Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football

by Bacon, John U.

  In the summer of 2003, Baylor basketball player Patrick Dennehy disappeared. During the investigation, head coach Dave Bliss portrayed Dennehy as a drug dealer to explain how the player might have paid his tuition without a scholarship. But authorities soon discovered teammate Carlton Dotson had shot and killed Dennehy. The NCAA got involved only in those aspects of the case that triggered its rules on paying players and the like, but left the legal matters for law enforcement. Likewise, the NCAA stayed out of two infamous lacrosse cases: the Duke incident, when three members of the team were falsely charged with raping a stripper; and the University of Virginia tragedy, in which George Huguely V murdered his girlfriend, fellow lacrosse player Yeardley Love. In both situations, the NCAA left the criminal investigations to the legal authorities—and wisely so. It would have been tantamount to assigning a serial-murder case to meter readers.

  Several Penn State insiders, however—both inside and outside the football building—warned Joyner and others that the NCAA might make an exception in the Sandusky case. To be safe, they urged Joyner, Penn State should hire attorneys with experience negotiating with the NCAA, and start building bridges before the reports emerged.

  Joyner replied that Penn State had never had a major infraction before and was not likely to get one now—ignoring that Penn State’s entire compliance department consisted of one man, who was not likely to find much over the years, if there was anything to find.

  The insiders’ advice was ignored.

  Not knowing any of this, Bill O’Brien signed on the dotted line.

  CHAPTER 3

  URBAN’S STORY

  If Bill O’Brien was walking into the Happy Valley swamp largely blind, Urban Meyer had a much better map of the landscape he’d be navigating in Columbus.

  After all, the man had been born in Toledo in 1964 and raised in Ashtabula, a town of about twenty thousand people, known mainly as a throwaway line in Bob Dylan’s classic “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.”

  Kids grow up tough in Ashtabula, a shrinking coal port in the northeast corner of the state, but Meyer probably grew up tougher than most. His grandfather had been killed in a German concentration camp, and after the war, his mother, Gisele, ended up on the wrong side of the East-West divide. Not content to die in East Germany, she crawled underneath a barbed-wire fence to escape, lived in a West German basement for three months, then took a ship to New York.

  “Germans at the time thought the US was all palm trees and sunshine and smiles,” Urban told me. “But when her ship arrived, the New York City sanitation workers were on strike. Her first three weeks in America she spent walking past mountains of garbage and avoiding rats the size of Volkswagens.”

  Although most Europeans find American football mystifying, Gisele Meyer loved it. Being Catholic, she naturally cheered for Notre Dame and dreamed her son would one day become the Fighting Irish’s head coach. Her son loved the game even more, but Notre Dame less. In Ashtabula, if you wanted to fit in, there was one thing you had to do, but only one thing: back the Buckeyes.

  Meyer didn’t need to be told. When he was just five or six, he recalled, his mom dragged him out of the house to run an errand during the Michigan–Ohio State game—at the outset of the Ten Year War between Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler.

  “I couldn’t believe we were leaving the house. We had to go to some outside mall, and when I heard the PA system playing the game, I just stopped, cold.” Meyer was mesmerized, and even his tough, Teutonic mom had a hell of a time getting her son to move.

  He played almost every play at Saint John High School, but after he failed to get Earle Bruce’s attention at Ohio State, he played two seasons of professional baseball before accepting the University of Cincinnati’s offer to play defensive back. When his college career was over, he knew he didn’t want to leave the game, but he also knew he couldn’t stay as a player.

  Coach Bruce came to the rescue, hiring Meyer as a graduate assistant at Ohio State.

  “What I admire most about Coach Bruce is what the fans of That School Up North love about Bo: he’s always honest and direct. Those two were very much alike.

  “This kind of world is hard. And the whole idea of following all these rules—not everyone does it. But there was never a time when Coach Bruce said, ‘Let’s find a way around something.’

