Urban Meyer saw some text messages were being published. He panicked.
The Ohio State football coach — still the Ohio State football coach, after the school suspended him for the first three games of the season Wednesday for his handling of domestic violence allegations against former Buckeyes assistant Zach Smith — asked a staffer about deleting text messages from his phone.
After a story by reporter Brett McMurphy that included screenshots of text conversations between Meyer’s wife, Shelley, and Courtney Smith, Zach Smith’s ex-wife, Meyer wanted to know how to delete messages on his phone.
The investigation by Ohio State found that Meyer spoke with the team’s director of football operations, Brian Voltolini, during an Aug. 1 practice, and “the two discussed at that time whether the media could get access to Coach Meyer’s phone, and specifically discussed how to adjust the settings on Meyer’s phone so that text messages older than one year would be deleted,” the report read.
When the school took Meyer’s phone the next day, the “phone was set to retain text messages only for that period [one year],” the report said, while adding they could not be sure he had acted to bury the texts.
“We cannot determine, however, whether Coach Meyer’s phone was set to retain messages only for one year in response to the August 1st media report or at some earlier time,” the report said.
The school, which determined Meyer mishandled, but didn’t cover up, the allegations against Zach Smith, found this troublesome.
“It is nonetheless concerning that his first reaction to a negative media piece exposing his knowledge of the 2015-2016 law enforcement investigation was to worry about the media getting access to information and discussing how to delete messages older than a year,” the summary said.
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