The wife is out of town, the dog is snoring at my feet and I stole an hour of sleep. So, I thought this would be a good morning to coalesce my thoughts on this confusing year. 

Urban The Program Builder

Urban Meyer’s genius is program-building, and there has never been anyone better.  He seems to thrive in those non-football areas like recruiting, building relationships in the community, marketing the program and evolving the program with state-of-the-art gems like “Real Life Wednesdays.”  This more corporate side of being a head coach is hard for most.  After all, the skill set of a good football coach- understanding and implementing football strategies, does not adequately prepare one to glad-hand muckity-mucks, community power-brokers and donors. However, Urban fits those roles and plays them as well as any coach, now or ever.

Part and parcel of this is culture-building. As above, in this role Urban has no peer. He has built a culture with the team of which we should all be proud. Our new kids respect and learn from the older guys. They learn to lead by example; they learn that there is no substitute for hard work; they learn that the team is greater than the sum of its parts; they learn that school (even Cardale learned it eventually) is why they’re here.  Taken as a whole, they learn to become “Grown-Ass Men”.  Without any doubt or hesitation, I would happily send my boys to play for Urban knowing that they would come out as better young men by the time they left him. 

Urban the Change Agent

Urban’s other genius has been his ability to turn around struggling programs. He’s done it at Bowling Green, at Utah, at Florida and here at Ohio State. And, most impressively, he’s done it immediately without any of that coachspeak like, “you’ll need to be patient for a few years until I get ‘my recruits’ in the program.”  Ask Chris Ash, who is one hell of a football coach, how easy it is to turn a program around. Few achieve it at all, fewer still do it well, but none have ever repeatedly done it like Urban Meyer. 

Urban the Offensive Guru

So, how has he pulled it off?  Well, mostly it’s been done via his genius in changing culture, as mentioned above. But, a new attitude only goes so far on Saturday afternoon. My opinion is that Urban was a little lucky in his timing. As he was starting at BG, a “new”, spread offense was starting to rise up from the ashes.  New is in quotes because effectively it mimics the single-wing offenses that the earliest teams used. What’s old becomes new again. This scheme was perfect for the schools that had a size and strength disadvantage.  To Urban’s credit, he was not so stuck in his ways that he ignored this “new” system. In fact he absorbed it and became one of the chief architects of this scheme. This scheme is perfect for schools that can’t compete physically because you are able to get your athletes free in space, and, since the QB was now an integral part of the running game, the defense had to account for him, which now took away their numbers advantage in the run game.  The traditional powerhouses were slow to change because they simply didn’t have to - at least, at first. Moreover, who would run zone-read, when you can run the “Dave?”  Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. 

Anyway, Meyer’s teams became offensive juggernauts and this continued even when he was able to recruit elite talent at Florida and Ohio State. Yet, if you run an offense that is designed to succeed despite a physical disadvantage, then being physical becomes less of a focus - a focus that could, and in our case I believe one that has spread through the whole program. 

Urban and the Law of Unanticipated Consequences

So here we are.  We are an elite and historic program with an elite coach who is unprecedented in program-building, who is a guru of one of the most potent offense schemes ever, and who is one of the best recruiters of all time. Yet, our teams, both this year and in years past, have often struggled with teams who have decidedly less talent. Every elite team loses games, even games they have no business losing, but it is rare that these elite teams routinely struggle in victory as often as we, and it is even more rare for them to occasionally get curb-stomped by 4 touchdowns by teams that have decidedly less talent. As we learned last night, the last time Alabama lost by 16 points was in 2004, and that was by a Nick Saban coached team. As much as we may not want to admit it Alabama is the very big kid on the college football block. If you watched that game last night you saw a team that plays with discipline, a team that is comfortable with their scheme, a team that plays with energy and a team that swarms to the ball with ill intent and a team that was obviously having a lot of fun.  Ultimately football is a physical game and it is a game (like most) where sound fundamentals trump schematic nuances. Remember when Charlie Weiss came to Notre Dame and stated that they would win because of his “schematic advantages?”  Well, how did that work out Charlie?

I suspect, like all great CEO’s, that Urban has given his assistants relative freedom in scheme development, particularly on defense. I also suspect that this has become more the norm as he spends more time developing the program bells and whistles.  After all, the law of opportunity cost applies in college football just as it applies everywhere else. And the cost, as I see it, is a staff that seems more intent on impressing their next employer with their brilliant schemes as opposed to teaching sound fundamentals. As a result, it’s not necessarily the best football player who occupies any given position, it’s the player who can best perform their role in that complicated scheme. Moreover, even that player is never going to reach their potential if they are thinking instead of reacting. I don’t think it’s coincidence that Larry Johnson, who is without question our best coach, is also our only coach who is not auditioning for his next job. However, whereas Saban has his attention squarely pointed at the product on the field, Urban has his attention seemingly everywhere but the field, particularly this year thanks to Zach Smith. Moreover Saban seems more comfortable being the dictator, while Urban is not.

Urban the.......?

So, we have a coach whose eyes may not be fully-focused on the x’s and o’s, particularly this year; we have players who get playing time based not on their God-given talent, but on their ability to understand a complicated system and their ability to adhere to a culture that emphasizes working one’s way up the ladder via special teams even if they may in fact be better than the person ahead of them on the depth chart; we have an offensive scheme that is based not on physically defeating your opponent, but one which is instead based on smaller, more agile offensive linemen who can move laterally and defeat bigger defenses via movement and combo blocking; and, we have a coach that -perhaps to his detriment - does not micromanage and one who values players who fit a culture over and above players who can and will knock the snot out of the guy across from them. 

Food for Thought

Just as Carnegie needed Henry Clay Frick and Buffet needed Charlie Munger, perhaps Urban needs a CFO, a Chief Football Officer, who would coordinate the actual running of the team.  Urban could still run the program, head the recruiting efforts and have veto power on all matters. Yet this would solve the problem that an ever-growing multi-million dollar enterprise creates: namely a program that forces one to do more and more work with less time.  Another plus would be the removal of a little stress off of Urban’s plate, which in turn could keep him around longer. 

To the two of you that have lasted this long: my apologies. Thinking about “my” Buckeyes is part of my fanaticism and writing is cathartic as I think about why things are as they are. 

Ultimately, I’d rather have my kids go to college and become better human beings as opposed to winning championships. But my goodness how, before I leave this mortal coil, I’d like the collective finger of college football to be pointing straight at Columbus, Ohio with fear and trepidation.