Urban Meyer won his last game as Ohio State's football coach, beating Washington in the Rose Bowl last season. (Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer)

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COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Former Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer doesn’t know, so we can’t know. Meyer doesn’t know whether life as a TV analyst, teacher, assistant athletic director, athlete motivator, corporate speaker, husband, father, grandfather and guy who gets to actually take a vacation will be enough.

He is undoubtedly busy and undoubtedly happy. He’s also openly uncertain and legitimately curious. For the 55-year-old, three-time national champion former football coach, life has changed.

Will it stick?

After sitting in his office for 45 minutes last week, and talking to some others working with him in his new life, I think Meyer doesn’t really want to coach football again. But he might have to.

I told him he seems busy and that must be a good sign. Because he doesn’t want to be bored, and he wants his days to matter to someone besides himself.

“I worry about that. I worry about that,” Meyer said. “That only thing that still gets me a little bit is, ‘Am I making an impact?’ That’s what I miss more than anything. I miss winning and I miss that.

“That’s the only thing I think about once in a while.”

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Urban Meyer during the Rose Bowl, what might be his last game as a football coach. (Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer)

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Meyer's new class

The people that might keep Urban Meyer out of coaching were aligned in desks seven deep and 16 across in a room with a low ceiling in the basement level of a campus classroom building. A young man in the corner nodded his head as the speaker concluded. A young woman on the far side explained why she was crying. Meyer wasn’t there on this day, but former Ohio State receiver Roy Hall was speaking to the 113 students in Leadership and Character, the class Meyer co-teaches with a retired military man.

Meyer was in Los Angeles, his TV duties with Fox Sports taking up the end of his weeks and weekends, while classroom tasks and other engagements with campus student leaders fill the front of his week. On this Friday, Hall was talking to the class, which is comprised of mostly upperclassmen because they have signup priority and the class fills quickly.

But it sounded like he could have been talking to Meyer. Because Meyer needs this class as much as the 113 students need him. Hall’s words filled the rapt silence:

I’m going to use my platform and my gifts and my talents to help people go farther than they would if they didn’t meet me.

Your title doesn’t matter. Life is not about you. It’s to make a difference, to invest and impact.

When you don’t know who you are, you don’t know your purpose.

“We need to talk about walking in purpose,” Hall, a one-day guest speaker, said of Meyer after class. “Most coaches, if you don’t have that, then at this point you feel like your life is over.

“I think he understands that and that’s why when he does this, why he has so much joy in it.”

The class meets Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 12:25 p.m. Meyer spoke two days before Hall, that Wednesday serving as his first appearance of this semester because of his Fox college football duties. But he’ll be in once or twice a week the rest of the semester.

The classroom is a generic background compared to the football team meeting room where he held court for seven years, surrounded by championship reminders and inspirational sayings of his choosing. But this is his team now.

“He 100 percent impacts me,” said Griffin Spielman, a 21-year-old senior who is no relation to OSU linebacker legend Chris Spielman. “He’s someone I looked up to when I was a kid, and it was amazing to hear from somebody like him because this whole class is about real life, and he’s someone who’s made an impact on so many people and made decisions that impacted so many people.”

Charles Buchanan, a senior lecturer in the Fisher College of Business and former 15-year military veteran, extended the invite to Meyer to co-teach with him soon after Meyer retired after the Jan. 1 Rose Bowl. Meyer can’t hand out grades, because he’s an athletic department employee, but otherwise Buchanan described him as a full partner in teaching the class, spending hours defining the curriculum, choosing readings and lining up guest speakers. This is their second go-round after first teaching it in the spring.

“I know he’s making a difference,” Buchanan says. “What that means to him … I think he gets a lot of energy from it. I absolutely know he makes a difference for the students.”

This didn’t feel like your typical college class. It’s not numbers, Spielman explained. It’s life. The experience is like a special school assembly three days a week. Victoria Knyszek, a senior from Hinckley, Ohio, who has taken several leadership classes in her four years, was curious for Meyer’s first appearance last Wednesday. She noticed students sitting straighter and quieting their talking when he walked in. During his one-hour lecture, he peppered the students for answers every 20 seconds.

