If You Had to Guess Right Now, Does Meyer Stay, Suspend, or Terminate?
Mates,
Despite some severely limited information (OSU is turtleing, for obvious reasons), we've had some great posts today about background information, FOIA denials, AD reactions and some fairly erudite comments about the issue. Simple Question, with a follow up:
Does Meyer stay at ohio, stay and get suspended, or get let go? And no matter your answer, why?
XM
Spot on! Please let Karma be validated!
Aside, Schiano is now batting 1.000 in not reporting abuse...
How happy must Schiano be that he started there in 2016?
Prediction: Urban pushes the AD on the grenade. AD gets fired. Shelly "resigns" from her employment with the school. The all Ohio investigative team will state Urban followed protocol but the protocol needs to be improved. Urban accepts 3 game suspension for lying to media but mostly agrees to save some face for their piece of shit university.
This is also the scenario I see unfolding. Meyer stays but Smith takes the bullet and is terminated.
One of them HAS to go and only one of them matters to the fan base.
Fired.
Any program that could fire Woody and still prosper, fire Tressel and still prosper, can do the same while firing Urban.
I suspect he’ll be back, maybe with a four game suspension (the non-conference schedule lines up perfectly for one). I have zero faith that the university will pay anything but lip service to what is a very serious allegation (with a mountain of condemning evidence). Talk is so cheap in sports when it comes to domestic violence and I can’t fathom OSU being the place where a stand is taken. The fact that their “independent” panel includes three university trustees should tell you all you need to know. I really hope I’m wrong, for reasons having nothing to do with football.
For those who argue Meyer will be suspended, what are you claiming he will be suspended for?
1. OSU can't suspend him for "lying to the media," because that sets up the expectation that he will be suspended for any future lies to the media. Every coach lies to the media to some extent for one reason or another, and this would invite a shitstorm over suspension every time Meyer or any other OSU coach gets caught doing it. The school isn't going to put themselves in that position.
2. OSU cannot suspend him for keeping Smith on the OSU payroll, because if Meyer did, indeed, report Smith to the OSU Title IX coordinator, it was the Title IX office that decided, based on a preponderance of evidence, that Smith didn't engage in domestic violence (or, if they had decided that he did, they would have gone to the administration with that finding and Smith would have been gone no matter what Urban wanted).
3. OSU cannot suspend him for a gross violation of Title IX by NOT reporting Smith to the Title IX office, because that would jeopardize all of OSU's federal funding. No school in the country rolls those dice. They have to fire him for that.
4. ???? Is there some fourth possible offense that he could be suspended for? I don't think so.
So it's fire/"allow to resign" or retain, as far as I can tell, and that all depends on whether there was a Title IX report filed by Meyer with OSU's Title IX office. He's a mandatory reporter, and he just can't report it to Gene Smith.
I don't think there's much chance he stays, but I dispute your basic premise. Termination is not the only possible penalty for violating a clause in your employment contract, including the reporting requirements. I'd expect it to only be applied to repeat offenders or particularly egregious cases.
Meyer's repeated bad judgement has helped turn this into a particularly egregious case.
So you think that the school will allow Meyer to get away with a Title IX violation with just a suspension? Man, I hope so! That would be the absolute worst case for both Meyer and the school. Maybe with DeVoss as SecEd OSU would get away with it and keep their federal funding, but there'd be questions in Congress, the press, and the public about why OSU was so feeble on Title IX. Meyer would then spend years just a step away from being fired.
But thanks for answering with your reasoning. We obviously disagree, but we each have our reasons for believing what we do.
A Title IX violation? Absolutely. This Title IX violation? Absolutely not.
Couldn't he take a "voluntary suspension" of 2-3 games, donating the equivalent in salary to domestic violence victims and issues, saying, "We all should do more to address this problem"?
OSU will can Gene Smith, and try to get out front of this issue; Oh, and Urban F Meyer will be even more guarded/cagey in any interaction with the press in the future.
August 5th, 2018 at 10:07 PM ^
Frankly, I think that would have been the most likely outcome if the circumstances were a little different. Like under the Gordon Gee administration. Maybe Gene Smith keeps his job too.
I just don't see how it can happen now, after he's already been put on leave and OSU formed a high level committee to investigate. It's out of the hands of their AD and all Meyer can do until the investigation is complete is offer to resign.
It depends on what he reported, and what procedure he followed when he reported it.
If he did indeed report it in a thorough and materially proper way to the OSU Titile IX staff, then OSU can't fire him.
Meyer has a mandatory duty to report. He does not have a mandatory duty to adjudicate.
If he reported it properly and the OSU Titile IX staff (and the police) with all of their lawyers and counselors and psychologists decided that there was nothing actionable, then they can't say later "Well, Meyer should have ignored all of that and fired him anyway." He would have had no expertise to justify that, and OSU would find itself in a lawsuit from the other direction.
My guess is that he vaguely reported something to some AD person, but he did not actually formally report it to the OSU Titile IX staff. If he would have, there would have been an investigation and a documented decision. They would not have had to put him on administrative leave to figure that out, they could have looked that up in minutes.
However, they may still have somebody fall on their sword to cover up for him and make his vague reporting come off as "just good enough" to place the blame elsewhere. TDB.
August 6th, 2018 at 12:50 PM ^
My how the times have changed. In 78, Woody Hayes punched a player and was fired. In today's world urb allows a coach to abuse his wife and all he'll probably get is suspended.
What really saddens me is the victim(s) Courtney & children in all this.
Last week I would have bet they would fire urb but today I'm not so sure. I'm now leaning they're going to keep him.
Stay. Much like Sparty, their cult is football over all else, and the school will do everything possible to protect their golden goose. Short of irrefutable proof that Meyer not only knew of the assaults, but physically helped Zach Smith abuse his wife/ex wife (which I think is pretty reasonable to assume didn't happen), he's not going anywhere, the NCAA and Big 10 will continue to not do a goddamn thing about it, and by the time the season kicks off, everyone will have forgotten about this whole thing because there's some new story, or even just day to day football goings on, to cover.