, sell the team, divest himself of any other business interests and just enjoy being rich, because that guy shouldn’t be running anything!
True leadership and accountability is necessary in football and in radio. Somebody has to be the one that gets others to buy into the vision and pull in the same direction. The day you cannot get a staff or a team to do that or you hire someone that cannot get a staff to do that, you are no longer fit to be a leader.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
