3 most bothersome things that stuck out about Ohio State's findings on Urban Meyer

After a two-week investigation and nearly 12 hours of deliberations amongst the Board of Trustees, Ohio State finally came to a decision on Urban Meyer’s fate late Wednesday night.

Meyer will serve a three-game suspension after an independent working group investigated his knowledge of Zach Smith’s history of alleged domestic violence. The Ohio State head coach will miss games against Oregon State, Rutgers and TCU before returning to the sideline in Columbus.

There was plenty of debate and discussion regarding Meyer’s punishment, as well as the awkward and uncomfortable press conference that followed the announcement of the suspension. But there were three things from the findings that were most bothersome.

1. Ohio State attributed Meyer’s statements at B1G Media Days to memory loss due to the medication he takes. The findings determined that Meyer did not “deliberately lie” at Media Days when asked if he was aware of Zach Smith’s 2015 arrest for domestic violence.
2. Meyer never mentioned Smith’s 2009 arrest to anyone at Ohio State. Athletic director Gene Smith said he was not aware of the arrest that occurred in 2009 — while Meyer and Smith were at the University of Florida — because Meyer did not mention it.
3. It appears that Meyer deleted all of his old text messages that may have contained important information. The report states that, after Brett McMurphy published his report, Meyer and director of football operations Brian Voltolini “discussed at that time whether the media could get access to Coach Meyer’s phone, and specifically how to adjust the settings on Meyer’s phone so that text messages older than one year would be deleted.”

Those three bullet points don’t exactly exonerate Meyer, especially in the world of public perception. And if all that was true, a three-game suspension appears to an extremely light punishment.