Giger: Meyer is the loser

ALTOONA, Pa. -- I was all set to write a column this morning about how I really can't stand national signing day, because it overhypes high school kids to such a massive degree that I'm just not comfortable with any of it. I'll get to the meat of that column in a bit.

Because when I woke up at 2:55 a.m. to get a drink of water, I checked my phone real quick and saw the news that broke overnight. The good news. The hilarious news.

Urban Liar has been fired by the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Hahahahaha!

I have long called him Urban Liar on my daily radio show, because that's really what Urban Meyer truly is -- a serial liar.

A guy who tries to portray a holier-than-thou image, but in reality is a slimeball.

A loser, despite what his record says about him as a coach.

I always think back to this video 11 years ago of Meyer, then the coach at Florida, ripping Orlando Sentinel reporter Jeremy Fowler for doing his job reporting a story. Notice how Meyer calls Fowler "a bad guy" and threatens to fight him, while the reporter handles himself with class the entire time.

The irony of the video is that Fowler is the one with great integrity in the sportswriting world -- he now works for ESPN -- while Meyer is the "bad guy" who has very little integrity left.

Meyer lied and weaseled his way through the Zach Smith domestic violence scandal at Ohio State three years ago. The way he handled that situation was rife with problems, as you can see here, and all of that painted Meyer as a win-at-all-costs coach who had zero interest in looking for or revealing the truth.

Let me stop right here and point out that, yes, any time a Penn State writer criticizes any other school or coach of anything, some people will circle back to what happened with Joe Paterno at Penn State. I'm fully aware that will always be the case, and for anyone who stumbles upon this story and isn't aware, I was then and always have been critical of Paterno for how he handled that disgusting situation. I just want to make that clear because I know there will be some people who bring that up in the comments section. They always do.

With that said ...

Urban Liar is just a phony. A fraud. He tries to present himself one way -- as a great leader -- but in reality, the more you learn about him, his character and the way he treats other people, the more he just becomes an unlikable person.

This is how the great leader Meyer treated his assistant coaches with the Jaguars, calling them losers.

This is how he treated a Jaguars kicker, by kicking him.

“I’m in a lunge position. Left leg forward, right leg back,” Josh Lambo told the Tampa Bay Times. “Urban Meyer, while I’m in that stretch position, comes up to me and says, ‘Hey Dips***, make your f***ing kicks!’ And kicks me in the leg.”

Lambo went on to say, "It certainly wasn’t as hard as he could’ve done it (kicked), but it certainly wasn’t a love tap. Truthfully, I’d register it as a five (out of 10). Which in the workplace, I don’t care if it’s football or not, the boss can’t strike an employee. And for a second, I couldn’t believe it actually happened. Pardon my vulgarity, I said, ‘Don’t you ever f***ing kick me again!’ And his response was, ‘I’m the head ball coach, I’ll kick you whenever the f*** I want.’ "

Urban Liar, of course, claimed Lambo's characterization of what happened was "completely inaccurate." But he lies all the time, so why should anyone believe him in any situation?

Oh, and there also was this from the kicker Lambo, in the Tampa Bay Times story:

Then Lambo was approached by head coach Urban Meyer, who wasn’t calling Jaguars specialists by their names.

“It was ‘Kicker, Punter, Long snapper,’ ” Lambo said. “Or S***bag, Dips*** or whatever the hell it was."

You can watch Lambo describe the situation below.

Who treats people that way?

A bad guy.

A loser.

A coach who should be unemployed, and now is after one embarrassing situation after another in Jacksonville.

One big issue I have is that there will be some TV network out there -- probably FOX, where he worked before -- which now can't wait to give Urban Liar another job as a college football analyst. I would be stunned if he's not back on the airwaves again next season, regardless of his credibility being destroyed, because he is still a huge name in college football despite all of the nonsense he has pulled.

Then again, perhaps Meyer will just go away this time and spare us from having to listen to anymore of his lies.

MY LEAST FAVORITE DAY
OF THE SPORTS YEAR

As I mentioned earlier, my plan was to write a column about how I dislike national signing day. It goes along with my feeling that our sporting society now places so much emphasis on college football recruiting that the whole thing really makes me uncomfortable.

I'm not going to be a hypocrite here. I wrote two stories on signing day Wednesday (get to know recruits from Penn State and also Pitt), plus took part in our live file. Covering recruiting is part of my job. I have to do it, and it is EXTREMELY important. I get that. But if you check out my stories, you'll see I took the simple approach of just revealing who signed and some details about each player, as opposed to going on and on with coaches saying how great these guys are.

I'll admit it's not great recruiting coverage, but I believe the simpler approach is the better way to go about it. And as always, I try to be honest and transparent here with regards to why I'm covering something a certain way.

Now, one thing I will make clear is I am a big believer that football truly is not about the X's and the O's, it's the Jimmys and the Joes. Because you can have the greatest X's and O's in the history of the world, but if you don't have enough good players, you're not going to win in football.

My issue with recruiting is that we -- and I mean both sports media and fans -- blow up high school kids to such a degree that I believe it does more harm than good when it comes to the sense of entitlement that runs rampant in sports nowadays.

These kids get so much exposure at 15 or 16 years old through recruiting, and it's always bothered me because I just don't believe the world should be set up to stroke the egos of kids that young with massive attention from media and fans.

