urban meyer is a lying liarpants who tells lies

Image clipped from video published by USA Today Sports

Things discussed:

  • Urban kept Zach Smith on staff for a decade after he learned Smith is a spousal abuser.
  • Urban lied about meeting with Courtney in 2009.
  • Urban lied about his knowledge of the 2015 warrant and continues to lie.
  • Urban’s first action when the media finally caught up to his secret was to delete evidence.
  • Gene Smith is happy to lie to protect Urban Meyer.
  • A three-game suspension is total window dressing. It’s not even really 3 games, it’s just he can’t be on the sidelines for two of them, so he can do all the coaching but doesn’t get to do the things the public sees.
  • The report outlined a clear and inarguable case for a guy to get fired, and the 12-hour session with the BoT and Meyer was all about how to staple a John Englerian reason to keep Meyer on to the back of it.
  • Urban Meyer wouldn’t even apologize to Courtney Smith, though he apologized three times to “Buckeye Nation” and said he’s sorry they’re all going through this, because he believes he’s the only victim here.
  • If you support Urban Meyer after this, send your kid to play for Urban Meyer after this, or make excuses for Urban Meyer after this, you lack integrity and that makes you a bad person.
  • Ohio State, like Michigan State, has no shame, and it’s a shame.
  • Ohio State University’s hard fought for academic reputation is now ruined.
  • Hope Urban was worth it.

You can catch the entire episode on Michigan Insider's podcast stream on Podbean.

Segment two is here. Segment three is here.

THE USUAL LINKS

[Eric Upchurch]

So I guess we should talk about this now:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Text messages I have obtained, an exclusive interview with the victim and other information I have learned shows Ohio State coach Urban Meyer knew in 2015 of domestic abuse allegations against a member of his coaching staff.

Courtney Smith, ex-wife of fired Ohio State assistant coach Zach Smith, provided text messages between her and the wives of Ohio State coaches – including Urban Meyer’s wife, Shelley – showing Meyer’s knowledge of the situation.

Meyer said last week during Big Ten Media Days that he had no knowledge of two alleged domestic violence incidents in 2015 with former assistant wide receivers coach Zach Smith that were investigated by the Powell (Ohio) Police Department.

Meyer said had he known, he would have fired Smith in 2015 – three years before he did last week after I reported the alleged domestic violence.

If you haven't been following this story, it goes like this:

  • Earle Bruce has a child, who has a son in turn. This person gets named "Zach Smith."
  • Smith listens to "Bawitdaba" nonstop for 28 years.
  • Smith gets hired at Ohio State because nepotism and proceeds to go on a series of childish rants on twitter. His coaching acumen appears to consist of yelling "hashtag zone six!" at his charges, who respond by dropping balls so emphatically their hands also fall off.
  • Smith has a series of domestic violence charges during this period starting in 2009, when he threw his pregnant wife into a wall, with additional police involvement in 2015 and this year.
  • Reporter Brett McMurphy exposes Smith shortly before Big Ten Media days, prompting a series of questions from reporters to Meyer; according to Courtney Smith, Zach's ex-wife, Meyer lied about his knowledge of the situation.
  • Smith gets fired.

The above article is damning and should be read in its entirety. Smith's abuse was scary and persistent; a text exchange between Courtney Smith and Shelley Meyer asks whether Smith has a restraining order—which is read as obviously necessary—and says "he scares me."

Unless Urban Meyer can make the case that his wife decided not to tell him about the years of abuse Courtney Smith was enduring—and that every OSU coach's wife made the same decision—this is a case of an institution knowingly employing a serial abuser. This isn't against the law. It's not against NCAA rules. It should be unacceptable in the court of public opinion, and you'd hope that would be enough to drum other folks out of their jobs up to and including Meyer.

I'm skeptical this will happen. OSU was readying a full-throated defense of Jim Tressel ("I just hope he doesn't fire me") when it became clear that directly lying to the NCAA four times would inevitably result in a show-cause that would terminate Tressel whether OSU wanted to or not. Without a similar sword hanging over OSU's neck*, their choice is to either disrupt their football golden era or follow the example that Meyer provided—downplay, hide, dismiss, survive. I got a dollar on the second playbook.

