Urban had "memory issues" and deleted text messages...

https://www.al.com/sports/inde...ings_urban_meye.html

Not long after it was announced Ohio State suspended Urban Meyer for three games on Wednesday night, a 23-page report was released with findings from the investigation.

Among the highlights:

"We also learned during the investigation that Coach Meyer has sometimes had significant memory issues in other situations where he had prior extensive knowledge of events. He has also periodically taken medicine that can negatively impair his memory, concentration, and focus."

The investigators said they believe that Meyer and his wife, Shelley Meyer, communicated in some way about concerns that Courtney Smith, the ex-wife of Zach Smith, raised to Shelley Meyer in text messages in 2015. Urban Meyer told reporters Wednesday night that he had no knowledge of those messages.

Urban Meyer and a football staffer discussed how to adjust the settings on Urban Meyer's phone so that text messages more than a year old would be deleted. Investigators didn't find any message more than a year old. However, according to the findings, investigators said they were unable to tell when Urban Meyer adjusted the settings on his phone.

Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith "explicitly" told Urban Meyer to acknowledge what he knew about the 2015 incident in a text message before Urban Meyer spoke to reporters.

After hours of deliberation Wednesday, Ohio State announced the Ohio State coach had been suspended for three games.

In addition, Gene Smith has also been suspended without pay.

"I am fully aware of the situation that has harmed the university as a whole," Meyer said Wednesday night during a press conference. "I followed by heart, not my head. I gave Zach Smith the benefit of the doubt. I didn't know everything about what Zach Smith was doing. I should have recognized the red flags.

I’m not buying the “memory issues”

This is from the same individual who left the University of Florida for “health reasons” and “heart issues” (I.e. Nick Saban showed up)... then magically reappeared in a weaker conference where one of the three primary teams (PSU) was under a massive scandal, and the other (UM) was bouncing between coaches.

Sorry. Fool me once...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: reloader-1,

Memory issues. More like MORAL issues. Or perhaps SELECTIVE memory. OK lets appoint someone to handle his financial affairs. See how he likes that. This is the tip of the iceberg with this guy and a lot of the other coaches.

quote:

He has also periodically taken medicine that can negatively impair his memory, concentration, and focus."

Like what?? If that is true the offenders are Benzos, opiates, and some drugs like Topomax. If this guy is serious lets see a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation.

quote:

Originally posted by ruger357:
He's always been dirty. He will fall at some point.

Examples?

First most of you automatically assume that there were beatings that took place.

You already have Zach Smith convicted just because a woman said so.

The Chief of the Powell Police Dept. said that his dept. had so many calls from Mrs. Smith and sped out only to find that there was NEVER any evidence that anything ever happened.

He said it got to the point that none of the officers wanted to waste their time going..but they did continue to waste their time.

He also said that several times they arrived and she was drunk and gave the police a hard time that they almost arrested her.

The article that started all this was by a writer named McMurtry or McMurphy, and he claimed that Smith had be arrested on Felony abuse or some shit like that.

It was mostly a lie and he redacted his story 5 times and never posted any indication on the editing that was done.
That story is what Meyer was saying he had no knowledge of...not the supposed abuse.

So, should he have fired Smith just because the wife claims he is abusing her???
If there was abuse, why did she stay with him?

Is she a child??

So, now we know that Meyer did report it to his boss.

We now know that his boss did not report it to the compliancy officer.

So, the OSU AD gets suspended without pay for 2 weeks.

Why does Meyer get suspended for 3 weeks and 3 games, not counting the 3 week suspension to date?

Oh, yeah, he claimed he knew nothing about Zach Smiths arrest for felony abuse. Nobody does cause it never happened.

But OSU is making him a scape goat to show they are on top of it and not whitewashing this.

So, Meyer gets a "slap on the wrist"...to the tune of about $500,000 because of WHAT AGAIN?

Of course OSU is dastardly because they did not mention Mrs. Smith...why? Because they could find no evidence, other than some pics she sent which, could have been faked.

If she had that evidence at that point, she should have gone to the police.

My ex was telling people for years...unbeknownst to me that I was beating her. She was trying to get attention and sympathy for something that never happened.
After our divorce, she was then telling people(mostly men who wanted to kick my butt), that I had beaten her up and broken her jaw.
I had to get a court order to get that stopped.

So, I do not just buy every woman crying abuse.
It is unfortunate that we now do not know who to believe or not.
But to most here, Zach is guilty as hell and so is Meyer.