“He demanded your attention,” she said, “he demanded your engagement.”

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Urban Meyer (right) with the Buckeyes against Nebraska last season. (Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer)

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Meyer's old fight

What Meyer misses most is waking to the battle.

“The morning is the hardest time of day,” he said. “You’re not in a fight.”

What most would see as the sweet relief of semi-retirement, the first waking breath without the matters of the day pressing down upon you, Meyer feels as an absence. Not just in the fall. There were at least 12 games a season that were part of the fight, but the recruiting battles were a constant grind. College football requires a never-ending pursuit of the next great player, and that pursuit was Meyer’s constant companion.

“I’ve been in a fight for 33 years, and now you’re not in that fight,” Meyer says. “So how do you fulfill that fight? And I feel that every morning. Every morning.

“It’s all about a win and a loss for 33 years. I mean every day was. Not just you’re getting ready for a game. No, no, no, no. You’re recruiting every day. You’re going against Alabama and Clemson every day, The Team Up North every day. Now you’re not. That’s the number one void, is you’re not in a fight.”

I tried to point out the dichotomy, that waking up to the fight made him a winner. He owns the third-highest winning percentage in college football history. But it’s also …

“The wear and tear,” he interrupted.

It’s why he’s out. He knows the conflict. It’s the conflict he lives. He coached a certain way, and that way made him win, and it also made him leave. The stress he absorbed for 33 years led a cyst in his head to endanger his health and force a career decision.

He knows coaching that way isn’t good for him, but that’s all he knows and he also misses it. He’s incredulous at friends in the business who lose five, six, seven games, or fall to their rival again and figure they’ll get them next year. He stares at his wife, Shelley, in disbelief after talking with one of those friends on the phone.

“It’s mind-boggling to me,” he said. “But she agrees with them. She doesn’t agree with me.”

Meyer understands all this, that the only way he knows how to coach is why he’s retired right now, and that if he would go back to coaching, he probably should change, but maybe he can’t change.

That’s why he doesn’t know his future right now.

He made note when Bob Stoops retired at Oklahoma in the summer of 2017 at age 56 and left the Sooners program to Lincoln Riley. Meyer talked to Stoops as a friend, and as a potential trend setter for his own program. I mentioned Ara Parseghian, the former Northwestern and Notre Dame coach who left the Fighting Irish in 1974 at age 51, physically exhausted and emotionally drained. He’d won two national titles, but he never coached again. He worked in TV for 14 years … and he lived until he was 94.

Meyer, as a young assistant at Notre Dame, knew Parseghian. He said he never talked to him about this.

“But I studied him,” Meyer said.

Maybe even then, Meyer knew himself well enough to know he wouldn’t be coaching into his 70s or 80s. He’d join the club of high achievers who went out early on top.

“I always had a window,” Meyer said, “just because I know how hard I go.”

He mentioned Bill Cowher, the former Pittsburgh Steelers coach, who left coaching for TV at 49 and has never returned. He mentioned Tony Dungy, who left coaching for good at 53. He said he’s talked with Dick Vermeil, who left NFL coaching at 46 because of burnout … and returned only after a 15-year break. He mentioned Mack Brown, the former North Carolina and Texas coach who is close with Meyer. He returned to coach the Tar Heels this season after retiring at 62 and taking a five-year break. Meyer is overjoyed to see Brown having fun and winning again, and asked his friend why he returned.

Brown told him it was because he didn’t like the way he finished his career at Texas, where he went 30-21 his last four seasons. Meyer went 45-6 his last four.

“You wish you were in the College Football Playoff to take one more swing at it,” Meyer says, “but I finished probably about the way I wanted to.”