*[McMurphy thinks there might be Title IX issues. As we've seen at MSU—why are our rivals all so awful—those take years and rarely touch the levers of power.]

REPAIR NOTICE: I originally posted this article earlier this morning but accidentally had some bad data from a dreaded bad sort on Excel. Things should be better now, and the conclusions were affected less than I thought they would be. Biggest change is Ohio State was credited with a few that belonged to Oregon State (an avoidable vlookup error), and the old home-road stats were all screwed up. They are fixed below.

michigan-football-wallpaper-2012-michigan-state-thumb1

Monumental

I've been slowly building and picking through an all-plays database built from NCAA.org's play-by-play data. The easiest thing to pull out so far has been penalties, so let's play with those.

The benefit of the all-plays is you can tell the difference between penalties, since a personal foul says a different thing about a team and does a different thing to them than, say, a delay of game to set up a punt. I broke the various penalties up into "Violent" and "Non-Violent" behaviors.

  • Acts of violence: Clipping, crackbacks, facemasks, illegal blocks, illegal use of hands, kick catch interference, pass interference (?), roughing the kicker (15), roughing the passer, tripping, and unnecessary roughness.
  • Non-violent behaviors: Delay of game, encroachment, false starts, holding, ineligible receiver downfield, intentional grounding, kickoff out of bounds, offsides, running into the kicker (5), sideline interference, substitution infraction, too many men, unsportsmanlike conduct, and illegal fair catch, formation, forward pass, motion, participation, shifting, and touching.
    Michigan last year was remarkably good at avoiding the latter type (in yellow in the chart below), leading the study at 2.3 non-violent infractions per game:

violent-nonviolent

lol…osu?

That's the Big Ten and the other 2013 opponents. I don't know if I want to count PI since its application can get downright chintzy, so that's broken out. Either way Ohio State managed to lead the conference in infractions per game, and was second in the study only to Terry Bowden's one-win (Morgan State) first season at Akron. Reason why this is? Online poll says:

sportsnationque

Fact: 4.5% of people who take any online fan poll are Buckeyes

Yea, and Urban did steal "60 minutes of unnecessary roughness," previously committed to MSU. I was surprised that Michigan State appeared to have their pugilistic streak in relative check, i.e. they were only among the leaders, not far ahead as I supposed from watching them. It takes a while to gather all the data but minus the regular season Wisconsin game (data wasn't available) their 2011 penalty numbers were high but their personal foul quotient wasn't: 31 violent (11 of those pass interference) to 60 non-violent. Wanna guess where a disproportionate of those came from? Offsides. #JerelWorthyJumpsEarly.

Michigan vs. Average

We're dealing with smallish sample sizes so conclusions are shaky. That said there are things to see when you look at which penalties Michigan was getting called against them versus a typical team on their schedule.

Non-violent things per season:

Penalty Avg Tm* Mich OSU ND MSU'12 MSU'11
False Start 16.5 7 20 21 14 20
Holding 14.4 13 12 11 15 12
Offsides/Encroachment 7.3 6 4 4 8 20
Illegal Offensive Stuff 6.0 - 4 5 5  
Delay of Game 4.3 - 2 3 1 4
Coach Derps 2.7 3 3 2 2 2
Intentional grounding 0.8 - 1 - 1 -
Unsportsmanlike Conduct 0.8 1 3 - 1 1
Special Teams Derps 0.5 - 2 1 - -
TOTAL 53.3 30 51 47 47 59

* over13 games

Michigan's veteran offensive line was good for something last year: remarkably few false starts and none of those illegal formation/procedure things that plagued us in various offensive transitions. That's a feather in Al Borges's cap: the offense had their fundamentals down about as well as you can ask. Pre-snap penalty-avoidance may be correlated with offensive line experience, though I haven't proven this. Further study: is it experienced OL or just experienced tackles? Inquiring 2013 offensive lines want to know.

