Less than 12 hours after Ohio State claimed its first national championship in more than a decade, a noticeably tired but beaming Urban Meyer sat at a podium inside the Renaissance Hotel in Dallas in a white button down with a Buckeye logo and a black sport coat.
For Meyer, this was a casual look compared to the suits and ties he’d worn over the last few weeks of the first-ever College Football Playoff. After all, it was finally time to rest after a month’s worth of long days and sleepless nights.
Yet as Ohio State marinated in the splendor of winning college football’s biggest prize, Meyer faced a barrage of questions about how the Buckeyes plan on doing it all over again.
“Tough questions, man,” he said with a smile and a chuckle. “We just won a championship.”
Meyer added: ‘The word repeat, we'll have that conversation, certainly not today. It's about enjoying it."
He compared his team to a group of "elite warriors" trained to accomplish the mission and trained to cherish its success appropriately.
"Right now," he said, "we're in the celebration phase."
“Eventually we're going to get to the learn from it phase, and then the next guys like this wait for the next mission. So that's the pattern we're going to have, and repeat, and those kinds of things, that's certainly not in the conversation right now.”
Even so, Ohio State — the flagship university of a football-crazed state — and its title defense begins now amidst the sport’s dog eat dog world.
A week removed from a 42-20 win against the Oregon Ducks at AT&T Stadium, the Buckeyes have turned the page to next season in more ways than one:
- Meyer, who does not hide a dripping affinity for recruiting, and the coaching staff are making their final efforts as National Signing Day looms 16 days away. Winning a national title offers them momentum. “The doors open. You move to the front of the line … There's just so much going on in our program right now on the positive side, and it's not theory, it's testimony, and the greatest testimony is right over here,” he said, tilting his head toward a shiny trophy and quarterback Cardale Jones and safety Tyvis Powell who sat to his left.
- With Jones, Braxton Miller and J.T. Barrett all expected to return to school, a quarterback quandary for the ages remains unsolved. Meyer said, “at some point I think I'll be ready to comment on it and have that conversation. Right now it's not (it) … At some point there will be some conversations and I think you guys know by now we're pretty transparent about everything we do, and at the appropriate time we'll have those conversations.”
- And finally, after embarking on a quest for championships called “The Chase” for the last three seasons, they are at the front of a rate race where every other program in the country is now chasing them. “I think we'll be very good. I think we have to watch for complacency in the program, and we're going to watch that very closely,” Meyer said.
After all, there's only a solid seven months until the meat of fall camp in August. And you better believe the bullseye on Ohio State's back will only get bigger and bigger as winter turns to spring, spring turns to summer and summer turns fall.