We've got colleges, including Penn State, now regularly making scholarship offers to kids in 8th grade. That kid could be 13 years old, for crying out loud, but it's become so common now that no one even seems to bat an eye when it happens.

All because we've come to understand that coaches must get involved with a recruit as early as possible in order to try and build a relationship there before other schools do.

What happens, then, is that college coaches have to build these young players up so much during the recruiting process in order to land their services that a lot of kids get to college and have to be brought back down to earth about how hard they'll have to work to succeed. It's called de-recruiting, and it's a big part of the learning process that we rarely hear much about.

Now you add in the transfer portal, which allows players to leave for any reason, and it's creating a tricky situation where so many young men become impatient having to sit out for a year or two because they're not ready to play that they decide to move on, thinking the grass will be greener on the other side.

Is it any wonder WHY so many kids feel so entitled that they think they should get to play more, after all the hype they received during the recruiting process from coaches and fans blowing smoke up their rear ends?

Back in the day, recruiting lists were hard to come by, and only a select few outlets had access to them or could really get much information on prospects. Now, with social media, everybody knows nearly everything about a lot of recruits because they have become, in all honesty, public figures.

Has anyone stopped to wonder if all of this is truly good for the recruits? No, because the adults are too busy making tons of money through recruiting coverage, which has blown up a million fold over the past two decades, and the kids are too busy enjoying being celebrities at 16 years old.

Maybe I'm an old fart who's being too cynical, but a lot of that just bothers me.

Some of this will come across as a rant against recruiting in general, but so be it. Here are some random thoughts:

* Matt McGloin was a ZERO star recruit. Nobody wanted him as a scholarship quarterback. He brought a mountain-sized chip on his shoulder to Penn State, had a nice college career helped out by the arrival of Bill O'Brien in 2012, then went on to start seven games in the NFL over the course of four seasons.

* Christian Hackenberg was a 5-star recruit who had a very inconsistent career at Penn State and never played a down in the NFL, despite being a second-round pick.

* No one wanted Trace McSorley as a quarterback, except for James Franklin, who offered him a scholarship while at Vanderbilt and then brought the kid to Penn State. McSorley is one of the great success stories in Penn State history and has gone on to the NFL.

* Rob Bolden, Paul Jones and Kevin Newsome were all 4-star quarterback recruits who never panned out. Then there's Ta'Quan Roberson, a 4-star recruit who at times looked like he had never played football during the Iowa game and just entered the transfer portal.

* So you see, no matter how many recruiting stars Drew Allar has or how much hype there is around him, my default position is to be skeptical of a quarterback and wait until I actually see him accomplish something in college before I'm willing to heap praise on him.

If you've followed my Penn State coverage at all in recent months, you've probably noticed that I've been reluctant to just assume Allar will become a superstar and that I believe he should have to sit for a year to learn, even though many fans want to see him thrown into the action right away in 2022. If you go back and consider what I wrote about all of those other quarterbacks up above, you should be able to see how I came upon my current mindset.

* There's also the way adults interact with recruits on social media that can be disturbing. Fans heap praise on a kid if he's interested in their school, but will turn on the kid in a heartbeat and start criticizing him if the young man doesn't commit to the school. It's pathetic. But it all comes with the territory once these kids, again, become public figures.

* Now we're into the age of name, image and likeness, which adds a whole new chapter to this recruiting stuff. Now these kids can go wherever they will make the most money, which is perfectly fine and well within their rights, but you have to wonder if the decision will be the best thing for their futures.

The nation's No. 1 recruit, cornerback Travis Hunter, flipped from Florida State on Wednesday and made the stunning announcement that he's going to play for Deion Sanders at Jackson State. The scuttlebutt is that Hunter is getting a massive NIL payday of $1 million or more from his decision to go to Jackson State. Hopefully it all works out for him, because while that's a lot of money, he could miss out on even more NFL money down the road because of his decision.

* Lastly, there's the Jaishawn Barham situation between South Carolina and Maryland. This one really smacks of entitlement and deception and selfishness, but hey, it's just the kind of nonsense that's going to be happening in recruiting going forward.

This is from The State in South Carolina, and it's a doozy:

When four-star linebacker Jaishawn Barham signed with Maryland on Wednesday’s early signing day, the news came as a surprise to anyone who follows South Carolina recruiting. 

It didn’t surprise USC head coach Shane Beamer.

Barham, a linebacker from District Heights, Maryland, had announced his public commitment to the Gamecocks on Saturday — in a ceremony in which he, his family and other supporters were all wearing South Carolina apparel — before flipping to the Terrapins on Wednesday. But Beamer said he had reason to believe Barham’s commitment over the weekend wasn’t a firm one.

“I can’t say that it’s a surprise,” Beamer said during his Wednesday news conference. “When this particular young man committed on Saturday, about 10 minutes later, I got a phone call from somebody in the know up there that said, ‘Just so you know, it’s all part of the plan. He’s going to flip on Wednesday and go to Maryland.'"

All part of the plan. To play schools and coaches, keep them guessing until the very end and then make a dramatic announcement that stuns everyone.

Should we be surprised that a high school kid would pull something like that?

Hell no. In fact, I'm surprised it took this long for it to happen.