Keith Strudler: Early Retirement

To be clear, I would be perfectly happy to retire financially secure at the age of 54. I’m guessing most of you regardless of age would agree. And this is not an indictment of my own job or employer, but simply the recognition that being able to decide how you want to spend each of your days without concern of business plans or personal finance is a fairly enviable position. I believe I could find plenty of good ways to productively spend my time without it being in official capacity – and that’s beyond the important tasks of rewatching the full run of Magnum PI, and things like that.

So, from my perspective, there’s no reason to feel sorry for outgoing Ohio State head football coach Urban Meyer. The 54-year-old has been a major Division I head coach for 17 years, including 13 collectively at Florida and Ohio State, two of sport’s blue bloods where resources are only exceeded by expectations. He’s posted an overall record of 186 wins to only 32 losses, including a 90% win record in Columbus. He perhaps single handedly revived a sinking Big 10 Athletic Conference, prompting rival Michigan – who Urban Meyer’s Ohio State has beaten in each of their seven meetings – to up their game with the hiring of Jim Harbaugh. And last but definitely not least, Meyer has won three national titles in his last two jobs, a gaudy record that puts him with the likes of Barry Switzer and Tom Osborne and the handful of coaches that see a championship as simply a starting point. So, not to belabor the point, Urban Meyer will retire at the young age of 54 as one of the most accomplished coaches to ever have walked a sideline.

Despite the above, this commentary will not attempt to place Urban Meyer’s career into historical context, nor argue whether or not today’s coaches have more complex roles than their predecessors, which they do. I won’t even spend time on the more controversial lines on Meyer’s resume, including this season when he was suspended for three games for his handling – or some might say ignoring abuse allegations against one of his assistant coaches. Urban Meyer is a complicated figure, and for as many people who revere him, there will be those that really don’t.

I don’t want to focus on Urban Meyer’s career. I want to focus on its ending. To be clear, this isn’t Meyer’s first retirement. He walked away from coaching in 2010, claiming stress and health concerns and wanting to spend more time with his family. Then like a week later, he was traveling the country for ESPN. And then a year later, he took maybe the most stressful job in college football that isn’t located in the state of Alabama. So there’s a skepticism about the authenticity of Meyer’s current plans and whether 12 months from now we’ll see him on another Division I sideline, or an NFL one for that matter.

But let’s assume for the time being that he’s telling the truth, that after the Rose Bowl, Urban Meyer will never again coach another football game. On the one hand, perhaps that’s one of the virtues of this line of work, at least at places like Florida and Ohio State. Urban Meyer, despite being a state university employee, made more money than most major corporate CEO’s. Top college football salaries rival their professional peers, making the NFL somewhat of a lateral move for university hires.

Along with those dollars comes an enormous, heroic amount of stress. Not the kind of stress that most of us have in our jobs, but the kind of stress that makes you think you might need to go to the hospital after a game. That kind of stress lasts day after day, year after year, in a job where being simply as good as everyone else is guaranteed to get you fired. In a role where doing the impossible – say, winning a national title – is something of an expectation. Where your bosses are everyone from the sitting governor to some guy who listens to the game in his car. And where your success sits squarely in the hands of unpaid 18 to 22 year olds, whose performance may waiver based on something like a math test or breaking up with their girlfriend. That’s the life of an elite college football coach, someone like Urban Meyer, who now is poised to give up what most would consider the best job in the business – and about 15 million dollars of future salary – because it’s just too much.

Perhaps that’s all we really need to know about the state of big time college athletics, a place where the career path often involves getting fired or burning out. All in the name of winning games for the alma matter. Which is why Urban Meyer allegedly is retiring. And why if I were in his shoes, I’d do exactly the same thing.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.