I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss why we decided to publish photos from the 2009 incident in Gainesville involving Zach and Courtney Smith.

We received these photos last week via CD from the Gainesville Police Department. They were sent by mail and not released electronically when Gainesville PD released the incident report and other documents related to the case last month.

At first, we were going to sit on them, but changed course when the national response to Meyer's press conference seemed to be that he enabled an abuser. We did not think that was fair.

We wanted to put them out there with little to no editorial commentary on them to allow readers to draw their own conclusions. Urban Meyer has been steadfast in his position that he had to rely on law enforcement to make the determination that domestic violence took place and although these photos show many things, it's hard to say whether they offer a clear cut, definitive answer as to whether domestic violence took place and who the aggressive party was in this incident. It's enlightening because this is the only incident in which Zach was charged, so you can imagine Meyer trying to parse what took place later in Powell when police and the district attorney declined to press charges.

We thought these photos would speak for themselves and readers would be able to draw their own conclusions, but were alarmed by how many people took this as an attack on Urban Meyer. To us, the photos showed nothing conclusive, supporting Meyer's position. It was important to us that we didn't editorialize or add unneeded commentary to the photos when we released them because that would be irresponsible on our part.

We decided to run them Monday because the saga was already going to be in the news that day anyway due to the 45 minutes Meyer spent answering questions about it in his first game week press conference of the season. We didn't want to put them out last Friday, today, or tomorrow where it could be seen as keeping the story alive.

We're not able to say whether Zach or Courtney is lying. Only the two of them know the absolute truth. One observation worth making is that nobody in the national media jumped on the photos to show how awful Zach Smith and Urban Meyer are. Probably because like so many of these cases, it's messy and there are many sides.