Urban Meyer to Ohio State: Why He's Entering the Big Ten at the Perfect Time

After weeks of rumors, last night, we finally received official word that former Florida coach Urban Meyer will indeed be the next coach at Ohio State.

The news of Meyer’s arrival in Columbus means that there will be a power shift in the Big Ten in the coming years, as the Buckeyes, who finished with a disappointing 6-6 campaign this year in their first season without Jim Tressel, will be looking to climb back up and once again be the flagship program of the conference.

Meyer couldn’t have come to the Big Ten at a better time. With the addition of Nebraska and the move to 12 teams, it looks like the Big Ten has really been beefing up lately, and it seems like there’s bound to be a fight between the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12 for college football conference supremacy over the next decade.

Even though the conference has been rocked by two major scandals this past year, the Big Ten is still in great shape for the future, as teams like Michigan, Michigan State, Nebraska, Wisconsin and now Ohio State will all be constant players on the national scene in the coming seasons.

With Brady Hoke doing some great work up there in Ann Arbor (admittedly, with a little help from all the talent that Rich Rodriguez brought in), the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry is now destined to once again become one of the most anticipated annual matchups of the college football season.

Not only is this great for the Big Ten, which will now have one of its power programs back in the fold, this is just great for Ohio State in general.

Many have already said it, but Meyer truly was the perfect hire for Ohio State, and for obvious reasons.

He’s one of the most respected and successful coaches in all of football, and he’s the type of leader that the Buckeyes need as they try to put the Jim Tressel-Terrelle Pryor fiasco in the past.

The job of building Ohio State into a national championship contender again won’t be extremely challenging, but it definitely won’t be easy either.

We’ll just have to wait and see how serious the forthcoming NCAA sanctions are, but even if they’re light, Meyer will still have other challenges to deal with.

Like we saw with Rich Rodriguez at Michigan, installing a spread-option offense in the Big Ten is no easy feat.

It took Rodriguez three years to figure out how to make it work, and when he finally did, it was too late, he had dug himself too deep of a hole.

Meyer’s situation at Ohio State doesn’t exactly mirror Rodriguez’s situation, but don’t take for granted how difficult it can be for a predominantly pro-style base-running team to transition to a spread-option offensive system.

If there's any coach that's proven he can make it work, though, it's Urban Meyer.

Meyer's got the perfect weapon at his disposal in budding freshman star quarterback Braxton Miller, and he's got the ambition to turn his home-state team back into a powerhouse.

If Meyer stays healthy, there's no reason he shouldn't have Ohio State consistently competing for not just Big Ten championships, but national championships as well.