One of the things that you realize while spending an hour carefully tracing around the heads of football coaches is that Urban Meyer has an affinity for squinty, angry looking coworkers.
I guess that's not super surprising; Urban is a frequently angry, frequently squinty coach himself, and probably likes to surround himself with other coaches that have a similar Oscar-the-Grouchian disposition.
Also not surprising is that a large, large number of these coaches have gone on to bigger and somewhat arguably better things once they've reached the end of their time with him. Good coaching rubs off, and Urban is one of the greatest coaches of his generation. A pretty terrible analogy to this is that his assistants are like bumblebees, and once they are fat with the magical coaching pollen that Meyer can provide, they fly off for another destination.
This has been pretty much par for the course during the Meyer era at Ohio State, but it's also something that in the past would've kept me up at night, wondering exactly how terrible and exacting of a coach the dude must be to run people off with such regularity. Past me was weaned on Jim Tressel, a guy who in ten years changed defensive coordinators twice and never changed his offensive coordinator. Keep in mind that that offensive coordinator was named Jim Bollman, and that's one hell of a record when it comes to staff cohesion.
And I used to think that was paramount. When your five year player turnover rate approaches 100%, the line of thinking I had was that it's more important in college football than almost any other sport to have long term consistency on the coaching staff. It helps establish a system, an attitude, that allows for things like Dave somehow working the 57th time it's been called or a defense that can keep you out of Upset City because your offense has only managed two points for the opposite team.
Guys like Bud Foster, Jimbo Fisher, Will Muschamp, and especially Jim Heacock can make the assistant coach seem utterly indispensable to a program. As their area of specialty ends up being the strength of a team, these coaches are looked as just as valuable as the head coach, even moreso if the head coach is a big giant idiot or something.
Urban Meyer isn't a big giant idiot, and doesn't function that way. His coaching tree, already extensive, is getting bigger every year.
Seriously, the list of non-embarrassing assistants of Meyer's that have had their own head coaching gigs is more than a little impressive: Charlie Strong, Steve Addazio, Gary Andersen, Doc Holliday, Dan Mullen, Kyle Wittingham, and I guess if you're gonna throw him might as well Tim Beckman are all big time college coaches who have selfishly left Urban in the lurch by wanting to get paid millions of dollars more than they were making under him.
This is a trend that has continued at Ohio State. I hope Meyer and company will forgive Ohio State fans for being at least a little apprehensive after losing the architect of an offense that rolled over some of the best defenses in college football for the past several years, and the position coach that coached up an 1800 yard rusher that completely dominated the last three games of a National Championship run.
Nobody really expected Tom Herman to stick around Columbus for long (unless they seriously overestimated the appeal of scraping ice off one's car at 6 AM in sub-zero weather), but that loss, the level of which would've sent me into a panic as an undergrad, now has me shrugging sheepishly. I'm not worried about how the loss of Herman will affect the offense; I'm excited about what Ed Warinner will bring to the job.
Stan Drayton's departure, though, tells the real story here. Within days, Meyer had replaced Drayton with one of the best young recruiters and position coaches in the country, Tony Alford. On paper, Alford has made a lateral coaching move, moving from one giant name in college football (Notre Dame) to another and keeping the same job title.
But Alford knows what you and I know: that working for Urban Meyer would one day allow him to become a part of a coaching tree that's really poorly rendered in MS Paint by a sarcastic internet writer. And if that means that in a few scant years we see Alford walking out the door to a MAC school, so be it! All that means is that he kicked enough ass for the Ohio State Buckeyes that others recognized it.
What Meyer has done is turn Ohio State into a true destination for college football's most exciting up-and-coming coaches. Whatever nervousness I used to have about coaching turnover is gone, because I know that next man up now applies to players and staff. If 2014 taught me anything, it's that Ohio State can be very, very successful with that attitude.
