Whenever I see people besiege "the media," I'm reminded we are a people that always want things to be easy. "The media" is not a thing, other than a vague idea we can feel distain for. Was the whole of sports media, in unison calling for the man's head? I don't think so. There was some, to be sure. There was a lot of wondering if it would topple him. We often see the wondering as something far more because it is our nature to react with wild swings. There's 11 fraught pages here. Even folks waiting for the facts to come out are hardly sanguine. They're often aggressive in their own ways.'
There's something that feels right about pointing out that Meyer doesn't owe "the media" and explanation. Who are these people, other than those who inform the public at large? And who is he, other than the one of the highest paid public employees in the country, who gave a $400,000 job to a man who was apparently having issues with sobriety, doing his job well and occasionally getting the cops called on him by a woman with bruises. In some ways, Urban owes his vast fortune and powerful position to "the media." Without such an arm, college football lacks the conduit to become a national money-making machine.
As for the facts coming out, it is fair to wait, as long as one also acknowledges there's a high chance most of this won't get public (and almost no chance without that dreaded "media"). Chances are, we'll know something but far from everything. We'll see what the school does, and put faith or doubt in institutions from there. It's odd, the biggest "fact" that will happen rests in the hands of Gene Smith and his bosses. And then some people will go back to trusting the man, others will lob this at him out of spite, and in truth, we should probably be a hint more skeptical after this than before, which is to say we should be plenty skeptical already.
(Someone above mentioned Ramzy taking a bath over not reporting Smith was a "S@!$@Lord, despite the sense he was. The thing is, most fans don't want rocks thrown at heroes. Most coaches are by nature not nice people. They are usually ultra-competitive absentee fathers and husbands who are masters are turning on charms to get what they want. The often unwind in massive ways, befitting a high-stress job. There are plenty of players who are not on the up and up, many more than you'd think. And while those things might be true, they're not things that in our hearts we'd like to know)
