How College Football May Have Changed If Urban Meyer Went to Notre Dame & Week 4 Picks

On Dec. 4, 2004, with his Utah Utes team having just completed a perfect regular season and becoming the first non-Bowl Championship Series representative invited to a BCS bowl, Urban Meyer was introduced as Florida Gators head coach.

Meyer’s hire at a Florida program less than a decade removed from winning a national championship signaled a crescendo in a meteoric rise through the profession. Just two years earlier, the coach was at Bowling Green, but parlayed his innovative offensive approach into the talk of college football by 2004.

On Dec. 12, 2004, another celebrated offensive mind was introduced as head coach at Notre Dame: Charlie Weis.

Weis coordinated a pair of Super Bowl-winning offenses for the New England Patriots, with the organization nearing its third championship in five years on the strength of one of the NFL’s most prolific offenses.

Meyer’s path to Florida and Weis’ to Notre Dame crossed in that Meyer, a Fighting Irish assistant as the program transitioned from Lou Holtz to Bob Davie, was a rumored target of the Golden Domers. Meyer instead opting for Florida left the vacancy in South Bend Weis filled.

Their careers intertwined again six years later when Meyer, with a pair of national championships en tow, abruptly stepped down in Gainesville and Gators successor Will Muschamp tabbed Weis to oversee the Florida offense.

Meyer resurfaced a year later as head coach at Ohio State, where in 2014, he coached the Buckeyes to the first College Football Playoff championship.

It might be reactionary to declare Meyer’s arrival in Columbus spared Ohio State from slipping into a period of sustained mediocrity akin to Michigan’s from the late 2000s into the mid-2010s. Still, coming off a sub-.500 finish and facing NCAA sanctions, Ohio State winning a national championship just three years removed from its 6-7 finish was a remarkable feat.

Meyer’s successor, Ryan Day, oversees the Buckeyes in a Week 4 visit to Notre Dame. The top 10 showdown is something of a defining matchup for both programs: After losses to rival Michigan in consecutive years that threaten Ohio State’s place among the national elite, Day is looking for a signature win that sets the 2023 Buckeyes on a Playoff course.

Likewise, Notre Dame looks to prove itself worthy of consideration among the top tier. The Fighting Irish have reached the Playoff twice since the format’s inception, but blowout losses to Clemson in 2018 and Alabama in 2020 woke up the echoes repeated for the last few decades: This is a program riding on an ancient reputation.

To be clear, the Notre Dame teams under Brian Kelly — tasked with picking up the pieces after the Charlie Weis era bottomed — were significantly more deserving of their opportunities than the 2000s Irish squads that gained BCS bids, only to be flattened by Oregon State in 2000; LSU in 2006; and Ohio State in 2005.

But following the 2020 season’s “Rose Bowl” Game semifinal played in Arlington, Texas, Kelly lamented programs like Alabama could reach a gear Notre Dame simply hadn’t been able. His comments lingered when Kelly bolted for LSU a year later.

It hasn’t just been the lights of the postseason in which Notre Dame’s faltered. The Irish’s highest-profile regular-season games that might have reestablished the program nationally — Florida State in 2014, Georgia in 2017, Michigan in 2019, for example — they’ve fallen short.

And it’s a trend going back at least as far as that 2005 season when Notre Dame nearly hired Urban Meyer.

Ohio State has been one of those rare programs with that extra gear, manifested in a National Championship Game appearance the same year as Kelly’s foreshadowing commentary about Notre Dame and the 2014 title won under Meyer.

In the same way that Meyer’s hire at Ohio State possibly prevented the Buckeyes from slipping into also-ran territory, it’s worth considering had he taken the Notre Dame job in 2004 that the Fighting Irish would have similarly rejoined the top echelon of the sport in short order.

Now, why exactly Meyer opted for Florida when he called Notre Dame his “dream job” — including during his run to a second BCS title coaching the Gators — isn’t easy to parse.

Such is often the case when trying to parse fact from fiction regarding Meyer.

One popular theory is that Meyer regarded Florida as in better position to immediately contend for championships. While that may have been a factor, Notre Dame finished the 2005 season with a better regular-season record — 9-2 to Florida’s 8-3 — and its two losses coming by a combined six points.

Most infamous of the two defeats for a variety of reasons was the 34-31 classic against rival USC, a game so incredible it apparently made Notre Dame brass lose all touch with reality. The university athletic department signed Weis to a 10-year extension immediately after, which became a millstone around a leprechaun’s neck for the ensuing decade.

Had Urban Meyer followed his supposed “dream” and gone to Notre Dame, it’s not a stretch to assume the Fighting Irish don’t lose to a John L. Smith-coached Michigan State team prior to the Bush Push.

It’s not as simple as to say Urban Meyer was a superior coach to Charlie Weis and thus of course the Irish win a game vs. USC with Meyer that they lost under Weis. Notre Dame in reality played a near-perfect contest against one of the greatest teams ever assembled.

But had a Meyer-coached Fighting Irish held Matt Leinart out of the end zone and sealed the win, and thus a perfect regular season with a berth in the BCS Championship Game, the college football landscape changes dramatically for the next 20 years.

A more experienced and arguably more talented Notre Dame roster the next year — which lost regular-season blowouts to Michigan and USC under Weis — may well have found itself in the spot Meyer’s second Florida landed: Beating Ohio State in the BCS Championship Game.

To be clear, I cannot envision a scenario in which the notoriously restless and scandal-plagued Meyer would have fulfilled a contract extension through 2015 signed after the 2005 USC game.

But if Notre Dame had entered the early 2010s already at the pinnacle of the sport, there is no looming gap to be bridged.

Week 4 marks another opportunity for the Fighting Irish to narrow the gap. Notre Dame is a three-point underdog under the watchful eye of Touchdown Jesus against an Ohio State team with more question marks than any Buckeyes squad since Meyer’s 2012 debut.