That kind of thinking or lack there of is about football, not anything else, I believe.

Find some facts, not just a rope.

^^^^^^^^^

Many have said, including me that the coach is an ass but this incident in Ohio is not his fault and the charges are bullshit. Most of the complaints about him revolve around his tenure at Florida. His teams were damn-near criminal organizations. He recruited one thug after another. But WTF. He’s a great coach.

quote:

Originally posted by Aquabird:
The Chief of the Powell Police Dept. said that his dept. had so many calls from Mrs. Smith and sped out only to find that there was NEVER any evidence that anything ever happened.

He said it got to the point that none of the officers wanted to waste their time going..but they did continue to waste their time.

He also said that several times they arrived and she was drunk and gave the police a hard time that they almost arrested her.

I was surprised (shocked would be a better word) that a police chief would make public statements like these you have outlined.

I did a search and couldn’t find anything like what you’re describing. Would you furnish a link please?

I’ll just repeat what I said, Aqua.

You are in Ohio, you probably admire Mr. Meyer for his athletic accomplishments.

I don’t have a dog in this fight. Not an SEC or Big 10 fan/alumnus, just familiar with the chap from his tenure at UF. He has “moral issues” to go along with his “memory issues”.

I'm from Ohio too. I am probably repeating myself but when I saw Mrs. Smith say in a televised interview that she told both her parents and her husband's parents about the physical abuse and they all urged her not to leave him. That's either bullshit or a screwed up family. Either way I have trouble seeing how this is Meyer's responsibility.

Future cgd sign: "Manafort found guilty because all the good lawyers were in Columbus"
ht my brother.

Real question, how long does OSU put up with Meyer now if he doesn't win? Considering that OSU canned Tressel for (and I quote)"...failed to comport himself ... (with) honesty and integrity"?

University presidents: Don't follow Ohio State's lead, or else

http://www.espn.com/college-fo...-avoid-buckeyes-sham

If you listen closely enough, you can hear college administrators across America flipping through this new Ohio State playbook that just arrived in the mail:

Place highly successful but besieged football coach on paid leave.

Hire important-sounding people with supposedly unimpeachable integrity to investigate him.

Call their probe independent every day and twice on Sunday.

And then wait for said probe to run a dizzying series of end arounds on the truth to save poor Supercoach's job.

Only here's a message for those administrators who think Ohio State just set a wonderful precedent for the next Touchdown Tech forced by public disclosures to put its most visible representative on trial: Don't do it. Don't sell your university's soul for the sake of a few extra glorious Saturdays in the fall. Don't reduce your fine institution to a practical joke by taking a futile stab at crisis management, and by keeping the coach who protected his staff and program at a significant human cost.

The nation isn't laughing with Buckeye Nation, but at Buckeye Nation. Or at least at the university officials who decided that Meyer deserved a mere three-game suspension for allowing wide receivers coach Zach Smith, an alleged repeat domestic abuser and confirmed serial screw-up, to remain on his staff for as long as he did.

Remember, it didn't take long for Meyer to show his employers that they had settled on a pathetically inadequate penalty. In the immediate wake of the announcement, Meyer read his initial statement of regret with all the emotion of someone reading a grocery list. He was asked in a news conference if he had a message for Courtney Smith, the woman who first accused her then-husband, Zach, of abuse while she was pregnant and Zach was an assistant under Meyer at Florida in 2009. The Ohio State coach didn't even have the decency to speak her name while spreading his message "to everyone involved" that he is "sorry that we're in this situation."

Rarely does a public figure so clearly declare exactly who he is and what he stands for, or doesn't stand for.

Deep down, Meyer had to know he deserved to be fired. He had to know that a mediocre coach with a mediocre record wouldn't have lasted long enough for Oho State to run an independent investigation that could never truly be independent, and could never truly return a recommendation and/or verdict independent of Meyer's 6-0 record against Michigan.

He escaped for the obvious reasons. Before the Big Ten season got underway, THE Ohio State University diagrammed THE most predictable play call of the year by sparing Meyer's job and enabling him as much as he had enabled his wide receivers coach, whose workplace conduct would've gotten him kicked out of most frat houses around the country, never mind the offices of a state institution. So Meyer exercised his restored clout at his presser when pressed about Courtney Smith, and apologized to his face-painted base about a "situation" that distracted "everyone involved" from the central mission of winning football games.

