Ohio State football: Former HC Urban Meyer has controversial hire

The former Ohio State football coach is now the head coach in Jacksonville and he has just hired a controversial coach who used to work in the Big Ten.

Urban Meyer did great things as the head coach of the Ohio State football team. He went undefeated in the regular season twice, won a national championship, and put the Buckeyes back on the map. He was an all-time great head coach.

That doesn’t mean he didn’t have controversy around him. The whole reason Ryan Day is now the head coach is because Meyer lied about knowing whether or not former receivers coach Zach Smith had domestic issues with his wife. He has recruited players at Florida too who had questionable pasts.

Now Meyer has controversy swirling around him again in Jacksonville. He has hired Chris Doyle as the Director of Sport Performance for the Jaguars. Doyle was formerly the Head Strength and Conditioning coach at the University of Iowa for 20 years before leaving this season.

The reason he left is what’s causing the issue. Doyle was named by several former black players as having a racial bias against them and calling them names. He also was accused of belittling black players and making them do more work than white players.

Meyer said that he vetted the hire and made sure that he was comfortable with everything before he hired Doyle, but it doesn’t seem that he has learned his lesson. There’s a reason that Doyle was not retained after 20 years under Kirk Ferentz. These allegations clearly had some merit.

If Meyer had learned his lesson from the Smith debacle, he would have steered clear of Doyle. There are plenty of other coaches who have the qualifications for this job that don’t have the baggage that Doyle has. This is just an unforced error.

We’ll see how the hire works out once the season rolls around, but the optics aren’t good. Jaguars players can’t feel too good about this hire.