The choice between the Gator Chomp and O-H I-O has put even a Hall of Famer in a bind. On The Triple Option podcast, Urban Meyer was asked to name the program he'd think of first, and his hesitation revealed more than his eventual answer did.

"I'm not going to answer that for obvious reasons cuz I'll take some serious shots," Meyer said.

When Meyer left Florida for Ohio State in 2011, plenty of Gator fans accused him of faking a health-related retirement just to wait out a bigger job. The backlash got loud enough that his wife, Shelley, eventually had to defend him in public.

"I just wish people would get over it," Shelley Meyer told The Gainesville Sun.

Picking a side on The Triple Option podcast now could stir all of that up again. Meyer now lives in Florida full-time, surrounded by Gator pride, while his loyalty to his home state never faded.

"I'm living in Florida now full-time, so I see a lot of Gators. Everywhere you go around here, it makes you feel like a Gator," Meyer said. "And obviously I'm from the great state of Ohio, a place I love dearly."

The numbers on both sides make the dilemma even harder to navigate. Meyer went 65-15 at Florida, winning BCS titles in 2006 and 2008, then 83-9 at Ohio State, capped by the 2014 playoff championship.

"I'm very blessed to be at both of them," Meyer said.

Though it hasn't always been this balanced. Back in 2014, during his first season at Ohio State, Meyer told youth campers that his unbeaten 2008 Florida team was the best he had ever coached.

"I think the best team to ever play the game in '08 (at Florida)," Meyer said.

A decade later, he's clearly learned to keep those comparisons closer to his chest and for good reason, because that careful balancing act follows him well beyond podcast questions.

Urban Meyer has settled a bigger question about his coaching future

For years, there has been a much bigger question trailing Meyer: would he ever return to coaching? When eight programs, including Florida, Penn State, and LSU, went searching for a new head coach all at once, his name came up almost immediately.

Gator Nation in particular was loud about it. Meyer, after all, is still the last coach to win a national title in Gainesville. But he wasn't interested.

"I don't have the desire," Meyer told WSYX ABC 6 back in 2025, leaving little room for debate.

He hadn't coached college football since 2018, and his brief NFL stint with the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2021 didn't go well either, ending with a 2-11 record.

Since then, Meyer has found a comfortable home on Fox Big Noon Kickoff, breaking down games every Saturday from the broadcast booth. And that role comes with one quiet but important requirement: to cover everyone fairly.

Publicly favoring one program over another, whether during a coaching search or a podcast debate, would make that balance very hard to keep.

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Written by

Harshita Saxena

Edited by

Aadesh Dhote