  “There’s nothing like having a conversation with someone who has the guts to say things people don’t like. ‘This is the way it is.’ It’s rare, and Earle has it. The honesty, the toughness—that’s the only way you can operate. And sometimes you get criticized for it. At the end of the day, you can’t please everyone.”

  When Bruce was fired by Ohio State, then later hired by Colorado State, Meyer eagerly followed. Bruce taught him more than plays. “He always said the two groups most overlooked were the former players and the students.” Bruce worked hard to keep both groups appreciated and involved.

  After five years there, and five more at Notre Dame—which thrilled his mother—in 2001 Bowling Green offered Urban Meyer his first head-coaching job. Sadly, it was after his mom had passed away. Meyer took a team that hadn’t had a winning season in seven years, including a 2-9 season before he arrived, and pushed them to 8-3 and 9-2.

  Next stop, Utah, where Meyer took the Utes to records of 10-2 and 12-0 in 2004, capped by swamping Pittsburgh, 35–7, in the Fiesta Bowl, for a Top 5 ranking. He won just about every Coach of the Year trophy, including the Woody Hayes Award.

  Notre Dame, which had just fired Tyrone Willingham, came calling. But Meyer, whose mother had named him for a pope, surprised almost everyone when he swerved south to Florida. His connection with Coach Bruce, however, only grew stronger. He continued to call his mentor almost every week, about everything from discipline issues, to hiring questions, to scheduling.

  “I like to get his opinion on how we’re doing things,” he said. “He knows me as well as I know me. If I’m overreacting, or struggling with the balancing act that’s so hard to achieve, he’ll say something.”

  The depth of trust between them was manifest in 2006, Meyer’s second season in Gainesville. He had led the fourth-ranked Gators to the SEC title game against Arkansas. If USC somehow lost against a weak UCLA team—which was a long shot—Florida could steal the Trojans’ invitation to the national title game against top-ranked Ohio State. But that didn’t seem very likely.

  At the team breakfast before the SEC title game, “I’m not doing well,” Meyer recalled. “I’m loaded up pretty tight. I’ve got such tunnel vision, I don’t even know Coach Bruce is sitting right next to me at my table. I feel a nudge. I look. It’s Coach Bruce.”

  Bruce all but shouted, “Hey! How you doing!?”

  “Honestly? I’m not doing too good,” Meyer admitted. “I’m too tight. I need to lighten up, loosen up.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?!” Bruce asked.

  The waitstaff, cleaning up around them, must have thought it was crazy, this seventy-eight-year-old man screaming at Meyer.

  “Let it go! Relax!” Bruce said, but seeing that he wasn’t getting through to his protégé, he grabbed Meyer’s shirt with both hands and said, “Let the m#*%@# go!”

  “Now he has my attention!” Meyer recalled.

  “How did you get here?” Bruce asked him. “How did you get here?!” He punched Meyer’s chest. “Relax! Let your kids play. That’s how you got there!”

  On Meyer’s game sheet, he wrote down, “Let the m#*%@# go!”

  Meyer knew his 2006 Florida team had great defense—led by Coach Greg Mattison, who would join Brady Hoke’s staff in 2011, with amazing results—but not a great offense. “We ran a lot of trick plays and reverses and fake punts,” Meyer said. But it worked well enough in the first half, when the Gators jumped out to a 17–0 lead and held a 17–7 advantage at halftime.

  When they returned to the locker room, “everyone’s cell phone was buzzing—almost like music,” Meyer told me. “Our SID was pasty white. He sa
id, ‘You won’t believe this. USC just lost.’

  “Now, I know the players know. They’re all grabbing their phones. I almost panicked.”

  Instead, Meyer turned to his players and said, “Hey! You guys want to play for it all?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Then let’s play for it all!”

  Of course, the Gators naturally responded by throwing two interceptions, which the Razorbacks converted to go ahead, 21–17, just two minutes into the third quarter.

  “It’s loud,” Meyer recalled. “We have no momentum. They’ve got Darren McFadden and Felix Jones. I thought, this could get ugly fast.”

