Suspended Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer will likely face even more scrutiny over one part of the university's investigation into his role in the Zach Smith domestic abuse scandal.
According to the investigation's summary of findings released Wednesday, Meyer was found to have deleted text messages between himself and Zach Smith that were more than a year old by the time the investigative panel obtained his phone on Aug. 2. The possible impetus for this, the summary noted, was an Aug. 1 report from national football writer Brett McMurphy that claimed Meyer had knowledge of Zach Smith's alleged abuse.
McMurphy's report detailed texts between Meyer's wife, Shelley, and Courtney Smith, Zach Smith's ex-wife.
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According to the summary, associate athletic director Brian Voltolini approached Meyer on Aug. 1 after McMurphy's report was published and discussed with him whether the media could access his phone records and how to set his phone to delete text messages that were over a year old. The investigative panel's review of Meyer's phone found no such text messages between him and Zach Smith.
Though the panel could not say with certainty whether this was done in response to McMurphy's report, it nonetheless found it "concerning" that Meyer's initial reaction was to worry about whether media could access his phone. This "lack of certainty" was "compounded," the panel found, by the university's failure to adequately and promptly respond to two public records requests made July 25 by the Ohio State student newspaper, The Lantern.
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One of the requests — made the day after Meyer denied knowledge at Big Ten Media Days of an alleged 2015 domestic violence incident between Zach and Courtney Smith — was for emails, texts and a history of calls between Meyer and Zach Smith from July 18-24 of this year. The other request was for the same types of correspondence, over the same time period, between Meyer and athletic director Gene Smith.
Although Gene Smith, Voltolini, Amy Nicol — Ohio State's director of internal operations for football — and Diana Sabau — OSU's senior associate athletics director — were aware of the requests, none followed up on a directive to "go get [Meyer's] phone and check his texts with Zach."
Investigators found that, had the requests been handled properly, the panel would know definitively whether Meyer had changed his phone settings in response to McMurphy's report. The panel found this oversight "problematic and frustrating," but noted it had no evidence Meyer was aware of the records requests.
