Urban Meyer reveals hungriest players he coached

Coaches occupy a unique position in sports, tasked with motivating players and getting them playing at their best. Urban Meyer is among the best to ever do that, a masterful motivator.

But even he has run across some players who needed no extra push. Guys who were always pedal to the metal no matter what.

“Hunger, hunger, hunger. I think Mike Thomas was a hungry player. You played with him,” Meyer told his co-host on The Triple Option podcast, Mark Ingram. “Man, he was hungry. Janoris Jenkins was hungry. Louis Murphy. Then the Bosas came from, they weren’t like fighting to eat, but you talk about love of the game. The Bosa brothers, their father was a first-rounder too, but Nick and Joey Bosa? That was every day. (Ezekiel Elliot) was there to eat. And that was every day. And the Pounceys. I could go on and on.”

There are undoubtedly other players that Meyer has coached who would also fit the bill. In fact, it’s something he insisted on looking for as a recruiter.

“We’ve always counted that,” Meyer said. “I’ll take a lesser player that loves the game than someone that it’s a root canal to coach the guy.”

Ingram also chimed in on how important that quality is to team success down the road. It starts with the individual but quickly becomes contagious. The former Alabama running back played on a national championship team. He knows what it looks like.

“You have to have it because, yes, you can fake the funk when it’s all good and when you’re winning games and when you’re playing well,” Ingram said. “But when stuff hits the fan, when you have an injury or when you have to compete for playing time, you have to fall back on your love for the game. If you don’t truly love the game, if you don’t have a passion and a desire to be the best at what you do, when times get difficult you will be exposed.

“That’s not only in football, that’s in corporate America, you said that’s real estate. Sometimes the market’s up, sometimes the market’s down. If you love, are you really willing to grind to go sell that property, to go find the properties that’s off market? When you love it, nothing will deter you from it. And if you only do it for conditional reasons, when times get tough, you will get exposed if you don’t have a true love, passion and desire for it.”

So, on to one more guy that Urban Meyer would put into that category. Yeah, he wasn’t getting through a full segment without mentioning one of the all-time greats.

“A unique guy, Mark, and you played against him was (Tim) Tebow. He had everything going,” Meyer said. “He had his faith. It wasn’t like he was in survival mode, but he, as I look back, he might have loved the game as much as anybody I coached.

“I mean, he would spend 12 or more hours a day on the game, whether it be training, whether it be taking care of his body, studying film. He loved practice, man. He’d be out there pushing the coaches around, and we would have a ball coaching the guy. You coach guys like that, two hours goes like this (snaps finger).”