Editorial: A true football folly

photo by: Journal-World Photo Illustration

Lawrence Journal-World Editorial

Maybe winning football games makes you forgetful.

Fans of the Ohio State University football program should hope that is the case; otherwise they may have to confront the possibility that their beloved football coach — and perhaps their entire university — has priorities deeply out of order.

The allegations against Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer are fairly simple: He improperly handled allegations of domestic abuse involving his former assistant coach Zach Smith. Allegedly, Smith’s wife sent text messages to Meyer’s wife relaying details of domestic abuse, and Meyer took little to no action.

A two-week, $500,000 investigation conducted by Ohio State University found that Meyer didn’t condone or cover up the domestic abuse but that Meyer and Athletic Director Gene Smith “failed to take sufficient management action relating to Zach Smith’s misconduct and retained an assistant coach who was not performing as an appropriate role mode for OSU student athletes.”

Meyer has been suspended for three games without pay, and the athletic director is suspended for about two weeks, according to various media reports. Meyer apologized for following “my heart and not my head.”

Exactly where his head was at is a legitimate question after reading the detailed findings of the Ohio State report. As several media outlets have reported, Meyer and Ohio State have left several important questions unanswered.

Among the troubling details are:

l On July 25, Ohio State had received a public records request from the Ohio State student newspaper seeking texts from 2015 from Meyer’s university cellphone. The newspaper had heard of reports that the assistant coach had been involved in a domestic violence investigation in 2015 that Meyer was aware of. Later that same day an Ohio State attorney directed athletic department employees to collect the relevant text messages from Meyer’s phone so that the records request could be completed, according to a Washington Post article about the details of the investigation’s report. By Aug. 1, no one had yet collected those messages. But the investigation did find that on Aug. 1 an athletic department employee who had knowledge of the records request told Meyer how to change the settings on his cellphone to ensure that text messages older than a year would not be kept. When the university did ultimately get Meyer’s phone, it had been set to only keep text messages less than a year old. The investigation couldn’t determine when that setting had been changed. Meyer’s memory was of no help.

l In 2009, Zach Smith was arrested in Florida for aggravated battery of a pregnant woman while he was an assistant on Meyer’s University of Florida football staff. Meyer was aware of the 2009 arrest. But when allegations of domestic abuse surfaced in 2015 in Ohio, Meyer said nothing to athletic department officials about Smith’s 2009 arrest. Meyer also did not disclose the arrest in 2011, when the athletic department made the decision to hire Smith as an assistant coach, according to the Post.

l The investigation concluded that Meyer’s wife, Shelley, received text messages from Courtney Smith, the wife of the assistant coach Smith, that allegedly show evidence of physical abuse that she had received at the hands of Smith. Meyer told investigators that he didn’t recall his wife ever discussing those text messages with him. Investigators didn’t believe him. “We believe it is likely that Shelley and Urban Meyer had at least some communication about these allegations in late 2015 and were concerned about them,” the Post article reports.

These details and others should be troubling to a university whose mission involves teaching the next generation lessons of ethics and responsibility. With the handling of this matter, it would seem Ohio State is falling short of its ideals.

A dangerous side effect of winning, perhaps.

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