Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  When Urban was in second grade, his younger sister, Erika, came home crying because two of his classmates were picking on her. Bud gave his son clear instructions that when he went to school the next morning, he had better take care of the situation. Urban was afraid to fight, but fight he did. That night Bud invited him to sit at the head of the dinner table and said, “You became a man today.” Thus were imbued two important values that Urban would later bring to his football teams: toughness and brotherhood.

  Bud was brilliant in his own right. His job as a chemical engineer afforded a comfortable living, with access to private school and membership at the local boating club. When the kids were in grade school, Bud gave them lessons in Latin, German, and trigonometry. His wife, Gisela, had some grit of her own, having escaped Hitler’s Germany as a refugee at the age of thirteen before emigrating to the United States when she was twenty-three. Gisela, however, was more of the nurturing kind, which suited her as a professional chef at the fancy hotel in town. When Urban was a boy, she filled his head with dreams of becoming the head football coach at Notre Dame, the ultimate ascension for a nice Catholic boy who was named for a pope.

  Like everyone else in the state, Urban was an Ohio State Buckeyes fan. He wore No. 45 as an homage to the great Ohio State running back Archie Griffin, the only player to win back-to-back Heisman Trophies. At that time, the state was under the sway of the legendary coach Woody Hayes, who was known as much for his intemperateness as his tactical brilliance. The coaches Urban grew up playing for were just like Woody—loud, demanding, and mean. “When I was in Ohio in the 1970s, it was not uncommon for the football coach to grab your facemask and kick you right square,” he told me. “This was back in the Woody Hayes era. Football was a tough, violent game, and putting your hands on players was acceptable. When I was a young coach coming up, the louder you were, the harder you were, the better the coach you were.”

  Meyer was pretty popular in high school, but he was serious too, old beyond his years. He went to his share of parties, but he didn’t get wasted or get into trouble. Hood recalls Meyer as a young man with “presence,” but he adds, “Urban has always been guarded. He wasn’t easy to get to know at first. You had to spend some time with him before he would loosen up.” His focus was heavily on sports. Meyer was a pretty good fullback and defensive back, but his real talents were on the diamond. After the Braves drafted him, he skipped his senior prom so he could board a flight to Florida and get a head start on rookie ball.

  * * *

  • • •

  After that fateful phone call to his father, Urban finished out his first season. He hit a whopping .170. The average ticked up to .193 the following season. It was especially frustrating to Urban, since he always tried to eat right, get his sleep, and practice until his hands bled.

  He realized he wasn’t cut out for baseball one night when his roommate came home late and stinking drunk. The next morning, the guy ripped two homers while Urban went hitless and made a couple of errors at shortstop. “Maybe you should try it my way,” the guy cracked. At the end of the season, the Braves cut him. Urban got the bad news via a letter signed by the great Hank Aaron. He still has that letter framed.

  As difficult as it was to accept his failure at baseball, the setback provided an opportunity to develop his persistence. So he went home and enrolled at the University of Cincinnati. Though he dabbled in some semipro baseball, he signed up to play defensive back for the Bearcats’ football team. The team was terrible, but Meyer still wasn’t good enough to start. Because he was already thinking about a career in coaching, he decided to major in psychology, figuring the knowledge he gained would someday make him a good motivator.

  During his senior year at Cincinnati, Meyer interned as a defensive backs coach at local St. Xavier High School. After graduation he got a job as a graduate assistant at Ohio State and enrolled in the university’s sports administration program. He was joined in Columbus by his college girlfriend, Shelley Mather. Shelley was also a psychology major, working toward a career in the mental health field.

  The two years that Urban spent in Columbus brought him into the orbit of Buckeyes coach Earle Bruce, who would become like a second father to him. Bruce succeeded Woody Hayes, and he very much followed in Hayes’s fierce tradition. He got to Us by berating his players, enforcing strict discipline, and insisting they meet his high standards. Bruce could be merciless to his guys during practice, but he also routinely invited players over to his house so he could get to know them in a more relaxed setting. When Urban introduced Bruce to his own father, it was like they had known each other their whole lives. Bruce paid Bud the ultimate compliment when he called him a “nasty ass.”