• Chase Young and Tyreke Smith bonding

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Urban Meyer (center) on the set of the Fox Sports College Football pregame show. (Lily Ro, courtesy of Fox)

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Meyer's continuing competition

I told Meyer he won’t have to chase jobs. We talked before USC athletic director Lynn Swann quit this week, but USC was already the school most speculated about for Meyer. Now a new AD may want to make a splash with a big hire. Whether it’s the Trojans or another school, the jobs will come to him for 2020 if he wants them. I think he will pass … for now.

“I’m not there at the moment,” Meyer said of a possible return. “Like you said, next year can I say that? We’ll talk again next year and we’ll see.”

What I think Meyer wants to do is see if he can coach his new life, explore whether he can create enough of his own fights, and construct enough impact from speaking to students instead of football players to fill his tank in a way that will keep him off the sideline.

He’s working toward that.

Walking out after his first leadership class in the spring, he called Buchanan within 15 minutes and wanted to know how he could be better. After his first college football studio show for Fox, he asked Brad Zager, the show’s executive producer, if they could go to Zager’s office and watch film of the show.

“He’s competitive,” Zager said. “You don’t get to be as good as he was on the sidelines without being competitive. I think no matter what he’s doing in life he’s going to be competitive. And I think right now, he’s competitive in wanting to be the best football analyst on television.”

But it was last Wednesday that was truly the type of day that may allow Meyer to stay with his new life. TV on the weekends. Teaching during the week. Family first. Coaching over.

After speaking to the leadership class in the morning, Meyer and Buchanan addressed another group in the evening that featured the captains from 35 of Ohio State’s 36 varsity sports. Meyer called Buchanan on the drive home.

“We moved the needle,” Meyer told him.

“That was a good day for him,” Buchanan said, guessing Meyer spoke to more than 260 Ohio State students Wednesday

“Those are some of the payback moments,” Meyer said. “Just wow. If I have those moments … But if those disappear? You take away those moments and I would be concerned.”

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Urban Meyer (left) at his retirement announcement in December with Ryan Day (right). (Kirk Irwin, Getty Images)

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Meyer's healthy change

Last October, I sat in Meyer's office with three other reporters as the coach explained the beginning of the end of his Ohio State coaching career. A cyst in his brain was causing debilitating headaches again. He didn't want the size of the cyst revealed then, but now he speaks freely while comparing it to his fist.

Leaving that office, I knew something had to give. Doctors had told Meyer the same. Surgery. Or quit. Have already undergone one surgery, he took the second option, which really wasn’t an option at all. It was a necessity. He looks better now and has heard that over again, joking about how terrible he must have looked in October. From there to here 11 months later, this has to be viewed as a good outcome.

“About as good as you can get,” Meyer said. “Especially that the program is doing so well, because that’s very important to me. That would be a bad feeling right now if they were struggling.”

The presence of Ryan Day as a coach to hand the program to is something Meyer took as a sign. He believed in Day so much, it made it seem right to go, and he calls the result every coach’s dream. The fact that the support staffers kept their jobs eased the worry that accompanies most coaching changes. The idea that what he built remains as part of his legacy at Ohio State makes him smile.

He doesn’t love discussing the decision, because he views it as personal one -- for every coach and athlete.

“People make decisions about themselves, and it’s no one’s business,” Meyer said.

But he will discuss the outcome. If he’s done as a coach?

“We’re good,” Meyer said.

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Urban Meyer walking into the Rose Bowl last season. (Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer)

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Meyer's new walk

Several hours after our meeting last Thursday, a figure in a white long sleeve T-shirt appeared at the edge of the parking lot at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, across the street from where Meyer now has his office in the athletic department. A vehicle pulled over, and the passenger jumped out on a frontage road to snap a photo with the figure.

It was Meyer, with earpods in, out for a walk in the midday sunshine on a day that for the previous 33 years would have been consumed with football preparation. That was Day’s concern now, not Meyer’s.

This was a man taking a moment to enjoy his new life. A man who can’t sit still. Meyer is both at once, completely aware of who he has been, but in conflict about who he could be next. That’s OK for now. But I don’t think he knows what the future holds.

That means no one knows.

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