Oregon coach Mark Helfrich will have a chance to steal the show on Monday night in Arlington, Texas, in the first-ever College Football Playoff National Championship Game. However, there is no question that as gameday arrives and the Ducks prepare to face the Buckeyes, the center of attention is Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer.
No single figure on the Bucks or Ducks knits together recent college football history the way Meyer does. No one’s chasing history more than he is. No one can improve an already-spectacular legacy more than the Boss Buckeye. This is the larger-than-life presence fit for an event of such stature.
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There are so many ways to connect Meyer to the larger story of college football in the 21st century, largely because he has left an imprint on so many places. Meyer won’t continue to be a nomadic coach — he’s quite settled and established at Ohio State, probably the school where he’ll stay the rest of his career — but he has wandered across the landscape over the past 12 years, and what he’s done in various situations is precisely what makes his career so special.
Meyer didn’t waste much time building Utah into a national power, winning the 2005 Fiesta Bowl and handing over his program to Kyle Whittingham, who was able to win the 2009 Sugar Bowl over a team and coach Meyer had defeated just a month earlier in the 2008 SEC Championship Game at Florida: Alabama and Nick Saban. Those interconnected facts tell a story in themselves, but they represent only a small part of Urban Meyer’s larger influence on the course of college football over the past dozen years.
Meyer and his 2004 Utah team — under a better and more flexible bowl system — would have been able to play Auburn in the 2005 Sugar Bowl. By being selected to play Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl, Utah and Meyer were deprived of a chance to truly prove themselves on a national stage. The missed connection with Auburn represented just one of many occasions over the years in which a team from the Western United States was not allowed to play an SEC team in a major bowl game.
It was therefore more than a little striking that right after Utah won the 2005 Fiesta Bowl, Meyer entered the world of the SEC, heading to Florida to become the successor to Steve Spurrier’s failed successor, Ron Zook. As “The Guy After The Guy After The Guy,” Meyer was able to double Spurrier’s national championship total in Gainesville in half as many seasons (six, to Spurrier’s 12).
While the 2008 national title — won in close proximity to Meyer’s former school, Utah (Florida finished first in the AP poll, Utah second) — substantially added to Meyer’s greatness, it was that first national championship, in 2006, which acquires more historical resonance as Ohio State prepares to face Oregon on Championship Monday. This is the case for two basic reasons.
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First of all, Meyer’s presence in the 2015 national title game once again puts this superstar coach in the center of a new event. You will recall that in the 2006 season, the Bowl Championship Series moved from a four-bowl setup to a five-bowl arrangement. In previous seasons, the BCS title game was simply the host bowl game where it rotated. The 2002 season — in which Ohio State won the national title — culminated with the 2003 Fiesta Bowl.
After that four-year rotation came and went, however, the BCS moved to the five-game lineup, making its title fight the stand-alone BCS National Championship Game, an entirely new entity which debuted in the 2006 season. The Florida-Ohio State clash in Glendale, Ariz., in January 2007, brought the BCS National Championship Game into existence. Meyer won it, and eight years later, the Urban Legend is once again on hand for an inaugural championship event in collee football. He and Helfrich will coach in the sport’s first playoff title bout, the first championship game in which two teams won their way into the event. Meyer can truly say that he’s been a firsthand witness to college football history.
The second and more powerful reason why Urban Meyer’s 2006 national title looms over Ohio State-Oregon is that the Buckeyes’ coach is trying to simultaneously complete and shatter a circle in JerryWorld. What Meyer established in the 2007 BCS National Championship Game can now be torn down — not partially, but completely — with a victory over Oregon inside AT&T Stadium.
When Meyer’s 2006 Florida team hammered Ohio State, 41-14, on that shocking night in Arizona eight years ago, college football — fresh from the USC-Texas Rose Bowl a year earlier and a period of time in which the SEC had captured only one national title in a seven-season stretch (1999 through 2005) — entered its Pax Dixiana, the reign of the SEC over the sport. Meyer ushered in the SEC’s period of dominance in college football, beginning a string of seven straight seasons in which an SEC team won the BCS title, and eight straight seasons in which an SEC team reached the title tilt.