  “They were clones,” Urban says. “They believed there’s no such thing as a gray area. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. I’m so grateful they were there to teach me that.”

  After completing his two-year master’s degree, Meyer accepted a part-time position as linebackers coach at Illinois State University. He worked day and night, seven days a week, for a whopping $6,000 salary. Shelley supported them as a full-time psychiatric nurse. The question of providing for a family is never a trivial one, and Urban briefly found himself wondering whether he should be a lawyer instead. Shelley helped him stay the course. “I could see how good he was and how much he loved it,” she says.

  They were all in—he with coaching, she with him. Urban and Shelley got married on July 8, 1989, during a brief window between recruiting and summer camps. (Over the years, Shelley would notice that a lot of coaches shared an anniversary during that same week.) The following year, at twenty-six, he moved on to take a position as wide receivers coach at Colorado State, where Bruce had recently taken over as head coach. While Urban was coaching, Shelley completed her graduate degree at the University of Colorado in Denver while raising their two young daughters—Nicki, who was born in 1990, and Gigi, who came along three years later.

  Four years after the Meyers arrived in Fort Collins, Colorado State fired Bruce, accusing him of hitting at least nine players “with a closed fist in unprotected areas of their bodies” and creating “a climate of intimidation and fear.” Meyer was initially swept out the door with the rest of the staff, but Bruce’s replacement, Sonny Lubick, brought him back.

  Meyer was grateful to be able to keep his job, but he had serious misgivings about what he perceived as Lubick’s lax approach. After Meyer drove one of his receivers to quit the team, Lubick let him know that if he wanted to keep his job, he had better lighten up. Urban did as he was told. To his surprise, Lubick’s methods proved to be effective as the Rams went on to win back-to-back Western Athletic Conference titles.

  The three years that Meyer spent under Lubick provided a critical addition to his knowledge. Sure, intensity and drive were important, but a coach could also get to Us using a gentle touch, if that was authentically of a piece with his personality. “His way of getting to the final product was different, but deep to the core he’s very similar to Earle Bruce,” Meyer says. “I don’t believe I would still be coaching if it weren’t for him.”

  That was an important lesson for Meyer. Unfortunately, he didn’t learn it well enough.

  * * *

  • • •

  He doesn’t remember exactly what set him off, only that he was coaching a “nonfunctional group” and saw something on the screen that he obviously didn’t like. This was 1996, and Meyer was in his first season as the wide receivers coach at Notre Dame. When he spied the unpardonable sin, he exploded in rage and tossed the remote control at the television. The glass shattered. Notre Dame’s head coach, Lou Holtz, later joked in front of the team that he would charge his wide receivers coach the cost of replacing the television.

  This was the only way he knew how to coach, and the occasional damage to electronics aside, it was becoming very clear that he was good at it. He may have been coaching a finess
e position, but he was determined to turn his kids into football players, Ashtabula-style. A typical two-hour workout would include ninety minutes of physical pounding, blocking, and hitting, over and over again. Only during the last thirty minutes would he use a football to actually work on receiving. “It was extremely unconventional,” says Mickey Marotti, who was Notre Dame’s strength coach at the time and has followed Meyer to Florida and Ohio State. “I looked at Urban as using an offensive line coach mentality to coach wideouts. He was all about teaching toughness.”

  In Meyer’s view, there were no small problems. His nickname around the team was “Captain Emergency.” Some of the players called him “Lunatic.” Yet, staying true to what he learned from Earle Bruce, he would still welcome his players over to his house several times a week to eat, watch TV, and hang out. Oftentimes they would go there even when he was out of town recruiting. They liked hanging with Shelley better anyway. “I really enjoyed talking to those young men. It was like having your own kids,” Shelley says. “At first, he just wanted to coach X’s and O’s, but he learned early on you can’t just get on the field and start running plays. You’ve got to deal with the whole player.”

