Should Urban Meyer Be Fired?

The CBS Sportsradio talking heads were pretty much unanimous in condemning Urban Meyer over this past weekend. At first their condemnation was based on his denial to the press that he knew about his assistant's alleged violence against his wife. The thought was that Meyers's wife knew about it, due to text messages sent to her, therefore Urban must have known about it also.

Then it turns out that Meyer did know about the allegations, and followed required protocol in reporting it to his superiors. But did the talking heads rethink their position? Of course not. They continued to mindlessly dump their vitriol on Meyer, regardless of the fact that he had acted properly.

As my old Contracts Law prof used to say, "we have to keep our thinking straight". First, this situation involves an alleged victim who is an adult. What this means is that there is no analogy to the Penn State situation, or any other situation involving abuse of children. Police reports were made in many of the instances of alleged abuse (apparently nine total), and the authorities never proceeded to file charges. What this means is that the authorities were well aware of the situation, so there was no need for Meyer to report it.

The second thing to keep in mind is that, once Meyer made the AD aware of the situation, it was up to the AD to take whatever action he felt necessary to ensure the integrity of the OSU program. Meyer's job is to win football games, it is the AD's job to oversee the program.

The third thing to keep in mind is that perhaps the woman involved wanted to keep the whole issue private.  If that is the case, it is not up to Meyer, or the OSU athletic program, to infringe on her privacy by publicizing the issue. She is an adult and perfectly able to pursue whatever remedies are appropriate. Her parents and other extended family were aware of her situation, and surely would have insisted on action if she was truly in danger.

The assistant's misdeeds, whatever they were, did not infringe on his ability to do his job.

For all these reasons, I say to the lamestream media, get a clue!