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A healthy Urban Meyer returns to coaching

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Urban Meyer listens as Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith introduces him as the university's new football coach, during a news conference Monday, Nov. 28, 2011, in Columbus.

AP Photo/Terry Gilliam Urban Meyer listens as Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith introduces him as the university's new football coach, during a news conference Monday, Nov. 28, 2011, in Columbus.

By Tom Archdeacon Updated 12:06 PM Tuesday, November 29, 2011

COLUMBUS — Gene Smith was explaining why Urban Meyer was the search committee’s first choice, its only choice, its perfect choice to become Ohio State’s new football coach.

“He gets it,” the OSU athletics director said on two different occasions at a Monday evening news conference to announce the big-splash hire. “We’re fortunate to have a man who gets it.”

Whether Meyer truly does, that is the big question.

Sure he’s a born and bred Buckeye — he grew up in Ashtabula infatuated by the Ohio State Buckeyes, the Big Red Machine and the Cincinnati Bengals.

And, yes, he understands what it takes to run a big-time college football program and win a national championship. In six seasons, he took the Florida Gators to two national crowns.

But the real test for him will come with the contract he just signed.

Not the one he supposedly inked earlier Monday. That one is for six years and is thought to pay him at least $4 million a year to lift the scandal-nicked Buckeye program back to national prominence.

To hear him, that’s an easy task compared to the other pact he signed.

When he took his turn at the microphone, Meyer reached into a pocket of his dark suit coat, pulled out a folded-up pink piece of paper and held it up so the media crowd that jammed the Fawcett Center could see.

“This is the contract my kids made me sign before I was allowed to sign a real contract. And it’s tougher than any other contract I’ve signed in my life,” he said in reference to his three children — two daughters who are playing college volleyball and 13-year-old son Nate who sat next to his mom, aunt and uncle at the gathering and was nodding vigorously as his dad explained.

Although Meyer never revealed the provisos he had agreed to, his family later filled in some of the details.

He had promised to eat three meals a day, work out every other day, take a vacation and attend his daughters’ volleyball games.

To a lot of folks that might not seem that tough — it pretty much sounds like normal life to normal folks — but college football coaches often are a far different breed.

The job is a pressure cooker and when you’re a totally-consumed, control freak like Meyer became as he was winning those crowns after the 2006 and 2008 seasons, you are anything but normal.

You end up lying on the floor in your home clutching your chest which has tightened with pain. You end up coaching other peoples’ kids and not knowing your own. And your wife goes from sweetheart to a sometimes after-thought.

After 25 seasons as a college coach — including two as a grad assistant at Ohio State under Earle Bruce, 13 at various other schools across the nation and then 10 as a head coach at Bowling Green, Utah and Florida — Meyer walked away from coaching after last season. He was just 46.

He had tried to do the same after the 2009 season, but no sooner had he retired than he changed his mind and returned to the Florida helm.

But after last season he felt he was done — forever.

He said he had to focus on his family and his health.

“I had a health scare and I had to learn to take care of myself,” he said. “I had been proud of myself that I had had balance for quite a while, but I lost that near the end. ... I tried to get involved in everything and change everything.”

He said he didn’t like “the state of college football” then and tried to cure “NCAA issues, agent issues, drug issues. ... I fell victim to the pursuit of perfection and I finally realized there is no such thing.”

But a month into his retirement, he said he was taking a walk with his wife, Shelley, when he looked at her and said, “ ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ ... She started to roll her eyes. She’s had to deal with it 22 years — 27 really. ... I realized I wanted to do this again, but I had no idea it would be here.”

As Ohio State was melting down in a memorabilia-for-tattoos-and-cash scandal that ended up costing Jim Tressel his job, pushing quarterback Terrelle Pryor off to the pros and decimating the ranks with player suspensions — not to mention more NCAA sanctions that may come — Meyer was working as an ESPN analyst.

But as he went campus to campus he said he also talked to coaches and found some who were successful and still maintained a balance.

Still he didn’t plan to return to coaching this year until it became obvious that OSU was going to replace interim coach Luke Fickell with a big name.

Although speculation was rampant for months, Meyer and Smith both say contact wasn’t made until Nov. 20 and then they met face to face in Florida three days later.

Meyer admitted he still had “second, third, fourth and fifth thoughts about taking the job. ... I had been to a place I’m not gonna go back to.”

Coming back to Ohio though — and especially Ohio State — was enticing. His Florida office had a framed picture of Bruce in it. He has a portrait of Woody Hayes in his home. His wife — who Meyer told everybody was “the Miss Junior Ross County Fair Queen” — always carried a buckeye in her purse for good luck.

The more he looked at the OSU job the more he liked it. He raved Monday about Braxton Miller, the freshman quarterback from Wayne High, and said he’s been assured by Smith and OSU president Gordon Gee that crippling sanctions aren’t on the horizon.

By the end of the session, he was talking about success coming when you “go very hard” and coaches “coach like their hair is on fire.”

His wife was not smiling, but he didn’t notice.

But a few minutes later he got the message when there was a thud in the back of the room as a woman camera person slumped to the floor.

“We need the EMS in the back,” someone said frantically.

Meyer stopped and watched a bit uncomfortably.

After a few minutes of pause, the woman was sitting upright.

It was thought she simply over-heated, though it may have been a bit of intervention from a higher source.

Just to make sure Urban Meyer really does get it.

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