The Justice of Urban Meyer
THE JUSTICE OF URBAN MEYER
If any of you have watched the recently released Netflix show about Urban Meyer’s time with the Florida Gators, Untold: Swamp Kings, a certain anecdote in the first episode might have stood out to you. One of the (former) players—Brandon Siler—is talking at length about how things changed when Urban Meyer took over as head coach back in 2005, and he offers the following, almost shocking, illustrative example:
When Urban Meyer took over he created a “Champions Club”. Meyer would put tape on the ground wherever they ate dividing those in the Champions Club from those not in it. If you were in the Champions Club, you got to eat a table with white linens, you ate steak/lobster, you had a server that brought you your food. If you were on the other side of the tape—not in the Champions Club—you ate burgers and hot dogs and you had to serve yourself. Siler proceeds to note that the idea behind Meyer’s approach was that he was going to treat his superstars like superstars, and his “sh*t like sh*t”.
The majority of people that have seen that episode have been shocked by what they heard in that story. It was too ruthless; too intense; too much for them. They couldn’t reconcile that type of story with their understanding of what is “fair” and “just”. For this exact reason it serves as a great example of how our understanding of “justice” has completely eroded in our society.
A lot of public conversations I have end up, at one point or another, swerving back to the topic of “justice”. I speak repeatedly about how people struggle to understand “justice” rightly. It struck me that this little anecdote is a perfect opportunity to draw further attention to the concept of justice and see how it can be properly applied in the world of competitive sports—and our society, at large, from there.
Justice in Principle
Justice comes from the Latin word justus: “jus” meaning “law”, with “Justus” meaning “the administration of the law”. “Law”, on a level deeper, establishes the right relations between interacting things. So justice, then, is the maintenance, or restoration, (ie. administration) of the right relations between things.
There’s a shorthand, easy way, to understand the application of justice right away: perfect justice would mean that every good deed would be perfectly rewarded and every bad deed would be perfectly punished.
The unjust man rewards bad deeds—or gives disproportionate rewards to good acts—, or punishes good deeds—or gives disproportionate punishments to bad acts. In God we have the perfect assurance that perfect justice will be meted out from the perspective of eternity. Some things may seem to go unreckoned, or unrewarded, here on earth—but from the vantage point of eternity everything will be perfectly reckoned and perfectly rewarded.1
Urban Meyer’s Justice
In this example about Urban Meyer and the Florida Gators we have someone who is rewarding the good and punishing the bad. He is attempting to treat his superstars like superstars and his bad players like bad players. Set aside the wiser realization that football superstardom does not equate with moral goodness, nor football weakness with moral weakness, and we can begin to see how the mechanics of what he’s trying to do is ‘just’ in a narrow sense (similarly, a person is prudent if they can achieve what they set out to achieve—and so we call the vicious person that is good at getting what they want someone who has “carnal prudence”).
How does our society respond?
For the most part, the reactions have been uniform: anyone that approaches managing a team the way Urban Meyer did is either crazy or way too intense. In reality, every Coach—every public leader—every teacher—every parent, should be striving to reward the good things that happen with those entrusted to their care, and punish the bad things that happen with those entrusted to their care. What Urban Meyer did should neither be shocking, nor rare. What should be of interest to the casual onlooker/fan is how well he did or didn’t mete out football justice within his team. What Urban Meyer was trying to do was to establish a just competitive hierarchy within his team. Spoiler alert: it worked. The Florida Gators were the best football program in the country in the second half of the opening decade of the 2000’s, and he was the greatest coach over that stretch—because he established the most just competitive hierarchy within his team.
Justice Equals Reality
If a competitive hierarchy is going to be truly just it must map onto the reality of whatever the true competitive hierarchy on any team is. A coach’s job is not to arbitrarily impose the hierarchy they want onto their team—though they do have the jurisdictional authority to do so. A coach’s job is to try and provide the competence and insight necessary to be capable of recognizing whatever the true competitive hierarchy of a team is, and then order the team according to that reality. Many coaches today are tyrants—they try to impose their (false) vision of what they want the order/hierarchy of their team to be on their teams, disregarding, or flat out denying, what the true order of excellence on their team actually is. A good coach is precisely this: the one who establishes, with their rightful authority, a competitive order/hierarchy of excellence that most maps onto the reality of what the order/hierarchy of excellence is on their team. A bad coach is the one that deviates from that true order/hierarchy the most.
Far more coaches are bad coaches than good coaches.
In justice, regardless of how well a coach thinks they did at evaluating this at one point in time, they must be ready to change and adapt the competitive hierarchy of the team as things change and different players surpass—or fall off—accordingly. Executing justice is a taxing emotional and psychological endeavor—hence the fundamental reason why so few people are excellent at it—and hence the reason for Urban Meyer’s inevitable downfall.
Urban Meyer’s Downfall
Without picking out any specifics to Urban Meyer’s story, in principle we can understand that his—and any other leader/coach’s—downfall is going to coincide with the decomposition of their hierarchy mapping onto reality. Add to the mix peoples fallen nature and you can even begin to intuit why it’s so hard to maintain a just ordering of people in an organization: As people have more success and are rewarded more lavishly for their successes, their desire to bail out and take the easy way into pleasure and complacency grows. In the narrow activity of football, the one who’s having success is also less likely to place any emphasis on other good acts as their football glory & riches diminishes the relative worth of actual morally good acts. Additionally, the more glory they receive for their successes, the more ravenously others strive to take their spot by ever more unscrupulous means. When you so explicitly make a competitive hierarchy known, like Meyer did at Florida, you foster a culture of hostility, disregard, vainglory, scheming and backbiting. Everyone’s position is known and everyone’s wealth is known—the wider the gap grows between those in the positions of glory & wealth from those left outside, the more you foster contention between those two camps.
The same thing that made Urban Meyer great was necessarily going to be the same thing that caused his downfall.
Applying Justice
Urban Meyer’s tenure came to an end. His just competitive hierarchy degraded into a psychological and emotional wasteland that took its toll on everyone involved and pushed him out of football altogether for a handful of years. Very few people—if any—made it out of that champions club with much peace and health to show for it.
Still, our society doesn’t know how to identify justice when it sees it, even if only stable ever so briefly. Worse: they call justice “unfair”, or “ruthless”, or “crazy.
What we can take from this is threefold: one, our sports, the thing that we so adamantly champion and honor here in America, are rarely competitively just; second, we lack any foundational understanding of justice—in particular that punishment is an integral part of justice; and third, lacking that foundational understanding, and not even recognizing a just system as just in principle (like Urban & the Gators, even if applied to something as arbitrary as football), we have a society that has very unjust systems across the board.
We’re not unjust like the modern secular-atheist utopians will have you believe, where we fail to make everyone materially rich or something. No, we’re unjust because we don’t understand the necessity of reward and punishment in fostering justice, and so we’re even further from being just than if we were trying and failing at it. +