Urban Meyer Ohio State Rumors: Why He Shouldn't Return to Football This Quickly

It’s been less than a year since Urban Meyer announced that he was retiring from the Florida team he had coached to a pair of national championships. With high-profile programs at Ohio State and Penn State in urgent need of new head coaches, it’s not surprising that the 47-year-old Meyer (currently working as an ESPN analyst) has been the focus of rampant speculation.

Whether or not the rumors of Meyer’s imminent hiring in Columbus are true, one thing is clear: Meyer shouldn’t be coming back to the sidelines in 2012. As much as fans want to see him back in college football, he can only hurt himself and his legacy by diving back in after a mere one-year hiatus.

Meyer’s retirement from coaching, like the 2010 leave of absence that preceded it, appears to have been largely motivated by persistent health problems. He was rushed to a hospital in late 2009 due to chest pains, and he faced what were believed to be stress-related cardiac problems if he continued the high-pressure, high-workload approach that had made him such a successful coach.

Assuming that health issues (and the ubiquitous “spending more time with his family”) were the actual motivations for his retirement, he has no business risking his health by returning to the pressure-cooker so soon. He’d be doing Ohio State (or any program) a disservice by giving them an apparent long-term solution as head coach when in fact he would be a constant risk to re-retire if his body couldn’t handle the stress anymore.

Of course, if Meyer’s retirement from Florida was actually motivated by some other factor—say, not wanting to deal with living up to absurdly high fan expectations in the nation’s most competitive conference—then returning to the sidelines so quickly makes him look like he quit on his Gators team. Either way, Meyer loses out in the end.

None of this is to say that Meyer should never come back to coaching. However, if he does, it should be on his terms and not because a high-profile program wants the instant recruiting boost of the Meyer name.

He also needs to spend another couple of years away from the game to give himself a chance to adjust to a post-football life. If he decides that he needs the competition of jumping back onto the coaching carousel—and, critically, if his body can handle it—then it will be a decision he’s had time to consider and not one made in the heat of a single recruiting pitch from the first program to knock on his door.