Michigan State football: Hiring Urban Meyer isn’t a slam dunk on the field

While it may seem to be a slam-dunk hire, if Michigan State football were to hire Urban Meyer, success isn’t a guarantee.

There are about eight weeks until Michigan State football needs to announce its newest head coach. The hire won’t prove to be a home run until years from now, but it can prove to be a failure if the athletic department and Board of Trustees get this one wrong.

A lot of bigger names have been mentioned in regards to this opening, one of those names is a familiar one to MSU fans.

Urban Meyer.

The current FOX analyst’s reputation speaks for itself, depending on whether you like him or not. Polarizing is certainly a fitting word to describe him. The recent Netflix documentary that left a lot out of his time at the Florida Gators gave the feeling he was priming the market to keep his name out there. With the chance of Meyer to East Lansing being something greater than zero at this moment, I would like to take stock in what hiring Urban Meyer means for Michigan State on field. Most believe it will be a slam-dunk no brainer, but I’m hesitant to see it.

Meyer does have multiple national championships, multiple SEC and Big Ten championships, and has lost fewer games between 13 seasons at Florida and Ohio State than Mel Tucker had in less than four seasons. There is no disputing the fact that he has won in his previous stops.

But here is where some of my first concerns start to bloom. Is he still really a “winner”?

Urban last coached college football in 2018, before NIL, before the portal era. There’s a joke in here somewhere about Rocky Lombardi being at MSU last time Urban was coaching college football. Urban, like many college coaches love total and complete control of their program. One of the many reasons Urban wilted at Jacksonville in 2021 was that players are far more autonomous and the head coach is not the “head guy” in the NFL. Even as the offensive mind he is, Jacksonville still ranked 27th in overall offense, 22nd in passing offense, and last in points per game offensively. I know, I know the NFL is different than college football in scheme and operations, but Saban at least lasted two years in Miami before returning to college (one of those was a winning season, too).

Outside of what Urban did when he wasn’t at the team facility, Jags players cited player mistreatment (ultimately leading to Urban’s firing) and the hiring decisions were meh at best, especially the hiring of Chris Doyle,  the former Iowa coach who was fired for racist accusations and discrimination among black athletes in the Hawkeye football program.

The tire fire in Jacksonville should not be dismissed because it was Urban’s first and only season on an NFL sidelines, modern college football is mirroring more and more to be like the NFL, especially in terms of recruiting departments and front office staffing. College football has shifted towards the NFL in player autonomy as well. How will Urban handle it? Sure, Urban has voiced support of players receiving NIL while in school, but he at least publicly voiced concerned using NIL as inducements to recruits, calling it “cheating”. Sure, it is cheating, but that hasn’t stopped many others from doing it, and the irony of Urban saying this is rich given what he’s allowed happen at his programs.

Urban is known for his “inner circle” guys, and his mindset of treating his superstars like superstars and his role players like… a little less than superstars. Is this a strategy that would work in the portal era? Even Urban thinks he’d have to change. Earlier this May, he said on his podcast when discussing Deion Sanders’ portal turnover at Colorado:

“Then I’m also trying to wrap my head around players being told just to leave. We’ve all been as a coach, you know, I wouldn’t be truthful to say there weren’t times I wanted to tell players to leave, but you just really can’t do that. You can make it hard on them and make them either improve or they leave.”

Player attrition will forever be the norm in the portal era, and guys will leave if they don’t think they’re of value to the program. Some view that as a positive, but how do you maintain a sustainable culture of success unless you can prove proof of concept immediately?

Urban Meyer’s first Michigan State football class in East Lansing would be the 2025 class. The players in that class were either filling their diapers or not even alive when Urban and Tim Tebow won two national titles at Florida, and were 10 years old when Urban won the first College Football Playoff era national title. Who is Urban Meyer in the eyes of these recruits? Do they see him as the man lifting trophies, or the one laughing and joking with Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart on Saturday mornings?

Potential candidate Kansas head coach Lance Leipold has been critiqued by some in the fanbase as a viable candidate due to his age.

He is two months older than Urban Meyer.

A man like Leipold has proven he can turn around a college football “have not” into a respectable program in this era of college football. Urban can’t.  Urban Meyer took over a Bowling Green program and jumpstarted his coaching career by rocketing them to success, and did the same at Utah. However his last two stops were not the rebuilds like it will be in East Lansing. Meyer took over a Florida team in 2005 that had not had a losing since 1979. Outside of the Luke Fickell interim season where the Buckeyes still managed to make a bowl game, Ohio State had not had a losing season since the first year of John Cooper in 1988 when Meyer took over OSU in 2012. Meyer can ascend a team to national title heights, but Ohio State had won a national title in 2002 under Tressel, and Florida won in 1996 with Steve Spurrier. These were not programs trying to build from the ground up, they were trying to make the final step.

Is Urban capable of rebuilding this Michigan State football program?

If he is, he’ll have to do it without the names he did it with before. Tom Herman, Mike Vrabel, Greg Schiano, and Fickell aren’t coming to be assistants under Meyer anytime soon. Charlie Strong and Dan Mullen likely aren’t guys that would leave their current jobs either. Do you really want guys like Steve Addazio and DJ Durkin on the staff? Personally, that is less than exciting to me. Assuming he’ll get names because he is Urban Meyer might not be the wisest decision.

I don’t believe success is guaranteed on the field if Michigan State football hires Urban Meyer, there are many questions that need to be answered on how Urban would do in so many areas. We have those answers with other coaching candidates. Even all of this is before you discuss the health issues, the behavior, the scandals, and whatever off-field issues you can think of. College football is full of morally absent individuals, one of them took MSU’s starting quarterback this past offseason.

If the administration wants to hire Urban Meyer, it’ll be because they wanted to and are willing to look past the transgressions or refuse to look at them at all in trading for on-field success. I am incredibly skeptical that Urban is still a winner.

Besides, if you’re going to hire a man based off his success of 10-plus years ago, why not just re-hire Mark Dantonio?