Ding Dong, the Dublin Dad is Dead

Urban Meyer was used to a world where the head football coach was the baddest hombre in town, and the Jaguars canned his ass for the hubris within a season.

Urban Meyer realized the American Dream as currently construed in the early hours of Thursday morning when Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan agreed to pay him a yet-to-be-determined mountain of money to fuck off and do literally anything else in the world besides return to work.

The boss cutting you an eight-figure check would be a life-altering win for Americans with normal brain chemistry. They would laugh their way out of the office and to the airport, where they would immediately book a one-way, first-class ticket to Titty Island and never be heard from ever again.

But Le Papa de Dublin is an Old Testament kind of pervert. The kind that only feels the faintest flickering of human emotion in his sandstone-smooth brain when he is using Stalinesque manipulation tactics with young men on his football team as a way to lead them in glorious conquest over some other sociopath’s lesser-talented football team.

For him, the chase was never about the money. Just an added bonus.

And who can blame him? From 2001 at Bowling Green to 2018 at Ohio State, his operation hummed with championship adroitness, save for that time he recruited a future serial killer in Florida or that other time he harbored a domestic abuser who moonlit as a shitty, oversexed wide receivers coach in Columbus. He got away with treating people like dirt every step of the way.

He would have gotten away with it, too, had he not left his cushy studio job with FOX Sports to go scratch his pervert itch on the gridiron.

Only this time, he couldn’t take former longtime disciples Mickey Marotti and Mark Pantoni with him, so he curiously decided to take his tinpot dictator game to the NFL and its locker rooms of unionized professional athletes.

Here is what I wrote about Meyer back in August before the Almighty Cleveland Browns faced my newfound second-favorite NFL team in Week 1 of the preseason:

You gotta hand it to Meyer. It’s a win/win for him. Either he becomes a successful coach and joins the fabled pantheon of those to succeed in the NFL and college football or he gets fired and paid all the money owed to him anyway before he ultimately returns to the college level to coach some cursed institution like Southern California or Notre Dame.

He’s going to try to run the same playbook he did in Columbus by trying to “out-culture” the other teams. Only, unlike at Ohio State, he won’t have an athletic advantage over 90% of teams that he plays. He has showed zero signs of adapting, and that’s part of what makes him hilarious.

Give the Dublin Dad this much: He put up Hall of Fame meme numbers in the 11 months he served as head football coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars while doubling their 2020 win total.

I’m not sure a 2-11 IPA will ever be sold at his cursed Dublin restaurant, but it’s a benchmark for Jaguars fans by which to always remember him.

Let’s replay the greatest hits of his tenure. Le Papa de Dublin was unplayable (in the British sense of the world) when it came to producing content:

• The first sign that Meyer had no intentions of changing his “my way or the highway” method of coaching: He hires and attempts to defend said hiring of Chris Doyle, Iowa’s former racist strength coach who almost killed a bunch of players, before relieving him of his duties within weeks. Meyer and the Jaguars were later subpoenaed for records relating to the hiring.

• The NFL fines him $100,000 and the Jaguars another $100,000 and makes them forfeit two future practices after Urban runs the Oklahoma drill and violates league no-contact rules during his first practice.

• Allows 33-year-old Tim Tebow another chance to roleplay as an NFL football player and attend fall camp, thus taking away meaningful reps from somebody who actually could have made the roster.

• After going 0-4 in the preseason and before opening Week 1 against the Houston Texans, NFL insider Jason La Canfora relays that Meyer’s tenure has begun with “tumult and discord” with one source saying Meyer becomes “unhinged too easily.” The Texans, the popular preseason pick to be the worst team in the league as their star quarterback battled sexual assault allegations, go on to beat the Jaguars, 37-21, in a game that was never as close as the score indicates.

• Denver Broncos defensive lineman Dre’Mont Jones, who played under Meyer at Ohio State, says he is “not surprised” by reports of low morale in the Jaguars locker room. “How he coached us was, he didn’t really fuck with you if you weren’t like a player. If you weren’t playing, those conversations didn’t exist.”

• After the Broncos beat the Jaguars, 23-10, Meyer laments to Broncos coach Vic Fangio that “it’s Alabama every week” in the NFL.

• After the Jaguars lose on the last play of the game to the Cincinnati Bengals on Thursday Night Football to fall to 0-4 on the season, The Rooster publishes two videos showing Meyer groping a woman who was not his wife while attending the birthday party of his business partner Chris Corso at Urban Meyer’s Chop House in the Shorth North Arts District of Columbus. Meyer admits he left the team in Cincinnati for a quiet dinner with the grandkids and should have left after being “lured” onto “the dance floor.”