Violent crimes per season:

Penalty Avg Tm* Mich OSU ND MSU MSU'11
Personal Foul 15.0 11 22 9 21 16
Pass Interference 9.2 9 8 6 8 11
Various Illegal Blocks 5.8 8 7 4 6 -
Facemask 1.8 2 4 3 1 1
Roughing the Passer 1.3 3 2 1 - 3
Kick Catching Interference 0.6 2 - 1 2 -
Roughing the Kicker 0.3 - - - 2 -
Unnecessary Roughness 0.0 - - 1 - -
TOTAL 33.8 35 43 25 40 31

* over13 games

Michigan's ability to avoid the peaceful infractions meant the Wolverines were the most pugilistic in the study by percentage of penalties that were violent. Cue the Urban Meyer chart:

meyerchart

Forgot to add the 15 yards for logo infraction

Really the Wolverines were average, the only thing standing out being chopblocks. There were a few of these called against Michigan last year that I thought were horsecrap (Mealer's v. UMass and Gallon's vs. Minnesota), and here's one that was legit (on Gordon):

If you don't spot it in 10 watches, watch it 10 more times.

I'm declaring Michigan a very average team at this.

Home Field Advantage?

There was one for Michigan, not the other guys. Michigan was relatively clean at home and in limited samples got kinda duked in the neutral games (Brian gave the refs a composite –5 for the Alabama game alone, which is about the difference between a typical day of Obi Ezeh as a senior versus Kenny Demens as a senior). Overall I noticed very little difference in any type of penalty with regards to how it was assessed against home versus road teams. False starts are a little more common for road teams (like one every 10 games) but that's about it. Things broke out a bit more among the small samples of a single team's season:

PENALTIES PER GAME

Team Pen/G Home Away Neutral Home Field Adv.
Akron 8.2 6.7 9.7 - -45%
Ohio State 7.8 8.6 6.3 - +28%
Nebraska 7.1 6.7 7.8 7.0 -16%
Purdue 6.8 5.4 8.2 9.0 -51%
Michigan State 6.7 6.3 7.0 8.0 -11%
Minnesota 6.6 7.0 5.8 8.0 +17%
Illinois 6.2 5.9 6.6 - -13%
Indiana 6.0 6.7 5.3 - +20%
Northwestern 5.8 5.4 7.0 2.0 -29%
Notre Dame 5.5 6.4 6.0 1.5   +7%
Connecticut 5.4 5.0 5.8 - -17%
Penn State 5.3 5.0 5.6 - -12%
Michigan 5.0 4.3 5.2 6.5 -20%
Iowa 5.0 4.9 5.5 4.0 -13%
Wisconsin 4.6 4.4 5.2 4.0 -17%
Central Michigan 4.6 4.3 4.8 6.0 -12%
Other 6.6 7.2 6.2 6.8 +13%
AVERAGE 6.2 6.1 6.3 6.2   -3%
 
Undebated: the paucity of calls per game that went against the Wolverines in the Big House. Debatable: whether that's because Hoke's crew are well-behaved gentlemen who happen to get screwed when they go on the road, or because even referees' psyches don't' do well against 111,000 critics. Interesting that being on the road actually helped some teams , particularly Ohio State. When I broke it down with the violent/non-violent stuff Michigan held steady as the best team in the study at avoiding the little things (they were slightly better on the road than at home) but a fairly dramatic difference in how the big things were assessed.

Non-violent6570876

Team Pen/G Home Away Neutral HFA
Ohio State 4.3 4.6 3.5 - +24%
Michigan State 3.6 3.1 4.4 3.0 -40%
Michigan 2.3 2.5 2.2 2.0 +12%
Avg Team 3.8 3.7 4.0 3.2   -7%

Violent:

Team Pen/G Home Away Neutral HFA
Ohio State 3.6 4.0 2.8 - 31%
Michigan State 3.1 3.1 2.6 5.0 17%
Michigan 2.7 1.8 3.0 4.5 -64%
Avg Team 2.4 2.4 2.3 3.0 3%

Either they let the Wolverines get away with murder at home, we turn into Michigan State on the road, or those calls just went against us more often than they should have.