There aren’t many college football coaches whose résumés stack up quite like the one Urban Meyer has built. Over nearly two decades, Meyer became one of the most successful head coaches in the sport, winning multiple championships with different programs.
He’s still one of only four coaches to win a major college football national title with multiple schools. But even with a Hall of Fame career in the rearview mirror, does one of the game’s all-time greats want to return to coaching?
Urban Meyer on Returning to Coaching
Meyer got his first head coaching job at Bowling Green in 2001. By the time he stepped away in 2019, he had led championship teams at, Florida and Ohio State, which followed his successful stint at Utah where the Utes went 12-0 in his second season at the helm (2004). He finished his career with three FBS national titles, plus Big Ten, SEC and Mountain West championships.
After a brief and unsuccessful stint with the Jacksonville Jaguars, Meyer called it quits. Nearly four years later, he opened up about whether he still thinks about returning to the sidelines.
Speaking on the “Run It Back” podcast with Lou Williams, Chandler Parsons and Michelle Beadle, Meyer kept it real. “When I first stepped down from Ohio State, I really struggled with it, even though I knew it was time.”
But today, he doesn’t feel the same way. “Now? Not at all. I mean, zero. I never knew there was a nice life out there.” The biggest reason for that change, he says, is the time he’s been able to spend with family.
“I have a wonderful family, a wife of 35 years, three kids and their spouses, and six grandkids. So, it’s almost like I never took a day off in 38 years. I never one day said, ‘I’m done.’ Because we’d go on a week-long vacation or something, but I’d get up early and I’d work till noon and they knew that was work time.”
Now, Meyer has flipped the script. A devout Roman Catholic, family has always been important to the man Sports Illustrated named Coach of the Decade for the 2000s. He’s been married to Shelley Mather, his college sweetheart from the University of Cincinnati, since 1986.
The couple has three children: Nicole, Gisela and Nathan. Both of his daughters played Division I volleyball — Nicole at Georgia Tech, and Gisela at Florida Gulf Coast. For now, head coach hungry teams will have to look outside of Urban Meyer in their search.