• Meyer’s wife, Shelley, a registered nurse who spent the entire pandemic tweeting coronavirus misinformation, publicly quits Twitter before harassing the mother of the woman in the video by telling her to “get her whore daughter in line.”

• Following Meyer’s apology to the team, an anonymous player tells NFL insider Michael Silver that the coach “has zero credibility within the locker room. And he had little to begin with.” The Jaguars lose the following Sunday to Mike Vrabel, with whom Meyer shares some history, and the Tennessee Titans, 37-19.

• After the loss to fall to 0-5, Meyer says the reason the Jaguars didn’t run a QB sneak at the goal line late in the fourth quarter was because No. 1 overall draft pick Trevor Lawrence “wasn’t quite ready for that yet.” His young pupil immediately refutes that, saying, “The QB sneak is something we can always do and I feel comfortable with.”

• Rival executives say the Jaguars will have “no choice” but to fire Meyer after one season.

• The following Monday, Meyer restates his weekly offensive goal of “250 passing yards and 250 rushing yards,” which is almost statistically impossible in the NFL due to the running clock after first downs.

• The Jaguars win their first game of the season the following Sunday, beating the Miami Dolphins, 23-20, in London. Everyone on Twitter makes the same joke about Meyer burning down area pubs to celebrate his first NFL Win.

• After benching All-Pro running back James Robinson after fumbling early in a 37-7 loss to the Los Angeles Rams, Meyer originally says that was due to Robinson being injured. When asked whey they risked further injury to Robinson by running him late in the game after the result had long been decided, Meyer says that’s a good question and the reporter should go ask running backs coach Bernie Parmalee. Meyer is immediately rebuked by Robinson, quarterback Trevor Lawrence, and other players over the benching.

• Following four straight losses and sitting at 2-10 overall, NFL.com reporter Tom Pelissero says that “tension is boiling over” within the Jaguars facility as Meyer called his assistants “losers” and almost fought mild-mannered veteran wide receiver Marvin Jones after a dispute at practice.

• A Jaguars source tells 247sports.com’s Dean Straka that Jags’ culture is “totally broken.” Another source one adds, “Meyer has repeatedly been caught in lies — lying to players, lying to coaches…”

• The Jaguars lose to the Titans, 20-0, with Meyer looking comatose at best during the post-game handshake. When asked afterwards if his offensive line isn’t playing well enough considering how much they’re getting paid, Meyer pauses before simply responding, “Yeah.”

• Former All-Pro kicker Josh Lambo says Meyer kicked him during preseason warmups, saying, “Make your kicks, dipshit.” When Lambo protested, he says Meyer responded with, “I’m the head coach, and I can kick whoever the fuck I want.”

• Jaguars owner Shad Khan fires Meyer during the midnight hour of Thursday morning.

Get a good look, folks! It’s almost enough to write a book—a book that I would read, by the way —about the most chaotic 11-month coaching reign in NFL history. I’m not kidding when I say that we will never see anything like it.

Contrary to the suave alliteration in the headline, we have not heard the last from Meyer. No, he will take that $80 million and probably return to the studio or become his restaurants’ version of a Wal-Mart greeter.

There will never, after all, be a short supply of Columbus residents who, barring all the evidence otherwise, have no problem rehabilitating Meyer’s image due to all the football games he won for the local team.

Unfortunately for Meyer, there’s still the issue of that pervert itch on his lizard brain. The one that can’t even be scratched by six pints of Bud Light and a young lass who looks much like his wife did 30 years ago.

There is only one way Meyer can satisfy that urge, and it’s as the head football coach. He will do another hiatus, but he will return to the college ranks because his ego will not allow him to end his legendary career in such humiliating fashion.

There are schools that say they won’t hire him, and fans that say they won’t cheer for him. But Meyer will be able to bamboozle some program horny for to taste the sweet opiate of football glory, and their fans will take a bite of the forbidden fruit to delude themselves into thinking Meyer, at long last, has finally learned he can’t get away with treating people like serfs.

It will all be mirage. This is who Meyer is. This is who he always will be. It just took him losing 11 games in a single season for most serfs to realize that.

THOSE WMDs. Plastic and lies: Murder charges expose illegal butt-injection operation… How to talk to people you disagree with… Birds aren’t real, or are they? Inside a Gen-Z conspiracy theory… The softer side of sabercats… How the taxi workers won.