Former Florida and Ohio State coach Urban Meyer discussed why repeating as national champions is so difficult to do.
Ohio State will have one of the toughest tasks in sports this season. Repeating as national champions. Former coach Urban Meyer knows a thing or two about the topic.
Meyer has never repeated as a national champion, but he’s had three chances at it. Each one has been a learning experience. Some offered a more realistic chance than others.
“Yeah, 2006 we lost the majority of our (Florida) team, and I knew it,” Meyer said on The Joel Klatt Show. “We had a great recruiting class in ’06, but they weren’t quite ready for primetime. That was the (Brandon) Spikes, Percy (Harvin) group. I knew if we could somehow survive that second year the third year we were going to be ridiculous, which we were in ’08. So that’s a little different.”
That was Urban Meyer’s first chance to repeat, following the 2006 national title at Florida. The Gators were very good in 2007, boasting a Heisman Trophy winning quarterback in Tim Tebow. But the defense had been decimated. The team lost four games.
Then the Gators won it all again in 2008. And 2009 actually offered a real chance to repeat.
“In ’08 we had everybody back,” Meyer said. “The entire, I think, two-deep was back. Then in ’14 we won it at Ohio State and we had the majority of the team back. And that’s a little different than Ohio State. They’ve lost a lot.”
Urban Meyer pointed out that simple reality for this year’s Ohio State group. It’s going to be tough with a new starting quarterback and new coordinators on both sides of the ball.
Heck, it’s tough even without those factors. Meyer has stewed over the topic over the years, wondering how he could have done better.
“Mack Brown and I have discussed this at great length. Billy Donovan and I discussed it at great length,” Meyer said. “Then one of the guys that really shed a light on this thing was Joe Maddon, the coach of the Cubs. I went to go see him every year, he’s the manager of the Cubs, he’s just a great guy, we became friends over the years. And he was miserable in 2017. Had the same team back, great players. I think they ran still in first place. And I walk in and I look at him and I can tell, he says, ‘This is awful.’ I’ve been there.”
So what is the biggest challenge to repeating as a national champion? Urban Meyer sums it up simply.
“Everybody changes,” Meyer said. “And everybody wants to point the finger at the players. I did it. The administration’s different. Your fans are different. Your donors are different. Your coaching staff is different. Everybody walks around like something’s changed, we’re a blue-collar team, we’re a blue-collar people, we work our ass off.
“And now we have the answers. I used to say that all the time, say, ‘Oh, I get it now. We have all the answers because we’ve won it.’ Do you realize now we are the target of every team in the country? And I would always try to push it down and it’s hard to do, because everybody changes.”
Bottom line: It’s just really hard to repeat. Urban Meyer knows it. Few coaches have won at as high a level as he has in college football.
But there’s a reason Nick Saban is practically universally regarded as the greatest to ever do it. He’s one of the few to figure out the formula to repeating. Because the numbers? The numbers say it’s virtually impossible.
“That’s exactly what Joe Maddon (said). He actually showed me a piece of paper from NHL, NBA, NCAA basketball, football, all the major sports, how hard it is to repeat,” Meyer said. “It’s low single digits, if I remember right. It was like 2% or something like that of teams ever, in the major sports, repeating.
“And it’s not because you’re losing players a lot, it’s just because the mindset. You go from a prize fighter to a guy that you’re playing defense all the time.”
Category: General Sports
