When the world first saw it, the image of sad Urban Meyer on a golf cart after the 2013 Big Ten championship game eating out of a Papa John’s pizza box became an instant meme with surprising durability. Even five years later, whenever something bad happens to Ohio State football, there it is, guaranteed to be on your Twitter feed. And it will never go away.
But why? There’s nothing particularly remarkable about a man eating pizza. Coaches do a lot of abnormal things, but eating after a football game when someone puts a pizza in front of you seems like a really natural thing to do.
The root of the meme, though, is this: Meyer is particularly and singularly unlikable. Even before the off-field drama this preseason against former receivers coach Zach Smith that led to Meyer being suspended, investigated over what he knew about domestic abuse allegations and ultimately reinstated, Meyer was not popular either among his peers or college football fans outside of Ohio.
Unlike Nick Saban, whose unique brand of perfectionism is so over-the-top that we can all kind of get in on the joke, Meyer’s humorlessness and self-righteousness comes off as a shallow exercise in trying to simplify a complex world. And if you’re going to draw those kind of stark dividing lines between good guys and bad guys, between right and wrong, it’s not helpful your reputation to when people get a look behind the curtain both at Ohio State and Florida and see all the ethical compromises Meyer made to run a football program at the highest level.
In other words, the pizza meme is powerful because it looks lonely. And when Ohio State struggles, it does so alone — with no sympathy from anyone and plenty of critics gleefully ready to say, “I told you so.”
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