The first year that Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer spent in Columbus included scattered tales of his disdain for anyone wearing a blue shirt to practice.
Not because he once had a family member morph into a human blueberry while touring a chocolate factory, but because blue is the color of the rival that folks in Ohio hate so much we’re starting to think they secretly love.
In his second year, Meyer has expanded his contempt for blue shirts to include anyone and everyone at practice -- including NFL scouts. A league source tells PFT that Meyer has been instructing scouts wearing blue shirts to change into something else (apparently, extra red shirts are available) before viewing practice.
It happened last year to Austin Murphy of Sports Illustrated and a search with the terms “Urban Meyer blue shirt” on Twitter yields several other mentions of the dynamic from last year. But NFL scouts, as far as we know, previously had been exempt.
The reaction from NFL scouts is, as one might imagine, not great. With some already thinking Meyer has grown a tad too big for his britches, the notion of enforcing an anti-blue dress code on men who aren’t attending practice as fans but as employees trying to do their jobs won’t win him many friends at the next level, beyond the friend in Foxboro whose team wears blue all the time.
Then again, maybe Meyer isn’t banning blue as a slap at Michigan. Maybe the somewhat lighter shade of the color worn by a certain SEC team with which Meyer is familiar now causes A Clockwork Orange-style response for the Buckeyes coach, given the misadventures of so many of the guys who played for him there.