  When Florida got the ball back, they couldn’t get anything going. Facing fourth and 10, from their own 12, Meyer looked down at the words on his game sheet and, for the first time that night, really read them. “Let the m#*%@# go!”

  All right, he thought, here we go. He called “Blitz at Nine”—a fake punt. Even his players couldn’t believe it.

  “I remember thinking, ‘If this doesn’t work, you lose your job.’ ” That might not have been an exaggeration.

  “I don’t even watch it,” Meyer said. “My mouth was sandpaper. I turned to talk to Chris Leak. I wasn’t really talking to him. I was just trying to look like I wasn’t calling a fake punt! I had to look somewhere else. I grabbed him—and it went silent. And then I heard the crowd—and I knew he’d made it. Hell, he got the damn first down, and three times more—maybe twenty-five yards.

  “The players will tell you that, after the fake punt worked, they knew we were going to win the game.” And Florida did, 38–28.

  “If the fake had failed, I think that would have been tough to rebound from. College football is all about momentum. Momentum is everything.”

  Meyer’s mom was gone, but his dad was still with him. After the Gators beat the Buckeyes for the national title, 41–14, Sports Illustrated reported, Meyer walked back to the sideline to see his father.

  “Well,” Bud Meyer said, “it’s about time you did that.”

  • • •

  After Ohio State hired Meyer on November 28, 2011, between their loss to Michigan and their loss to Florida in the Gator Bowl, he didn’t waste any time putting his stamp on the program. When Meyer walked into his first team meeting that day, he did not start with the usual pleasantries—hello, thanks, great to be here. He told them all to sit up straight in their seats, then pointed out those who weren’t sitting straight enough.

  “He grabs your attention right away,” 2012 captain Zach Boren told me. “That first meeting was intense. Intense. But that’s something we needed. We’d gotten complacent around here. He was all serious, all business.”

  Of the four coaches featured here, if you wanted to go get a beer, Meyer might be the fourth one you’d pick. They all have deeply competitive personalities, but Meyer is wired just a little tighter than the rest. But he did not come to Columbus to have a beer with you. He came to run the table—and his yearlong campaign started that day.

  • • •

  Buckeye fans bristle when Michigan head coach Brady Hoke refers to Ohio State as Ohio—which is the name of the state, or an entirely different state university, located in Athens. Likewise, Michigan fans roll their eyes at the Buckeyes’ recent custom of referring to their school as The Ohio State University. This would suggest the university was the state’s first, though Miami University in Oxford was founded in 1809, sixty-one years before Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College was born in 1870 and later became Ohio State. It would suggest Ohio State was the best school in the state, but for years Miami was harder to get into, while great liberal arts colleges such as Oberlin, Wooster, Kenyon, and Denison have been highly rated for a century—not to mention Case Western.

  The Ohio State University? More like an Ohio State University.

  Just a generation ago, if you had earned a diploma from any high school in the state of Ohio, you were automatically, by law, granted admission to Ohio State—hardly the foundation for competitive excellence.

  “Over the past two decades,” former Michigan president James Duderstadt told me, “Ohio State has invested heavily in its academic programs and today ranks as one of the nation’s leading research universities. They have become very competitive in attracting outstanding faculty and students.”

  “Ten or fifteen years ago,” said Michigan professor John Hagen, who has served on many national panels in his forty-five-year career, “you wouldn’t even list Ohio State in the top three or four in the Big Ten academically, but they did a big fund-raising campaign a few years ago, and I hear they’re doing another one, so they can offer higher salaries and get some more of our star faculty. They’re not just competing with us in athletics anymore.”

  If you grew up in Ann Arbor in the seventies, as I did, the most hated man in your universe was not Leonid Brezhnev, but Woody Hayes. A close second, however, was one Archie Griffin, who not only was the only two-time Heisman Trophy winner, he was a certified Wolverine killer. He faced four of Schembechler’s best teams, all ranked third or fourth in the country, three of them undefeated, and walked away with three wins and a tie—which were the first four Michigan–Ohio State games I watched.

