CINCINNATI, Ohio — The walls and hallways of the University of Cincinnati's football building make no mention of the man who is arguably the program's most famous alum.

You'd have to dig through a box in the athletic communications office to find the only mention of him. The 1985 Cincinnati football media guide sums up his career in 35 words:

"Made the team as a walk-on in 1984 spring drills ... saw action as a reserve at safety and was the holder for PAT and FG attempts last season ... good all-around athlete ... 1 letter."

Next.

In the one year he was on the Bearcats football team, Ohio State coach Urban Meyer was somewhat of an afterthought. The Buckeyes (2-1) host Cincinnati on Saturday at Ohio Stadium, and if this game was played 30 years ago, Meyer would simply be an unknown walk-on on the visiting sideline.

He had two tackles during that 1984 season, both in an October game against Florida that the Bearcats lost, 48-17. The rest of that season, which Cincinnati finished 2-9, was filled with holding footballs on field goals and extra points, and helping out in other phases of special teams.

"It wasn't a great experience," Meyer said. "We weren't very good."

A former professional baseball player forced to cut his career short due to arm issues, he walked onto the Bearcat football team because he was looking for the next challenge in his life.

Short-lived and unimpressive, Meyer's college football playing career pales in comparison to his success as a college football coach.

"He's a much better coach than he was a player," David Currey, who coached the Bearcats from 1984-1988 and is now the athletic director at Chapman University, told cleveland.com in a phone interview from his office in California.

"He wasn't a great player, he wasn't going to play for a living, but you could sure tell he was going to coach for a living if that's what he wanted to do."

Meyer knew years before that he wanted to be a football coach. He got his first taste of football coaching as a kid while walking around the track that once surrounded Cincinnati's football field during a game between the Bearcats and Wichita State. That in-your-face introduction to college football stuck with Meyer.

But baseball got in the way.

He was recruited to play football out of high school, but opted for baseball, which he called his best sport, after being selected by the Atlanta Braves in the 13th round of the 1982 Major League Baseball draft.

Two years in the minor leagues - which also included a short stint as a student and assistant baseball coach at Cleveland State - ended when the young shortstop started dealing with arm issues. Meyer said it was the kind of problem that could be remedied today with Tommy John surgery, but that was before the procedure became as commonplace as it is now.

The Braves released him in 1983.

"I was so young, 17 when I was drafted," Meyer told cleveland.com. "Real young guy from a small town, big fish in a little pond and then all of the sudden, bang, you're in the pros where everyone is a great baseball player. First year I didn't play very well, second year things were going well and my arm started having issues. When you're not a high draft pick, you're gonna get cut."

He ended up at Cincinnati, where his grandfather once taught traffic law and where his father graduated from in 1957. He had no intention of playing football. When he first arrived, he helped coach the Bearcats baseball team.

So how did the former pro baseball player who had experience coaching baseball at two different colleges end up being a football coach?

"My first love has always been football," Meyer said.

That's what initially brought him back to the football field when he tried to walk on to the Bearcats football team in the spring of 1984.

Currey said he didn't think much of the former pro ballplayer when he first showed up at spring practice. Meyer had been recruited by Cincinnati out of high school, but that was before Currey took over as coach.

Meyer was a normal college student with a mustache and long hair that drooped over his ears and forehead. He went to church on Sundays and enjoyed trips to Florida during winter break with teammates Rob Niehoff and Billy Davis, whom he still considers close friends.

Niehoff's son, Kevin, is a junior on the Ohio State football team. Davis is now the defensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles.

On the football field, Meyer was a hard-hitting safety who wore No. 49. He was intensely devoted to physical fitness and spent the majority of his time away from the field in the weight room.

His time as a slick-fielding shortstop gave him above-average hands for a defensive back, and he worked hard a perfecting his special teams duties.

"I've always been very respectful of those guys who are grinders," Meyer said. "I consider myself a grinder."

He had a calming presence about him, too, which came in handy as the holder on field goal attempts.

"He would always say, 'Come on Franky, let's get this snap, let's get this thing done,'" said Nick Frankos, a former Cincinnati football captain who was the long-snapper on the 1984 team. "He was a pleasure to be around."

But none of that translated to a ton of playing time. Instead Meyer, a self-proclaimed "football guy at heart," spent his time learning more about the game he loved.

He would spend extra time at practice working on his craft, but also learning about the right ways to run a practice, how to go about handling substitutions and anything else that pertained to being a football coach.

He didn't view walking onto the football team as a means to landing an eventual coaching gig, but it worked out that returning to football provided an opportunity to further refine his expertise.

"He was a student of the game," Currey said. "He was always trying to learn about things."

Ohio State coach Urban Meyer's bio from the 1985 Cincinnati football media guide.

He was also a great teammate. Meyer didn't come in with any preconceived notions of his athletic prowess just because he had played baseball professionally for two years before joining the Cincinnati football team.

He was a great athlete. But the Bearcats had other great athletes. Meyer worked to earn his spot on the team.

"He had been exposed to professional life, playing against 28-year-old men," Niehoff said. "He was used to being a competitor as a baseball player and took it to the college football field."

Meyer doesn't talk much about his playing career with his current players, saying it went by so fast that there isn't much to learn from it. It doesn't help that the Bearcats weren't very good back then either.

Limited time on a 2-9 team didn't provide many motivational tools.

He was done playing by 1985 when he began his football coaching career as an assistant at Cincinnati St. Xavier High School. Currey later offered Meyer a job as a graduate assistant at Cincinnati, which Meyer was close to accepting before Earle Bruce came in with a similar offer at Ohio State.

Bruce wanted Meyer despite his lack of playing experience.

"I think sometimes the good players can't coach because they are too demanding and they don't recognize that some people don't have the same talent as they might have had," Bruce said. "If a person can be a good coach or a good teacher, then he is, regardless of what he did as a player."

So maybe it's a blessing in disguise that Meyer opted for baseball right out of high school.

Had he pursued football and had a four-year college career, it's possible he would have been led on a different coaching path. Meyer was good enough in high school to become a scholarship football player in college.

Instead he was just a walk-on trying to find playing time on a bad football team.

"Back then he was just another guy on the Cincinnati football team," Niehoff said. "Nobody knew he was going to be a national-championship-winning coach."