Urban Meyer fast-forwarded Ohio State scandal into disgrace with statement

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And in the end, as you knew it would, Urban Meyer’s odyssey of flexible morals would come to rest on one plinth – whether or not he would get his final $38 million.
 
Meyer, the spectacularly discredited Ohio State football coach, issued a statement today backtracking what he earlier said about the 2015 domestic assaults by the former assistant coach Zack Smith, with Meyer going from knowing nothing about the assaults by Smith upon his now ex-wife Courtney to knowing and “following the correct protocols.”
 
Smith himself then doubled down in an interview and said that athletic director Gene Smith knew about the 2015 assaults, which would seem to blow away all vestiges of plausible deniability inside the Ohio State athletic department.
 
But Meyer’s statement also was pegged to attack any attempt the university might make at firing him for cause, which could have invalidated the contract and leave the school shamed but $38 million (the total of outstanding money remaining on his contract) richer.
 
In other words, Courtney Smith’s beatings are now merely a staging ground for a fight over reputations and contract law.
 
Since Brett McMurphy broke the story last weekend on his Facebook page while being paid by ESPN (a hilarious tale of corporate America in its own right), Meyer has been reduced in stature again and again, and his response now is to fight back at the only enemy he has left – his employer. And now that Gene Smith is apparently involved, thus further dragging the university’s culpability into question, the university is going to come swinging back.
 
If this reminds you at least tangentially of another Big 10 school and another scandal made geometrically worse by corporate silence, you’re right there with everyone else. The silence is the connector between this and the Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno/Penn State pedophilia scandal, the refusal to act swiftly to do the right thing, that made everything so much worse.
 
But Courtney Smith didn’t stay silent, and her time came when McMurphy approached her to ask about the different violences she endured. She spoke up, she brought documentation, and McMurphy did the reporting. There was justice to be done, a blow to be struck against silence, and now we have the end product – a quick-burning fuse on a mountain of gelignite, with reputations and money to be won or lost.
 
And that’s the grim end-game that comes from protecting the guilty at the expense of the innocent. Domestic violence is a much more complicated (I hesitate to say “nuanced,” for there is no nuance in punching a pregnant woman) issue than can be solved by simple administrative solutions like firing.
 
But it will all be reduced, as it was at Penn State, into a fight over careers and contracts and a university’s reputation, with Courtney Smith reduced to a sidebar. It’s the same old narrative – follow the money and the power, and only mention the victim in passing.
 
At least Urban Meyer did us all a favor and fast-forwarded the story to its inevitable resting place – the one where nearly everyone ends up caked in disgrace.

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