Especially now that they have this spectacular failure to throw back in his face if he gives them any shit.
My prediction: Meyer is back on ESPN in some capacity very soon (maybe even for the college BCS next month), and does that for a year or two, before some college athletic director, with more ambition than scruples, gives Meyer his next gig.
Meyer’s skills could translate into another kind of sports job. Maybe Rick Pitino will hire him as an assistant at Iona in charge of motivation.
Or any corporate job. “Hello, Mr. Meyer? My employees lack motivation. Can you come kick their legs please?”
This is almost a given
The more interesting question is whether or not that school is close to being a perennial contender. He’s not going to want to go to a Florida Atlantic or maybe even a lower tier Power 5 school unless he gets desperate.
So is a top tier team going to try Meyer out within the next year? If not, maybe he stays with ESPN.
I found myself this morning marveling that there can exist in the mind of a (presumably) rational adult human a thought process leading to the conclusion that kicking a subordinate is a sensible, responsible, professional course of action, likely to produce desirable outcomes.
Scathing article in the Boston Globe about Meyer (possibly paywalled).
Some choice quotes:
Meyer’s brief tenure in the NFL exposed him. He’s not the strong leader and championship-caliber program builder he made himself out to be. He’s actually a walking disaster, leaving a wake of controversy, shame, and self-inflicted wounds at every turn.
But Meyer’s 11-month tenure was a fiasco from the moment he was hired. Meyer made a number of gaffes that make you slap your forehead and wonder what he could have been thinking.
Meyer isn’t a leader. He’s a bully and a con man.
He could get away with it in college when he was coaching 20-year-olds who needed him to make it to the NFL. When recruiting the best players was more important than X’s and O’s and tactics. When he had total control over the university, the town, the boosters, and the media to control his image and narratives.
But leaving the college bubble for the NFL revealed Meyer’s true character. And as the Jaguars quickly learned, Meyer was too immature, too undisciplined, and too insincere to succeed on his own merits.
This was a terrible hire from the beginning and I think everyone in the world except Shad Khan knew it.
I wonder if Urban Meyer is now seen as more trouble than he’s worth, even for a mid-tier college program or ESPN.
If complete toolboxes like Bobby Petrino and Lane Kiffin can keep getting jobs, there’s hope for Urban.
I think plenty of mid-tier programs would take a chance, but I can’t see Meyer thinking it’d be worth anything less than a premier program.
But the problem is he couldn’t use the same tactics anymore.
College players can now potentially be paid millions while still in college in licensing. And they no longer have to waste a season if they transfer.
Players put up with his BS before because that was their best shot at reaching the NFL. Now? If he pulls the same sort of abusive crap, they’re on with their agents and entering the transfer portal the same day. And the higher value recruits will have advertising revenue of their own. That was a major problem in the NFL for him. He never understood that the players aren’t relying on him to get them into the draft and he can’t sink their chances with another team - they already got past that point.
In the NFL? He can’t sit on the number #3 recruiting class and beat up on Southnorth Regional State University every season. All the teams have players of roughly the same average quality (more or less).
What happens when even one 5-star college recruit leaves his program and heads to a rival university? How fast before he gets fired? He was always good about getting out of Dodge before the heat got too intense and giving some kind of excuse for it (health seems to be a favorite of his), but nowadays that may happen before the first game of the season.
I sure hope you Meyer-haters are chastened now that his daughter Gigi has stepped up to defend him on social media.
“The spirit of the enemy is in full force battle mode in this world & in people,” she posted. “This is war. But like I said… We all know who wins in the end.” She added prayer and cross emojis.”
“The enemy (aka the world) REALLY doesn’t wanna see good people win. & you can argue whether my dad is a ‘good person‘ or not based on what you see in the media (a super reliable source of info as we know. Anyone who truly knows us knows how incredible he is as a person. & the world hates any platform we have, so he’s going to create chaos to destroy it. Little does he know he’s making it stronger it’s not over. Keep watching.”
Gigi says that the assault on her dad has awakened “the kraken in me.”
Nooooo…not the kraken!!!
Sure makes you think twice when it comes from such a neutral, unbiased source. 
What’s a kraken?
I’ve seen Gigi. She’s got some serious muscle (she’s a fitness guru). Maybe she could play professional hockey.
Recently, a spurious lawsuit.
I think she meant crackhead.
Technically, a mythological, giant squid. The term, “release the kraken” is from the remake of the film Clash of the Titans.
More recently, “release the Kraken” has been used by supporters of Trump, to refer to some secret, massively impactful evidence which, when finally revealed, will confirm their belief that Trump actually won the election.
Yeah, that would be the Jacksonville fans in this case.
It has to do with Republican politics.
The Jags are saying that they fired Meyer “for cause” and do not intend to pay out the rest of his contract.
Seems an obvious move, but I’m sure it’s just the start of negotiations.