Saturday Will Mark a Flashback to a Happy Time for a Young Urban Meyer
When Urban Meyer wakes up in the morning these days, he bleeds scarlet and gray. The Ohio State head coach has made no secrets that coaching the Buckeyes is his dream job, but that doesn’t mean previous stops in his career don’t hit home.
On Saturday, OSU opens the 2016 season against Bowling Green, the program that offered Meyer his first head coaching opportunity way back in 2001.
“I want to say a couple of things also about a great school we're playing this week,” Meyer said on Monday. “Bowling Green, I love that school.
“I loved my time there, and a lot of great people there.”
After various assistant coaching jobs from 1985 (St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati) to 2000 (wide receivers coach at Notre Dame), which included two seasons as a graduate assistant in Columbus coaching the Buckeyes, Meyer accepted the job at Bowling Green.
This wasn’t a position he accepted without much thought. Although most coaches would jump at a chance to take the top spot at an FBS program, Meyer was looking for something he saw at other places: history.
“The reason we took it, first of all,” Meyer began, “they had a winning record against every team in that conference, overall record. So that tells you, taking over a place that's never done it is hard. But to take over a place that's done it, maybe has fallen off a little bit. And I still remember that to this day, when I think about Bowling Green, it's one of the most tradition-rich programs in the MAC.”
When Meyer walks into the Woody Hayes Athletic Center each day, he does so with confidence. His Buckeye team is one of the best programs in the nation, but that was not true when Meyer arrived at Doyt Perry Stadium.
“I remember one of those preseason magazines came out, I think we were 129, or 119 or something like that. That was our ranking,” Meyer said of 2001. “I thought you have to be blanking me when I saw that. I didn't know there were 129 teams or 119 teams, 120 teams.”
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