The major college sports machine churns on, stopping for nothing and nobody in its path. Just another sad and disturbing development at another big-time school with a moral compass gone awry in pursuit of victory and the desired revenue streams attached. You need a scorecard to keep track of this scandal and that one. If it isn't federal agents chasing the money men buying talent in college basketball, it's a Maryland administration trying to explain how an overheated football player could die on the watch of the alleged educators hired to coach him.

Once upon a time, Urban Meyer ran a football program at Florida defined by dominance on the field and so much noise away from it. The New York Times reported that Meyer's players were arrested at least 31 times between 2005 and 2010. Aaron Hernandez had caused Meyer so much trouble in Gainesville that the coach told one NFL team that it would be unwise to draft him. "Don't f---ing touch that guy," was the way the Florida coach put it. Meyer told the NFL team Hernandez was too big of a character risk to employ despite the fact that Meyer himself had benched the tight end for a grand total of one game out of 40 at Florida.

While working for ESPN in between coaching jobs, Meyer told one former NFL executive and media analyst that he was "tired of dealing with the police all the time" and that he yearned to "coach good kids." But in Meyer's world, the kids weren't a bigger problem than the man recruiting them.

Ohio State's elders knew what they were getting when they hired Meyer in 2011 -- a national championship coach, one of the best of his generation at identifying and developing talent. But they also knew they were getting a head coach who ran a reckless program, and who didn't live by the codes of honor he talked about, wrote about and posted in capital letters on team facility walls. This was a man, after all, who needed to sign a contract with his wife and children, promising that he wouldn't again get swallowed whole by the monster that is elite D-I sports.

So in keeping Meyer, Ohio State covered for Ohio State and tried and failed to wish away the work done by an enterprising journalist, Brett McMurphy, who published damning texts and photos. In fact, to read the university's own 23-page summary of its findings is to read a clear-cut case for the coach's termination.

Investigators did not believe Urban Meyer's claim that Courtney Smith met with him (along with her husband) in 2009, and did not believe Meyer's claim that Smith recanted her allegation at the time. Investigators also did not believe Meyer's claim that he had no communication with his wife, Shelley, about the 2015 texts and photos Courtney shared with Shelley in discussing another alleged assault by the assistant coach.

Investigators also determined that Meyer had discussed with a staffer adjusting the settings on his phone to delete texts that were more than a year old (his examined phone turned up no messages older than a year), a reaction they concluded often indicates "consciousness of guilt." Investigators said they were concerned and troubled by many of Meyer's actions, or inactions, in this case, and their summary makes it clear to a right-minded reader that Meyer violated contract language calling for termination for bringing the university "into public disrepute, embarrassment, contempt, scandal or ridicule or failure by Coach to conform Coach's personal conduct to conventional and contemporary standards of good citizenship ..."

But as the investigation closed, the home team's assigned judge and jury excused and rationalized Meyer's behavior at every turn, even suggesting that the blatant lies he told during July's Big Ten Media Days were unintentional and the possible result of medication that might've affected his memory. This conclusion was almost as shameful as the report's list of Zach Smith's misdeeds while working for Meyer, including "promiscuous and embarrassing sexual behavior, drug abuse, truancy, dishonesty, financial irresponsibility, a possible NCAA violation, and a lengthy police investigation into allegations of criminal domestic violence and cybercrimes."

How does Meyer not get fired for that list alone?

How? By understanding that winning conference and national championships is more important in his business than anything else, that's how. In a telling message cited in Ohio State's summary, Meyer reminded his staff after Smith's firing that the team and the players must come first: "Zero conversation about Zach's past issues. We need to help him as he moves frwd. Team and players!!"

We need to help him, not her. Team and players first. Buckeye Nation above all.

This is the reality of major college football, and of major college sports, where unworthy athletic cultures are preserved at all costs. It's going to be tempting for future administrations dealing with future scandals on other campuses to follow the Ohio State script, cook up a ridiculous investigation and reach for a reason, any reason, to hang on to a winning coach.

But university presidents from coast to coast should understand that Ohio State has been severely diminished here, along with Meyer, who can never again be taken seriously on anything. The school's overriding message to its world-famous football coach was pretty simple: Just keep beating Michigan. And right-minded observers everywhere scoffed at the absurdity of it all.

In the end, the people running Ohio State just made fools of themselves. Was the pain really worth the gain?

Zach Smith takes aim at Brett McMurphy in Twitter rant

I'm not sure this is going to work out how he wants it to..... unless he wants to be even more untouchable.