Urban borefare | an asinine ending to an asinine year

What a banner year it’s been in the college coaching business.

From Rick Pitino to John Calipari to Lane Kiffin to Mark Mangino to Mike Leach, and finally, to Urban Meyer, it’s hard to imagine an industry that collectively thinks more highly of itself sinking this low. Well, outside of the Washington beltway, that is.

For the record, we’ve tried our best to avoid joining the bevy of bloggers who’ve waxed poetic about the Urban Meyer debacle. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the mega-story that the sports media breathlessly covered over the entire Christmas weekend revealed itself to be a whole lotta bupkus. Turns out, Urban himself believes he’ll likely be back on the sideline this fall. So that basically means the national media devoted 72 hours and eleventy billion column inches to a coach who’s decided to skip sprang duh-rills. Frankly, we can’t think of a more appropriate ending to 2009.

Urban Meyer

In general, we tend to agree with The Big Lead that Urban’s grand flip-flop came off more than a little Favre-ish. We also drew a couple other conclusions from the sordid non-story:

1) That must have been one helluva “spirited practice” by the Gator players on Sunday to convince Meyer to opt for a leave of absence instead of resigning. We’re picturing one of those slow unison hand-claps that build to a crescendo while rousing string music plays in the background.

2) You gotta admire the ability of these high-profile coaches to constantly strive for new levels of sanctimony. “I have given my heart and soul to coaching college football and mentoring young men for the last 24-plus years,” Meyer purred in his initial statement released by the University of Florida on Saturday, “and I have dedicated most of my waking moments the last five years to the Gator football program.” Look, there’s no denying Urban Meyer is an immense coaching talent, but a “mentor”? Puh-lease. Meyer has dedicated most of his waking moments the last five years to winning football games, not building fine, upstanding citizens in Gainesville. While Meyer was compiling 47 victories over the last four years, his players were racking up 251 traffic citations. That’s not a mentoring program … hell, that’s not even a halfway house.

And to think … we haven’t even gotten to National Signing Day yet. Paging Coach Kiffin …