SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. - Urban Meyer is at the end of his fifth season as head coach at No. 3 Ohio State. Five years is a generation in college football. The last members of Meyer's first scholarship class are finishing their college careers. They are the last players who can give testimony to this program's rise under Meyer, the demanding, driven coach hired after the Buckeyes went 6-6 in the 2011 regular season.
Here's what Meyer's first class has accomplished in its five seasons: one national championship, one Big Ten title and a semifinal berth Saturday against No. 2 Clemson. They have five pairs of gold pants, the coveted trinkets awarded annually to Ohio State players who defeat Michigan.
The Buckeyes under Meyer are 61-5 (.924). That's an average of going 12-1 every year, with an extra victory to spare. So congratulations to the entire class. With your indulgence, let's introduce them. Please save your applause until we conclude.
Center Pat Elflein.
Thank-you. You may applaud.
Actually, there's also a pair of walk-on linebackers, Joe Burger and Craig Fada, who have made 36 tackles between them in their careers. Burger and Fada have won four letters, and they are so well-regarded that they are among the team's five co-captains (with Elflein, quarterback J.T. Barrett and corner Gareon Conley).
Elflein, Burger and Fada are all that's left of Meyer's first year. Several signees left after four years, several transferred, a few were asked to leave and injuries curtailed the careers of the rest. Elflein and Fada are locals. Elflein committed to Ohio State a couple of weeks after Luke Fickell took over as interim head coach in June 2011.
"He started at the bottom. He wasn't a starter. He wasn't this. He wasn't that," said Fickell, the co-defensive coordinator who just took the head coaching job at Cincinnati. When Meyer took the job at the end of the year, he saw Elflein and asked Fickell, "What the hell is wrong with you?"
Meyer said pretty much the same thing a year later to former offensive coordinator Tom Herman the first time Meyer saw Barrett.
"I didn't like them very much," Meyer said. "Now I love them."
The evolution in Elflein from undersized recruit to All-American and Rimington Award winner mirrors the change in the Buckeyes. It sounds empty to say that Meyer demands a complete physical and mental commitment from his players. All good coaches do. But the difference between what Fickell expected as an interim coach in 2011 and what Meyer expected the following year was stark. Two-a-days, with both sessions in pads, didn't go over very well with the older guys.
"They were a little insubordinate at first. 'This isn't how we do it. We win games, blah blah blah,'" Fada said. "He wasn't having any of that. That went out the window real quick. Once they realized what Coach Meyer was doing wasn't for himself, it was for us, they kind of bought into the whole idea of it."
"The journey started a little rocky," Meyer said. "We were a very bad football team. We were losing to Miami of Ohio 7-0 after the first quarter, in my first game. Alabama Birmingham was like 23-17 in the third quarter. So we were very bad, no disrespect to those teams. But we were bad. And something changed."
Ohio State won every game in 2012. And have won nearly all of them since.
"When I first came in," Elflein said, "they wanted to establish a culture. They were the ones really enforcing the culture the whole time. The players were the ones trying to accept the culture. ... Now it's the players enforcing the culture. It's not so much the coaches anymore."
What does that mean? It means when a player dogs it in the weight room, he's got four teammates in his face, demanding more effort. It means sacrificing time with family and friends. It means the Buckeyes take pride in giving what Meyer has been demanding.
"How he ran his program was all that I knew," Fada said. "Knowing that it was tough, I thought that every other program was tough. The older that I got, the more I realized that, that was not true. I had a buddy who played at Marshall and [friends at] a couple of other places, MAC schools and places like that. They just told me it was nothing like I was experiencing. That's what makes us so much different. We're just an elite program."
Meyer said Elflein, Burger and Fada, the last of his first Buckeyes, will always be special to him. When they look back over their five seasons, they see how far they have come. They see how far the program has come. They see how different the recruits are.
"We only take grown men now," Fada said.
Seventeen-year-old grown men?
"Exactly," Fada said. "For example, for our linebacker culture, you have to become us. We're not going to become you. That's pretty much our motto for the whole team. You either become us or you're not going to make it here. It's tough. It's tough sometime. [It takes] a lot of mental toughness, for sure. If you're not mentally tough, you'll break down. You will."
It is the nature of the college game. Players come, players go, winning coaches stay. Meyer will coach Elflein, Burger and Fada for either one more game or two. When they leave, the Buckeye locker room will have no more origin stories.
Meyer described his reaction to that as "very sentimental. They are family for the rest of their lives. And they enjoyed ... "
He stopped, and a smile edged across his face.
"I shouldn't say 'enjoyed,'" Meyer said. "They understand every minute of it now."