More than this, Meyer initiated the SEC’s reign at the expense of none other than Ohio State. He set the tone for Ohio State in bowl games against SEC opponents; the Buckeyes got creamed in another BCS championship game the year after their loss to Florida, bowing to LSU in New Orleans. OSU finally exorcised its SEC demons by beating Arkansas in the 2011 Sugar Bowl, but one cannot deny the centrality of “Florida 41, Ohio State 14,” within the larger run of recent college football history. If the Buckeyes had won that game, the SEC wurlitzer might never have cranked up. Perhaps Jim Tressel would have become the Meyer of his sport. Perhaps the Big Ten’s course would have become substantially different since January of 2007.
But no — Urban Meyer dealt a devastating blow to Ohio State, one that psychologically shook the program and required a few years to recover from.
How fascinating it is, then, that Meyer — who dueled with Nick Saban in consecutive SEC title games in 2008 and 2009 — was able to defeat Alabama not in an SEC context, but as Ohio State’s new leader, in the first College Football Playoff semifinal round?
How amazing is it, then, that Meyer — the man who did so much to hurt the Big Ten when in Gainesville — could now give the conference its first national champion since Ohio State won the 2003 Fiesta Bowl?
How utterly delicious is it, then, that Meyer — who began Pax Dixiana for the SEC eight years ago — ensured that the SEC was locked out of the first College Football Playoff National Championship Game, marking the first time since the 2006 Rose Bowl that the conference had no dog in the national title fight?
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What is Urban Meyer coaching for on Monday night? He’s coaching, first and foremost, for his players. Second, he’s coaching for his school. Beyond those considerations, however, Meyer is coaching for some large pieces of legacy-building significance.
If you define “modern college football” in broad terms, citing the introduction of the AP poll in 1936 as a modernizing moment as far as the recognition of national champions are concerned, Meyer is trying to join Nick Saban as the only coach in the “modern” era to win national titles at two different schools.
There are three other coaches who won national titles at two different schools, but none of them did so fully within the confines of the “modern” era (1936 or later): Howard Jones (Yale and USC), Pop Warner (Stanford and Pittsburgh), and Fritz Crisler (Princeton and Michigan). Jones won a title in 1939 at USC while Crisler captured one in 1947 at Michigan, but both men won their titles at previous schools before 1936, when national titles were much more arbitrarily claimed and arrived at. Meyer and Saban would truly stand alone if Ohio State beats Oregon.
Second, Meyer is competing for a third national championship. If he claims the crown, Meyer would become just the 11th man to win at least three titles since the advent of the AP poll in 1936.
The other 10 (and oh, what a top 10 it is):
1. Bear Bryant (6 titles)
Tie, 2. Saban, Frank Leahy, and John Mckay (4 each)
Tie, 5. Bernie Bierman, Bud Wilkinson, Woody Hayes, Darrell Royal, Barry Switzer, and Tom Osborne (3 each)
Third, Meyer is coaching in his first national title game at Ohio State. May we remind you that had it not been for THIS MAN (below), the Buckeyes might have made the title game earlier in Meyer’s tenure:
Meyer is coaching to blot out the mistakes of athletic director Gene Smith, making up not only for lost time and opportunities, but for the loss to Michigan State in the 2013 Big Ten Championship Game, which deprived Ohio State of a trip to the final BCS National Championship Game.
It is scary to think that if not for bad leadership by Gene Smith and a bad fourth quarter in Indianapolis 13 months ago, Ohio State and Urban Meyer could be working on a third straight appearance in college football’s national championship game, the kind of feat one would associate with Saban and Alabama over the course of the past six years in the sport’s history.
No matter — if Meyer and Ohio State win this national title game, they will have proved more than enough to the rest of the college football community. Given that Meyer will have won a national title with a third-string quarterback at the helm, a victory over Oregon could very possibly initiate a new reign over the sport, much as Meyer created a new era eight years ago with a national championship-bearing win over the very same school he coaches tonight in Texas.