Last Night's Winner: Pat Forde's Hierarchy Of Urban Meyer's Needs

Far and away the bestest genre of sportswriting is the one in which an adult informs a stranger what he should and shouldn't be doing with his career. I give you Pat Forde on Urban Meyer:

If those things are true, and Meyer is ready to enter a rewarding new phase of life as a paternal bleacher creature, watching his three kids play sports, so be it.

[...]

But if Meyer suddenly shows up in Denver to coach Tebow, he's a con man of the highest order. If he changes his mind and comes back to Florida before it hires someone else, he's a diva even Favre would disdain. If he takes another job a year from now, his family will know once and for all where it ranks in his personal hierarchy of needs.

Elsewhere in adult life, leaving a job is rightly reckoned to be a personal decision, made for a complicated mix of personal reasons, some of which may be entirely selfish and mercenary and at odds with whatever outward explanations are given. Very often people regret these decisions and go back on them. This is all pretty normal. In sports, however, folks are held to account by kibitzing journalists who take and leave and re-take and re-leave jobs all the time but who insist on being perpetually and spoon-bangingly 5 years old when it comes to the people they cover. It's the good fortune of sportswriters that when they leave, say, the Louisville for, say, ESPN.com, no one bothers to muse about where their families rank in their hierarchy of needs.

Meyer should have left last season [ESPN]