A former Ohio State trustee resigned his position in the wake of the university’s three-game suspension for football coach Urban Meyer, saying, “there was something altogether wrong about reducing it to a couple of games,” according to a report from The New York Times.
The trustee, Jeffrey Wadsworth, termed himself the “lone voice” among the school’s Board of Trustees in calling for a more severe punishment for Meyer.
He is the only trustee to speak publicly about deliberations the university called in a statement last week “frank and comprehensive.” Central to the debate was how to reprimand Meyer for his mishandling of domestic abuse allegations involving a former assistant coach, Zach Smith.
“You read the report,” Wadsworth told The Times, “and there’s seven or eight things about emails, memory loss, hearing things five times, and to me, that raised an issue of standards, values – not how many games someone should be suspended for."
Wadsworth continued, “I felt that getting into a limited number of games that was a suspension missed the point of a bigger cultural concern about, ‘What message were we sending?’”
According to The Times, Wadsworth felt the three-game suspension was too forgiving.
“I read all the articles,” Wadsworth said, citing one USA TODAY Sports column, “and I’m embarrassed.”
He said of Meyer, “I didn’t feel that I’d seen high-integrity behavior."
While Wadsworth declined to go into detail about the nature of last week’s deliberations, which spanned nearly 12 hours, trustees discussed a “range of options,” he said, before turning to a discussion on the length of Meyer’s suspension.
He resigned from his position on the board about an hour after Ohio State announced Meyer’s suspension and athletics director Gene Smith’s 17-day, unpaid leave.
Attempts to reach Wadsworth by USA TODAY Sports were unsuccessful.
The former CEO and president of Battelle Memorial Institute, a science and technology company based in Columbus, Ohio, Wadsworth was appointed to the board in 2010 and was scheduled to conclude his term in May 2019.