A day after winning the Big Ten Championship, Urban Meyer, as he often does during his press conferences, delved into a stream of consciousness when reflecting on the journey that had yielded Ohio State its first conference title in five years and a prized spot in the upcoming College Football Playoff.
“That doesn’t happen without the leadership of these guys that usually sit in the front row and they’re called seniors,” Meyer said, pointing from the podium a couple feet away. “Usually, I don’t make a big deal out of seniors, but this is a big deal.”
Perhaps no player is more emblematic of such a compliment than senior captain and defensive tackle Michael Bennett, who immediately came to Meyer’s racing mind.
"He just finished his best three weeks as a Buckeye; I don’t know how he played — I think he played pretty good — but I’m not talking about that,” he said.
“I’m talking about his development as a leader and a guy that I can count on. A guy that doesn’t whine and moan and complain about stuff because that’s kind of how he got through it in the old days and that’s not the case at all right now."
For starters, the moment is as interesting as it is newsworthy.
Though Meyer has built a reputation for being honest — and sometimes excessive, brutally so — about his players’ on-field endeavours, he is subdued when it comes to internal affairs like most major college football coaches or any major organization for that matter. Nonetheless, the instant peels back a curtain.
“It’s well-documented that there was a lot of friction when Coach Meyer got here,” Bennett said Thursday. It's here where the relationship between a head coach and one of his key players is brought to light, even if was done unintentionally and innocuously.
"I was hard-headed, young," Bennett said.
Even so, Bennett has long been trotted out for interviews as an ambassador of sorts for Meyer’s Ohio State, a rock-solid and triumphant example of someone's who's successfully mastered the duality of being a student and an athlete. After all, he's the son of military parents who molded him into the articulate, thoughtful, intelligent and independent 20-something-year-old he is today. And maybe that's why there was this friction with Meyer and his vision in the embryonic stages of their relationship.
“I don’t appreciate people thinking they have control over my life. I’ve been raised to think for myself and I’ve been raised to not be a follower," Bennett said.
"You can go into high school as a sophomore and be a leader, in college you have to take that follow role when you’re younger. That was new to me and that’s why it was so hard for me early in college, but now that I’ve been through that and I’m ready for that and I’ve experienced it before.
"I know I’ve grown a lot, I don’t rebel just for the sake of rebelling anymore. That’s an 18-year-old thing to do. At 21 or 22, you have to understand that there are times when someone is trying to commit an injustice and other times where they are just trying to make you better.”
Bennett said figuring that out took time.
"All the situations that I was pushed into helped me to grow. All and all, you have to make that decision yourself. I was fortunate enough to have those hard situations that made me realize that it’s not always good to rebel because someone told you to do something, or rebel because you didn’t really want to do it," Bennett said. "Usually the hard path is the right path. The harder things are, that’s probably the right decision. That’s a weird realization to come to, but once you realize that, if something comes easily you might want to change what you’re doing.”
And when it all clicked, Bennett emerged as a decided leader for an Ohio State team playing its best football late in the season.
"You got some guys you didn't think would be who they are now," senior wide receiver Devin Smith said. "Guys like Mike Bennett; we all know how good he was. Having a coaching staff like Coach Meyer’s staff came in and really brought the dog out of them."
First, though, Bennett had to let them.
