Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer was caught by surprise recently when somebody asked him about his decision to take his team down to Florida next year for a week of spring practice — a decision that, obviously, Meyer has not yet made.
“Someone said, ‘Boy, I saw in the paper you guys are going to Florida,’” Meyer recalled Tuesday after the Buckeyes’ third practice of the spring. “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’”
The confusion stems from Meyer’s answer last week when he was asked at the Tim Tebow Golf Classic if he would consider doing what Michigan and head coach Jim Harbaugh did recently when the Wolverines spent a week of spring practice in Bradenton, Florida at IMG Academy.
“I think it’s creative,” Meyer said then. “I always worry about taking their spring break from it. … But I’m looking into it for next year and maybe the future, too, because it’s creative and if it’s good for the players we would probably do it.”
On Tuesday, however, Meyer backtracked a bit from those comments saying, “Someone stuck a microphone in my face and I said that.”
“Would we look into it? We look into everything,” Meyer said. “But I can’t see taking spring break away from players. That doesn’t mean we don’t research it and keep an eye on it.”
Meyer didn’t totally rule it out the move as a possibility, but he certainly downplayed the idea.
“We look into everything, but we wouldn’t take their free time from them,” he said. “If there’s someway to do something like that that helps the players, we’d look into it.”
