Florida Football: Why the University Should Fire Urban Meyer

In 1995, Sports Illustrated published an open letter to Edward "Tad" Foote III, the president of the University of Miami, asking him to please drop its football program on charges of drug abuse, arrests and academic cheating. In that letter, SI referred to the program as "a disease, a cancer that is steadily devouring an institution."

If Miami is a cancer, then the University of Florida is a drug: a dirty, expensive Bolivian powder. Pretty on the outside, but seedy and life-wrecking underneath.

UF is on the top of the college football world after two NCAA championships in the last three years (which doesn't really mean anything based on the current BCS system, but work with me). The team fields a defense in which all 11 starters could be on NFL teams in the next three seasons... and it has Urban Meyer.

Meyer is essentially a crook. For a head coach who prides himself on supposed discipline and intensity, it's a joke that he is the leader of a team that has had over two dozen players arrested in his first four seasons at Florida.  

Behind those beautifully crisp blue and orange uniforms, the program is a black hole on the college football scene. His rough exterior is just a blanket for a gooey center. 

Name another coach who would allow players second and third chances after charges such as robbery or assault? 

Meyer loves to say that he looks up to notorious tough head coaches like Tom Landry and Ohio State's Woody Hayes. Of course Hayes was the same guy who got fired for notoriously punched a Clemson player in the throat after a late interception in the '78 Gator Bowl. 

Still, these guys are saints compared this sleazeball. Would either of those coaches have let notorious thugs like Jarvis Moss (who played this season despite failing drug tests) or Percy Harvin (the Florida standout who was banned from all Virginia High School sports after punching a ref) even step on the field?

Would they even give them scholarships? Harvin shouldn't be in the NFL, he should be working a 9 to 5. 

The NFL loves to sit back and wonder why it has had such a problem over the years with violence off the field. Players like Ray Lewis, Donte Stallworth, Adam "Pacman" Jones, Plaxico Burress and Matt Jones were all stellar college athletes given every chance to succeed.

Although the NFL has attempted to crack down, it's not a lie that Ray Lewis should be sitting in a jail cell now for his involvement in a 2001 shooting of two men after a Super Bowl party, or that Donte Stallworth deserved more than thirty days in prison after he killed a man while driving drunk in Miami Beach earlier this year. 

The NFL is working hard to clean up its act. The commissioner's ambiguous suspension of Pittsburgh's Ben Roethlisberger was a strange, but somewhat enlightening punishment. Despite the fact that Roethlisberger was never charged, the suspension was a fine attempt at trying to put a "role model standard" in the NFL.

The NFL will continue to work hard on its end, but the problem really starts with these powerful college programs. The University of Florida obviously values football victories over morality. Twenty-two-year-old kids know better. 

Meyer might think he can get away with repeating over and over again that these kids are still young, or that "they are still finding their way,"—but he shouldn't. Even if you are recruiting from the local prison, everyone knows it's bad to rob somebody, and it's good if you choose to help out a soup kitchen on Friday night instead of  joy-riding in a stolen car with an ounce of blow. 

Meyer thinks he's on top of the world. He coasts through his neat, little schedule with genuine ease as a benefit of recruiting some of the best high school players that a kind word—or a booster's under the table check—can buy, but he should have the foresight as an educator and a leader in the UF community to take care of this problem. 

Is every good football player in the country a raging criminal? No.

We occasionally see a few cases at other institutions, but they are often taken care of swiftly by the school. Oregon's dismissal of QB Jeremy Masoli was beautiful to watch after Masoli was given too many chances. Masoli was Oregon's best offensive player last season, but the university removed him just as swiftly as they remove a kid getting straight F's. 

So why is Florida stacked full of these criminals? 

The coaching is the reason: Urban Meyer is the reason behind the leniency and the joke that is Florida's arrest record. 

Yes, if Meyer keeps leading UF to 10-win seasons, then most will look the other way, but if he wants to be a respected member of the football community—like Joe Paterno or Mack Brown—then he must start laying down the law, instead of laying down in the sun while his players run wild beyond his grasps.