Ohio State Football: How Will Urban Meyer 2.0 Handle a National Championship?

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Along with his three children, Urban Meyer stood in the northeast corner of Arlington's AT&T Stadium on Monday night, the familiar feeling of confetti falling accenting his team's latest rendition of "Carmen Ohio."

But as soon as the singing of Ohio State's signature song had concluded, the family of five realized that they were short one, as the Meyer matriarch, Shelley, had gone missing in the sea of celebration.

With tears—the good kind—in her eyes, 24-year-old Nicki Meyer scurried off off to find her mother, while her younger sister Gigi paved an opening among a sea of reporters-turned-paparazzi. Once reunited, the five Meyers—son Nate included—locked in embrace, celebrating the family's third national championship in the past eight years.

Only this one was a little sweeter, and not just because it was their first at the premier program in Urban and Shelley's home state. The Meyers had not enjoyed such elation since Urban's last national title at Florida in 2008, and that "celebration" went a little differently than this one did.

"Urban Meyer stood on the field with his second national championship team, the 2008 Gators, singing the fight song," ESPN's Wright Thompson wrote in his 2012 profile of Meyer. "After the last line, he rushed into the tunnel and locked himself in the coaches' locker room. He began calling recruits as his assistants pounded on the door, asking if everything was okay."

As it turned out, everything wasn't.

Eleven months later, Meyer would suffer a stress-induced health scare following Florida's loss to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game. Last fall, Meyer admitted to HBO Real Sports that his pursuit of perfection in Gainesville caught up to him and was ultimately the reason why he prematurely retired from coaching at the end of the 2010 season.

"You build this thing up, and it's hard to sustain," Meyer told HBO's Andrea Kremer. "I remember standing at the SEC [media day] podium, and they said, 'Coach, how does it feel that anything other than undefeated and a national championship, you're a failure?' And I just stared at the person asking the question, and it just sunk through my body. And I said, 'You're right.'"

Ben Axelrod

Meyer would take a sabbatical from coaching in 2011 only to return to the sideline as Ohio State's head coach in 2012. He did so with a promise to his family—in the form of a contract written by Nicki on pink notebook paper—that he would take better care of himself, whether that be dealing better with either winning or losing.

Thanks to a three-game stretch that included two losses at the end of 2013 and start of 2014, we've already seen how the new Meyer handles the latter. But it wasn't the losing that got to Meyer at Florida so much as the pressure to maintain the winning, which is the same challenge that he'll now face with the Buckeyes back on top of the college football world.

It's too early to tell how Meyer will handle Ohio State's recent success with a full offseason and the entire 2015 campaign still ahead of him. But it didn't take long for the third-year Buckeyes head coach to receive his first test, with reporters in the post-championship press conference already inquiring about the likelihood of Ohio State repeating as national champs.

And for what it's worth, Meyer's answers sounded like that of a changed man.

"We'll have that conversation, certainly not today. It's about enjoying it," Meyer said. "Right now we're in the celebration phase. Eventually we're going to get to the 'learn from it' phase, and then the next guys like this wait for the next mission. So that's the pattern we're going to have."

While Meyer's plan sounds good in theory, it should be noted that he also said all of the right things following Florida's championship in 2008. A coach would never publicly admit that he's already looking ahead to the following season so soon, or put the pressure on his team to live up to the expectations set by its predecessor.

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But with 14 combined returning starters on offense and defense, the expectations have already been set for the 2015 Buckeyes to continue what appears to be the budding dynasty Meyer is building in Columbus. Their head coach isn't naive about that either, as he'll hit the recruiting trail on Thursday expecting his third national championship to have a tangible effect.

"You move to the front of the line," Meyer said of dealing with recruiting prospects as the reigning national champion. "[OSU assistant] Kerry Coombs and I are sitting there, and I said, 'Man, I can't wait to go out recruiting.' You can't recruit to this now, you're officially a bad recruiter."

How Meyer wraps up his next three weeks of recruiting will go a long way toward determining how long the Buckeyes are able to sustain their success. What will be most important, however, will be his ability to maintain the championship expectations at Ohio State as a positive and not a detriment.

At Florida, they consumed him and ultimately led to his departure. But as evidenced by Monday night's celebration, so far, it's been so good for the Meyers in Columbus.

Ben Axelrod is Bleacher Report's Ohio State Lead Writer. You can follow him on Twitter @BenAxelrod. Unless noted otherwise, all quotes obtained firsthand. All statistics courtesy of cfbstats.com, and recruiting information courtesy of 247Sports.