There was a long article on Urban Meyer in yesterday's Tribune (I didn't buy it, someone left the sports section sitting on the seat on my train). I won't bore you with the whole article, but here is a small piece of it when they discussed the BCS:
Meyer usually counts to 10 before saying anything about the BCS, but on this day he's ready to cut loose.
"It's a failed system," he says. "I think it has to go to a playoff, but I don't know it well enough. Give me three months and let me prepare and I could come up with something."
It's not that Meyer dislikes bowl games. What he hates is the way the teams are selected. He calls the conference tie-ins "garbage."
In his first year as a head coach, Meyer coaxed Bowling Green into a six-victory improvement. But at 8-3, his Falcons were not invited to a bowl.
The next season they went 9-3, 6-2 in the Mid-American Conference, and were home for Christmas.
"My kids at Bowling Green, if you told them they'd have to walk down the freeway 27 hours [to get to a bowl game], they would have done it," Meyer says. "To have the seventh-place Big Ten team [go instead]? Why?
"I'm not a big fan of conference commissioners, I'm not a big fan of university presidents, I'm not a big fan of sponsorship. I am a big fan of the student-athlete."
When Meyer was coaching wide receivers at Notre Dame in 1997, he recalls, "there wasn't one player, one coach, one fan, anyone" who wanted to play in the Independence Bowl. But the Irish still went and got spanked by LSU 27-9.
Last year Northern Illinois was 7-0 and ranked 12th after victories over Maryland, Alabama and Iowa State. But after late-season losses to Bowling Green and Toledo, the Huskies' season ended without a bowl.
"That's what makes me so sick," Meyer says. "As a coach, I can tell you that Northern Illinois is better than the BCS [teams]. I played against them."
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Urban Meyer Showing Some Huskie Love
