Ohio State Football: Urban Meyer Handles Sporting News 'Investigation' Correctly

It's been a couple days since the Sporting News' report on Urban Meyer and the culture at Florida was released. There was a little kerfuffle about the "circle of trust" business (and Meyer didn't do himself any favors by initially pleading ignorance on that one), but by and large the report, appears to have already blown over.

Now, some of the minimization of the report's impact has to do with the dearth of people willing to be named and on the record about the goings-on there in Gainesville; if nobody's willing to speak up and face scrutiny for it, it's not THAT big a deal to them.

The real factor in why this issue is being put to rest, however, is Meyer himself. Here's an excerpt of the comments he made at the Big Ten teleconference yesterday:

"We were hired to graduate players. We did that. We were top 3 every year in the SEC in graduating and APR. We were hired to win games. We did that. We followed the rules. We did that. We recruited great classes. We finished in the top 5 every year."

"We did [give players preferential treatment]. We do that here. We did it at Bowling Green and Utah. If you go to class, you're a warrior and do it the right way on and off the field, you're completely committed to helping us win, you're going to be treated really good. You're going to get nice gear. You're going to get to move off campus if you like. You get treated really good. Guys that don't go real hard and aren't committed, yeah, it's real difficult."

No equivocation, no double-speak, no hiding from questions. That's how you handle bad news in this day and age (and, let's be clear: allegations like those are bad news). The evidence is on Meyer's side on this one, and he's letting it speak for itself.

Now, hopefully he brings that same mentality when the evidence isn't on his side, but knowing college coaches these days, that's asking a lot.