Urban Meyer didn’t know who Mike Vrabel, NFL coach and former employee, was

On By Littum

Manning Cast’s alternate broadcast of Monday Night Football generally produces great stories adjacent to football. So did Urban Meyer’s 13-game tenure as Jacksonville Jaguars head coach.

In Week 12, these two forces met in a huge, slightly confusing, yet completely believable story from longtime NFL mainstay Mike Vrabel.

Vrabel spent 14 seasons in the league as a linebacker and six as the head coach of the Tennessee Titans. He spent two more as the defensive line coach for Meyer’s Ohio State Buckeyes. But when the two met in 2021, Meyer took one look at the former All-Pro, NFL coach of the year and, importantly, his former employee and asked “do I know you?”

“Yeah, I’m the head coach of the Titans,” Vrabel said to a chuckling Peyton and Eli Manning. “And I worked for you for two years.”

For any other head coach, most of whom have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game and its main characters, this would be unbelievable. But given Meyer’s countless ways to screw up just about anything related to his NFL tenure, this was pretty standard.

Meyer was bad enough to get fired two-thirds of the way through a season with the Jaguars, a franchise that gave Gus Bradley three-plus years at the helm. He was such a disaster that we were able to publish an article here titled “12 Times We’ve Told You Urban Meyer Is The Worst” and it still missed some of Meyer’s dumb-brain demeanor.

Including apparently acknowledging a division rival’s head coach who also happened to be one of his assistant coaches less than a decade earlier. Urban Meyer, man.