Meyer will reportedly hold down a regular studio gig for two or three days a week during the season, with sporadic appearances for recruiting, spring practice and preseason sordids in the summer. Meyer will likely commute from Gainesville, where he's expected to retain an as-yet determined position in the Florida athletic department and an office in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. So he's not completely burnt out.
If his postseason auditions during the Las Vegas Bowl and BCS Championship Game are any indication, Meyer will do just fine on camera, and may even be the one person on the network not named "Ron Jaworski" allowed to talk X's and O's in a way that doesn't amount to an especially fancy highlight package. At the very least, we learned he's capable of softening his steely gaze enough to avoid frightening the children.
Still, he's an oddity in the Land of Talking Heads, where former coaches are almost universally fired (Bob Davie, Phil Fulmer) or retired (Lou Holtz, Mike Bellotti, Terry Donohue) in the conventional sense – that is, well past their prime. Meyer, on the other hand, is only in his mid-40s, just a year removed from leading Florida within a game of its second straight national championship appearance. There aren't many coaches in media who are also likely targets for every major job opening in the country.
The role is more common in the NFL, where winners John Madden, Dick Vermeil, Bill Walsh, Jimmy Johnson and most recently Bill Cowher and Jon Gruden all walked away at or near the top for lengthy broadcasting gigs with plenty of gas in the tank. Vermeil, Walsh and Johnson all returned to the sideline; considering Cowher and Gruden's names still come up for about 75 percent of notable job openings every winter, one or both are likely to be back in the saddle at some point in the very near future, too. The cast-off college coaches who have cycled through various sets and broadcasts over the years (see Terry Bowden, Bill Curry, John Mackovic and Dr. Lou himself, who initially migrated to broadcasting between stints at Notre Dame and South Carolina) have also tended to find their way back into coaching in short order. Meyer will have no shortage of opportunities to follow them, and the odds on his return to coaching within five years have to be heavily in favor of a comeback.
In the meantime, America gets to watch a 46-year-old leader in his field setting aside part of the most productive years of his professional life to sit in a studio in Bristol, Conn., talking about other people doing the thing he can still do better than almost any of them. Meyer has a reputation as an all-in guy, and an all-in retirement split between his daughters' volleyball games and a lake in the middle of nowhere, I could see. A gig as a part-time critic is a tougher sell, but it may not stick for long.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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