  If you want to really ruin your day, talk to Mr. Griffin for an hour and discover he is the epitome of all that is right about college football.

  It is enough to make a Michigan man want to throw up.

  Archie Griffin grew up, as they like to say, in the shadow of the Horseshoe, the fourth of eight kids, seven of them sons—all of whom played serious football. In the Buckeye State, that means everything. On Friday nights, the entire town empties into the local stadium. That included Archie’s father, James Griffin.

  “He would always be there,” Archie recalled. “That might not sound like anything to you, but he worked three jobs: at Ohio Malleable, a steel casting company; another for the City of Columbus; and a janitorial service. He worked days, and he worked nights. That had to be awfully hard.”

  To see his kids play Friday nights, James Griffin would take his vacation time. “That was his vacation,” Griffin said. “To watch his kids play football Friday nights. He loved doing that. When I think of him, that’s what I think of first. And every time I say that, it gets me choked up.”

  This time was no exception. To maintain his composure, the impossibly energetic Griffin had to pause and look out the window on the Olentangy River rolling outside his office.

  It will come as a shock to most football fans that Griffin visited Michigan and seriously considered going there. But he went to Ohio State, partly for his father, but also for the man in the baseball hat, the short-sleeve shirt, and the black tie.

  “I loved the man. I think about him every day—and I mean that. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Woody Hayes. Something he would have said, in the course of the day, comes back into my mind.

  “The biggest thing he talked about in meetings, year after year after year, was paying it forward. Paying it forward. You’ve been blessed, so you need to give back and give the next generation a chance.”

  Naturally, that list includes number 45 himself. Griffin and his wife, Bonita, founded the Archie Griffin Fund and have endowed six scholarships at Ohio State, and not in football or basketball, but in the Olympic sports.

  But Griffin’s greatest gift for his alma mater is his career itself—the one after football. In the state of Ohio, his name probably runs second only to his old coach’s. Griffin could have made himself a wealthy man quite easily through sales, public relations work, even TV and radio, to name just a few pursuits. Instead, he returned to his alma mater in March 1984 to work in the athletic department, but left his comfort zone in 2004 to lead the alumni association, which now has a half million dues-paying members, thanks to his leadership.

  “Now that I’m fifty-eight, I love my football, I love my Buckeyes, but I love this university as well, and what it can do for the people of the state of Ohio. For me, it’
s vastly more important. But I know without football, we wouldn’t be this big, or this powerful. It’s the drawing point.

  “The president of the university can’t draw that. The president of the United States can’t draw that! It’s like Bear Bryant said: ‘You can’t rally around a math class.’

  “When you think about it, it’s true—but getting people on campus actually helps the math class. And football does that! When people get drawn in, they can see what this place is all about.

  “You get less support from the state now, so you need donors—and that’s where football helps, too. That’s why so many people know who we are, and what we do here.

  “I’m not going to say all five hundred thousand alums are huge football fans, but I’ve gotta tell you, it’s a big point of interest! We have alumni who are very proud of Ohio State, and we hear about it—especially when things are not going well! The tattoo issue. When something like that happens, you see how passionate they are. And they want it fixed! But it really shows you that they care.”

  When I visited Griffin in 2012, some 211,000 alums had already shown they cared by raising $1.5 billion of a $2.5 billion campaign, “But for Ohio State,” to benefit the university’s fourteen colleges, which have rapidly been climbing the national and even world rankings the past decade.

  “They’re still not Michigan,” Professor Hagen said, “but now they’re certainly right up there.”

  And that’s true top to bottom. A friend of mine had little trouble getting in some two decades ago, but was surprised to learn from the admissions department in 2013 that her out-of-state daughter would need a 3.6 GPA and a 28 ACT just to be considered.

  In its most recent ranking, U.S. News & World Report named Ohio State the eighteenth-best public university in the country. Thirteen of Ohio State’s graduate programs ranked in the top ten, and the university itself earned the title of best public university in the state.