  Alas, his body would prove to be unsuited to the hard-core way he lived his job. Meyer was working the sidelines during a Notre Dame game in 1998 when he was overcome by a sharp pain in his head. He visited a doctor, who told him it was the result of a benign cyst in his brain. The cyst didn’t require any surgery or treatment, but the doctor warned Meyer that the pain could flare up again if he got too stressed.

  Bud and Gisela made it to South Bend for every home game, each time throwing a huge tailgate party for family and friends, with Gisela creating a theme for each party, cooking up a storm, and serving champagne. Sure, they were proud Catholic parents, but they didn’t start making that kind of effort just for Notre Dame. When Urban was at Illinois State they once drove ten hours each way to watch the team play a road game at Indiana State.

  Gisela’s dream was for her son to become a head college football coach, but she didn’t live long enough to see it happen. In 2000, she died from cancer. A year later, her dream came true when Meyer became the head coach at Bowling Green State University.

  The program had just endured six consecutive losing seasons, including a 2–9 record the previous year. Within the first few weeks of his tenure, Meyer learned that twenty-seven players had skipped study hall. He saw an immediate opportunity to instill a new culture, and he seized it. He called for a 5 a.m. workout at the team’s indoor practice facility. It was a frigid winter morning, and he had lined up trash cans around the field so the players could puke in them while he ran them ragged. That workout came to be known as Black Wednesday, but according to Meyer, it was the least of his cruel and unusual tactics. “I was a thirty-six-year-old raving lunatic,” he says. “I did things at Bowling Green that should’ve gotten me let go. I needed to be at a place where I could make mistakes, where not many people cared and it certainly wasn’t in the limelight.”

  Nearly two dozen players quit the team as a result. The ones who remained were his type of guys, in mentality if not in talent. Meyer and his staff oversaw all aspects of the program. That included academics; Urban proctored some study halls and tutored his guys in math. But he knew that discipline and effort could take his team only so far. At some point they would have to figure out a way to beat more talented teams.

  So he and his assistants bunkered themselves over the summer in an effort to come up with a fresh offensive scheme. The idea was to create a system that no one else was running. Dan Mullen, who was a graduate assistant at Notre Dame, came with Meyer to Bowling Green as quarterbacks coach, and they talked about how Holtz and his staff used to get freaked out the week they were preparing to go up against Navy’s wishbone offense. That was the psychological advantage of wielding an anomaly.

  While they were at Notre Dame, Mullen and Meyer had spent some time at Louisville with Scott Linehan, the team’s offensive coordinator, who was doing some creative things with the I formation. That system was normally designed to feature tough, hard straightaway running, but Louisville was doing some innovative things to open things up. Mullen and Meyer experienced an epiphany when they asked Linehan what he did to counter a blitz from a cornerback or safety. Smith explained that because they regularly deployed four or five wide receivers, “we never see a corner or safety blitz, ever.” It was a powerful concept: If you use the entire field, you won’t have to feel any pressure.

  As part of their Bowling Green experiment, Meyer, Mullen, and offensive coordinator Gregg Brandon studied what had come to be called the “spread option offense,” a modern scheme that called for the quarterback to operate from a shotgun formation and fire a lot of short, pinpoint passes. The spread had been used in the past by Kansas State’s Bill Snyder, but a young, up-and-coming coach named Rich Rodriguez, who had just taken over at West Virginia, was pushing the concept even further. Meyer liked the spread, but he didn’t want to get away from his mind-set that football was a tough-man’s game. His solution was to take the tactics of the spread and combine them with some elements of traditional power football.

  Meyer sat in a room with Mullen and his offensive coordinator, and they doodled and dabbled for three months, not sure what they were doing. “It was awesome,” Meyer says with a big grin. To further keep defenses off guard, they devised an intricate set of calls and audibles that gave the quarterback lots of leeway in decision making. They went through every possible scenario, figuring out how they would counter the counters to their counters. The goal was that they would never run a play where they had to cross their fingers that the defense wasn’t in a certain formation.

