After perhaps the most tumultuous years of his highly successful college football coaching career, Urban Meyer will announce Tuesday afternoon that he is stepping down as head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes after the Rose Bowl. His successor will be the current Ohio State offensive coordinator Ryan Day.
While university officials haven’t specified the reason for Meyer’s decision, they have indicated that he is retiring from coaching altogether. The decision comes after a season in which the university suspended him for three games and he revealed that he was suffering from a cyst in his brain.
Meyer, among the elite coaches in college football and one of its highest paid, has coached at Ohio State for seven seasons. During that time he led the team to at least 11 wins every season, won four Big Ten championships and one National championship. His 2014 season, in which he won it all, was the most successful. His last was by far his most controversy-filled.
Meyer, who has generally received positive press, particularly from ESPN, for whom he worked for a year as an analyst, found himself the subject of a series of ugly headlines earlier this season over his handling of assistant coach Zach Smith, the grandson of Earle Bruce, a former Ohio State coach and a mentor of Meyer.
Smith was fired this year after being accused by his ex-wife of domestic abuse. Though Meyer had known about accusations against Smith, which dated back years, he kept him on the staff and at one point told the press that he didn’t know as much about the situation as was later revealed.
“A detailed report issued by an investigative committee left a lasting stain, detailing behavior by Meyer that could easily have taken down a coach of lesser stature,” AP reports. “The investigation showed that he tolerated bad behavior for years from Smith, including domestic-violence accusations, drug addiction, lies and other acts that directly clash with the values Meyer touts publicly.”
For his mishandling of Smith, Meyer was suspended by the university for three games this season, a decision he made clear that he believed was unfair.
Along with the controversy and tension over the Smith case, Meyer showed signs of physical distress this season, at one point even falling to a knee during a game due to what he said was a severe headache caused by an arachnoid cyst.
Meyer’s contract is one of the best in college football. In April, the university extended it to 2022, upped his salary to $7.6 million with a built-in annual raise of 6%, AP notes. He will be walking away with $38 million left on his contract.