Then-Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer on Dec. 5, 2021, in Inglewood, Calif. | AP Photo, Kyusung Gong, File
Published on January 4, 2026 at 12:15 pm
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Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to spend his lame duck period proving what a great sports fan he is.
It’s very quickly veering into pastiche and self-parody, however.
After spending the last few months talking about golf and the college football playoffs even while staying silent as a groyper runs to succeed him, America’s Governor outdid himself to close out 2025 by picking Urban Meyer, the most universally reviled and loathsome figure in Jacksonville Jaguars history, to — get this — serve as a trustee at New College.
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New College was once upon a time the state’s honors college, a place where people went for alternatives to the education on offer at the bigger schools.
Now, of course, the “woke” has been purged, as have many of the academic standards, as DeSantis has turned the Sarasota institution into a knockoff of conservative Hillsdale College, though with sports teams now.
While the politics are conservative, the spending has been profligate.
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According to Florida’s Department of Governmental Efficiency, the school is spending more than $83,000 per student — which is more money than many of those reading this column on their work breaks make, and roughly seven times the per capita spend at the University of Central Florida.
It will be interesting to see what Urban Meyer has to say about that, of course, given his uniquely problematic record while making millions to make a mockery of the Jags during the abbreviated season he spent helming the franchise in 2021, a tenure that felt like nothing so much as long COVID.
And like long COVID, the consequences are long-lasting. It really took until this year, when Liam Coen’s culture took hold, to purge the last taste of vomit and regret that was the Urban Meyer experience.
The most viscerally disgusting moment happened after the Jags played in Ohio in October.
The season was already slipping away, and Meyer decided to let the team travel home without him, so he could hang back in his home state to “see the grandkids” and get handsy at a bar with a woman half his age, getting away from the NFL grind with a grind of his own.
He called that a “distraction.”
Then there was the time he kicked Jags kicker Josh Lambo, who was a beloved member of the team before the coach decided to assert dominance against him with “Hey dips***, make your f***ing kicks!”
There are plenty more stories about that toxic lost season, of course, that call into question whether Meyer should be anywhere near the Florida university system.
But this quote from a former wideout says it all.
“He feels like threats are what motivates,” D.J. Chark said. “I know he would come up to us and tell us if the receivers weren’t doing good, he wasn’t going to fire us, he was going to fire our coach.”
Those defending Meyer might have arguments like “Sure, he didn’t make it in the pros, but what about his college career?”
Let’s review the circumstances under which he left the University of Florida and Ohio State then, as they don’t make him look any better, despite winning three national titles along the way.
His Gainesville goodbye was allegedly for health reasons and to spend more time with family. That rationale was proven to be a lie when he took the job in Columbus less than a year after his final chomp. But his legacy was sealed, if an article at the time called “How Urban Meyer broke Florida football” is meaningful.
On the bright side, only 30 players he coached were arrested during his six year tenure, meaning far more managed to stay out of jail thanks to his brand of moral guidance. Some alums, such as Aaron Hernandez, went on to even more epic legal entanglements after joining the NFL, of course.
He left Ohio State amid yet another ethical cloud, after having been suspended for a few games for trying to paper over a domestic violence probe against an assistant coach between 2015 and 2018.
That coach was a former graduate assistant of Meyer’s at UF and reportedly “was arrested in 2009 for allegedly jamming his pregnant wife into a wall” back then.
This is, of course, just a high-level overview of the scummy, sleazy, and sordid history of a man who might know football but who has demonstrated, time and again, a commitment to sociopathic self-regard that makes him uniquely ill-suited to be a university trustee.
Confirmation ultimately is up to the Florida Senate. None of them are young, and all of them know this history, and if they have any moral grounding, they will ensure that Meyer is never allowed to influence students in this state again.