  Meyer took a player named Josh Harris, who had been converted from quarterback to running back, and put him back under center—or at least, in the shotgun. Then he went to work teaching him the offense. Harris thought he was working hard, but his coach let him know early on that he was selling himself short. “You’re a great kid and a good student,” Meyer told him. “I just don’t understand how you cannot be a fanatic about this game.” Harris responded well—evolving from responding well to being told to work hard to wanting to work hard—and the rest of the team followed suit.

  Thus did Meyer successfully apply his PEAK profile to his very first job. He showed his players the value of persistence even as he ran them until they puked. He had to convince them that he understood what they were going through, no doubt telling and retelling the story of that phone call with his dad. He needed to demonstrate that he was being authentic with them, and that he was making his choices for the right reasons. And they needed to trust that he knew what he was talking about. Otherwise they would never fully commit to running this weird, newfangled offense.

  The season opener at Missouri presented a major challenge, to say the least. Meyer had one big advantage: Missouri’s coaching staff could not have prepared their team to defend the spread option, since no one had ever run it before. Most of Bowling Green’s offensive plays had four or five wide receivers. Only one or two of them could catch, but the Missouri defenders didn’t know that. They had no choice but to defend the whole field, which hampered their ability to put pressure on Harris. Bowling Green won a shocking 20–13 victory. The score reverberated around college football, forcing observers to ask a pair of questions that would be asked many times again: Who is this guy coaching this team? And what the hell is he running?

  * * *

  • • •

  He was too big of a talent for Bowling Green to hold. The Falcons finished that first season with an 8–3 record, the biggest turnaround any team in America enjoyed that season. They went 9–3 the next. Just like that, Meyer was scooped up by the University of Utah, which signed him to a five-year contract worth $400,000 per year.

  Once again, Meyer brought down his cultural hammer. He did the trash can trick again, put the Utes through military-style bo
ot camp, turned weight room workouts into a test of wills. He faced his own cultural challenge because many of the players were from a Polynesian background. They shied away from eye contact and bristled at his penchant for confrontation. He had to adjust intelligently and empathetically.

  Several assistants, most importantly Mullen, followed Meyer to Utah and helped him teach the spread option. They were met with a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck that Alex Smith, a tall, gangly quarterback out of Bremerton, Washington, was on the roster. Smith only had one other major scholarship offer, Louisville, and started off as the team’s third-string quarterback. He was skinny as hell but possessed a beautiful mind. Smith entered college with so many advanced placement credits that he was able to earn an economics degree from Utah in two years. He was also a quick study when it came to the spread option, devouring the complex array of audibles and split-second decisions the quarterback was required to make. He loved discussing the intricate details with Meyer.

  Meyer considered himself a keen evaluator of talent, but he had no idea how good Smith was until Smith was pressed into duty after the team’s starter, Brett Elliott, broke his wrist in the second game of the season. The next week, Smith led Utah to a 31–24 victory over a California team that was led by another underrecruited quarterback named Aaron Rodgers. Two weeks later, Smith piloted the Utes to a four-point win over No. 19 Oregon. By the time Utah finished the season with a 10–2 record, Smith knew the playbook as well as any of his coaches. Meyer trusted him to call most of the plays himself.

  Smith was the marquee talent, but in many ways another player had a more profound effect on the head coach and his wife. He was Marty Johnson, a gifted but deeply troubled running back from Sacramento. Johnson had a previous drunk driving conviction before Meyer got to Utah, so when he was arrested for DUI again during the 2003 season, Meyer’s instinct was to dismiss him. Shelley, however, prevailed upon him to give Johnson another chance. Unlike Urban, she understood the powers of addiction. She worked with addicts all the time, particularly adolescents, her specialty at the University of Utah’s psychiatric hospital. She also taught classes in the school’s nursing program. Shelley pointed out that if Johnson didn’t get his problem under control, someday he could do serious damage, to himself as well as others.