MARGE: Am I cool, kids?
BART and LISA: No.
MARGE: Good. I'm glad. And that's what makes me cool, not caring, right?
BART and LISA: No.
MARGE: Well, how the hell do you be cool? I feel like we've tried everything here!
HOMER: Wait Marge. Maybe if you're truly cool, you don't need to be told you're cool.
BART: Well, sure you do.
LISA: How else would you know?
Urban Meyer is one of the most consistently successful recruiters in recent college football memory; his incoming classes have been excellent, year in and year out. It's one of the major reasons why he was given the Ohio State head coaching job (well, that, and the championships, the ties to the state of Ohio, a legacy of success at a school similar to Ohio State in terms of exposure and pressure, tightly cropped hair that appeals to uptight Ohioans, etc.), and Meyer has proven that not only can he put together a recruiting class filled with players that fit his system, but that he can live up to the often insane expectations placed on those same players by an absolutely rabid fanbase.
Heavy rests the crown and all that, but truthfully Urban Meyer is getting paid a lot of money for those results, and in the pursuit of justifying the roughly 5.9 million dollars he's getting paid each year, Meyer has cultivated an attitude of professionalism and seriousness that permeates everything that he does.
That extends to recruiting, and in the aftermath of a Signing Day that saw Michigan and Ohio State neck and neck in the overall class rankings, Meyer addressed directly some of the shenanigans going on in Ann Arbor:
"No, no, I don't think we'll do that," Meyer told ESPN.com when asked about sleeping at a recruit's house. "But you have to be aware of what your rival is doing at all times. You can't be caught five years behind, and if something is out there, and I'm not going to name any schools, but there are some really good, creative ways of recruiting.
"I'm not talking about the craziness. I'm talking about things of substance."
Okay, that's some serious shade, and here at Eleven Warriors we've had an inordinate amount of fun meticulously cataloging every single one of Jim Harbaugh's foibles since he was hired as Michigan's head coach. And to be sure, a lot of this is because Jim Harbaugh is a crazy person who does weird things, but it's probably honest to say that it's at least in part because of our befuddlement that maybe the insane things that he does actually works.
I was thinking about that this week on the Dubcast when we interviewed Darron Lee. I had asked him what his favorite non-championship football memory at Ohio State was, and he mentioned Urban Meyer doing the Dab. If you don't know what the Dab is, that's literally the point. You're old, Darron Lee isn't, and you will never enter his world of Vine celebrities and dank memes and dances based on rap songs. And that's okay! Look, I'm a high school teacher. I'm privy to all the viral video clips, I know why everyone is running off the plug (twice!), and am way more informed about Fetty Wap than I really feel is necessary.
Still... I'm almost 31. I've reached the age where it has become exponentially more difficult to get in the heads of Kids These Days. I can't tell you why Harbaugh has been so successful as a recruiter (even taking into account various defections and public missteps).
But maybe my students can! To that end, I created a survey designed to reveal the secrets behind both being cool in the eyes of teens and whether advanced recruiting techniques are truly effective. I've recorded some of their answers below.
QUESTION 1: What makes an adult cool? Can an adult ever really be cool?
"Cool glasses."
"Being funny, relateable, not fake, and act as a friend and a superior WHEN NECESSARY."
"Yes. I think their maturity (or as mature as they normally are) makes 'em cool."
"Basically when they're chill."
Okay, I honestly was not expecting these responses. Adults... can be cool? What is this devilry? I resolved to dig deeper.
QUESTION 2: Would a teacher doing the Dab make you more likely to do their homework? What if they started singing Drake lyrics (or whatever musician/band you like)?
"Probably. I have no dancing skills whatsoever, so I think it would be pretty cool/funny."
"NO. I have no idea what 'The Dad' (sic) is."
"Yes, ABSOLUTELY!!"
Okay. Hm. I really expected this to be a kind of "oh no, dad's singing to Damn Yankees again" douchechill, but wrong again! Kids by and large enjoy adults making idiots of themselves to the tune of contemporary music. I'm not sure the level of irony involved here but I feel like after reading this, Ed Warinner had better up his cheeky Instagram game.
Questions 3 and 5 specifically addressed stupid Harbaugh tweets, and again I was left having to re-think all of my smug hot takes about the dude.
QUESTION 3: What if I started class every day with a Nicki Minaj quote? Would that help make me cool?
"Yes, because I LOVE her."
"Yes."
"No. She's more plastic than skin."
Kids like Nicki Minaj, generally. I don't really get it (outside of one killer verse), but the point is that hey, if it fits the finely crafted Twitter persona that you've built for yourself over the course of several years, screw it! Go ahead and retweet ol' Roman Zolanski.
QUESTION 4: Let's say that two businesses want to hire you for the same job at the same pay. One boss is very serious and demands perfection (or you might get fired for a younger, better worker). The other boss also demands perfection and might also fire you for not being as good as someone else, but is silly and climbs trees and says weird stuff. Who do you want to work for and why?
"The 2nd, I don't want a strict boss."
"The one who is silly and climbs trees."
"I'd work for the 2nd guy. It's good having a fun relationship with your boss."
"Silly boss. I'm lonely."
And there you have it. Yeah, to us this question is pretty on the nose, but these kids aren't football fans. Kids like goofy crap, they have always liked goofy crap, and they always will like goofy crap. Harbaugh, for all of this faults, is clearly and empirically more tuned in to the youth of today than Urban Meyer is. Apparently.
QUESTION 5: Is there a term for someone who goes to France, eats at McDonald's, and then posts about it on Twitter?
"Trendy."
"Fun."
"American!"
Dammit.
Part of me is heartened by this survey. My students are a lot more positive and less cynical than I thought they'd be, which I should've expected since they're pretty good kids. I'm glad that they can embrace being weird and dumb, because the loss of an appreciation for the weird and dumb is one of the great tragedies of growing up.
The other, older, crankier part of me is horrified, in part because the survey confirmed something that I'd feared and suspected for a while now: Harbaugh's methods work. So do Urban's, obviously, but that aforementioned "craziness?" Sorry Urban, some kids are all about that; and maybe, in a cutthroat business with rampant oversigning (both ours and theirs), high school recruits have every right to want and even expect a little levity from their potential head coaches. It seems a little unfair to me that even before these players step on campus, 17 and 18 year olds are expected to adhere to an unspoken code of conduct that treats every second of football as Serious Business.
Of course, as always, it comes down to winning. Urban Meyer, with his three rings, can afford to be all business because his is a proven culture that works. Harbaugh won't or can't replicate that attitude, but as long as he can match wits with the Buckeyes, neither Wolverine fans nor recruits will care all that much.
