Ohio State Bowl Ban: Would Urban Meyer Have Still Come If He Knew About Ban?

The NCAA has issued its final sanctions on Ohio State, and they include nine lost scholarships over three years, two years of probation and a one-year postseason ban for 2012, which includes the Big Ten Championship game.

Outside of this, the Buckeyes were most recently in the news because of newly-acquired head coach Urban Meyer. Widely regarded as one of the best in the game, high school kids have been flocking to Columbus now that he is there.

But would he be there if he had known about all of these penalties?

Absolutely.

Ohio State was either going to hire a new coach at the end of this season or sign Luke Fickell to a multi-year contract. Stringing him along just so the team would have a head coach while waiting for Meyer to take over when things are hunky-dory would have been wrong on multiple levels.

Meyer desperately wanted to get back into coaching, but he also knew that he could wait around for one of his ideal jobs to open up at Michigan, Notre Dame or Ohio State. With Brady Hoke and Brian Kelly having success in Ann Arbor and South Bend, respectively, that left the Buckeyes, and this situation really just fell into his lap.

Outside of the sanctions, things could not have lined up any better than it did for Meyer’s return to coaching. Here’s what he had to say about the sanctions.

"I agreed to become the Head Football Coach at The Ohio State University because Shelley and I are Ohio natives, I am a graduate of this wonderful institution and served in this program under a great coach.”

These penalties hurt, but there’s no way they would have been enough to keep Meyer out of Columbus.