Reggie Bush's comments on recruiting Urban Meyer to USC certainly made the rounds yesterday. Garner so much attention, did they, that the point I arrived at -- here are two recent USC Heisman winners treating the firing of USC's active head coach as something of a foregone conclusion -- seemed to dawn on the people making it.
Reached by Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports, Bush and Leinart had this to say:
"Me recruiting Urban Meyer?" Bush said. "I'm still trying to learn college football."
"We're all good. … [Bush's comments were] taken out of context," Leinart told CBS Sports. "I like Clay. I really like him. There's a lot of pressure on him. I think he's doing the best he can. We'll see what happens. I support him."
But let's roll back to the man in question here, Urban himself. What does he have to say about being USC's next head coach?
“I believe I’m done but I’ve also learned to just live in the moment,” Meyer told the Los Angeles Times. “I love what I’m doing and I hope I do this for a long time.”
I believe I'm done, he says. Learned to just live in the moment, he says.
To be fair, this has been Meyer's consistent response ever since he announced he was walking away in December -- and it's an honest one. Meyer left football, for the second time, because it became apparent he could no longer coach while living a healthy life.
At the same time, Meyer has yet to prove he can actually live without coaching football. He hasn't proven it to us and, far more importantly, he hasn't proven it to himself.
His time off hasn't been idle. He's teaching a class at Ohio State. He's an assistant athletics director at Ohio State, offering counsel to the active Buckeye coaches. And when the fall rolls around, he'll work as a studio analyst for FOX... where he'll spend hours each Saturday watching football with Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart.