FOX Sports Analyst — Big Noon Kickoff | College Football Hall of Fame, Class of 2025

Urban Meyer's Apple Watch: 187 Wins, Three National Championships, and the Most Instructive 13 Games in NFL History

The only modern-era coach to win national championships in two different conferences. Florida 2006. Florida 2008. Ohio State 2014. A 187–32 record across four programmes. The Urban Meyer coaching tree has produced more head coaches than almost any in the sport. Then Jacksonville 2021: 13 games, 2–11, fired. Now a College Football Hall of Famer on the Fox Sports Big Noon Kickoff set alongside Joel Klatt. On his wrist: an Apple Watch.

Urban Meyer — Apple Watch on wrist. Source: FOX Sports / Big Noon Kickoff

Urban Meyer — College Football Hall of Fame (2025), three national championships, Fox Sports analyst

Urban Frank Meyer III was born July 10, 1964, in Toledo, Ohio, and grew up in Ashtabula. He played college football as a defensive back at the University of Cincinnati, where he earned a degree in psychology, then earned a master's in sports administration from Ohio State in 1988 while working as a graduate assistant on Earle Bruce's staff. He spent years building his credentials through assistant positions at Illinois State, Colorado State, and Notre Dame before his first head coaching job at Bowling Green in 2001, where he went 17–6 in two seasons. At Utah in 2003–04, he went 22–2 including an undefeated regular season, a Fiesta Bowl victory, and the BCS-busting campaign that forced the sport to acknowledge non-power programmes.

The University of Florida hired him in 2005. What followed was the most productive six-year run in SEC coaching history: 65–15, two national championships (the 2006 season over Ohio State, the 2008 season over Oklahoma), a 22-game winning streak, the development of Tim Tebow into the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner, and four separate 20-game winning streaks — a record unique in major college football. He stepped down after the 2010 season citing health concerns. He came back. Ohio State hired him in 2012, and in seven seasons he went 83–9, won the inaugural College Football Playoff National Championship after the 2014 season — making him the only modern-era coach to win a national title in two different conferences — and seven Big Ten titles. He retired following the 2019 Rose Bowl. His overall college record: 187–32. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2025.

The Jacksonville chapter is the other part of the biography, and it belongs here too. Meyer came out of retirement in January 2021 to coach the Jacksonville Jaguars — his first NFL job, tasked with building around the first overall pick in the draft, quarterback Trevor Lawrence. He went 2–11 and was fired after 13 games, in the midst of multiple controversies both on and off the field. It was the most public and comprehensive collapse of a major coaching career in recent memory. He returned to Fox Sports, resumed his role on Big Noon Kickoff, and was announced as a Hall of Fame inductee four years later. The coaching record stands at 187–32. The Jacksonville season stands at 2–11. Both are part of who Urban Meyer is.

"The only modern-era coach to win a national championship at two different schools in two different conferences." — College Football Hall of Fame, on Urban Meyer's induction, 2025

Timepiece

Apple Watch

The Apple Watch, first released in 2015 and now in its tenth generation, is the world's best-selling watch and a platform that has extended beyond lifestyle accessory into genuine health infrastructure. The current lineup — Series 11, SE 3, and Ultra 3 — offers continuous health monitoring across the full day, wrist-level communications, and ecosystem integration that operates without demanding deliberate attention from the wearer. All models update automatically over the air.

Heart rate monitoring, ECG, blood oxygen, temperature sensing, sleep apnea detection, and sleep tracking run passively throughout the day and night. Meyer stepped down from Florida citing health concerns; he stepped down from Ohio State citing the same. The Apple Watch, monitoring physiology continuously and flagging patterns the wearer wouldn't otherwise notice, is a practical tool for someone who has made clear that the demands of elite coaching carry a physical cost. Communications — calls, messages, notifications — arrive at the wrist without requiring a phone. On the Big Noon Kickoff set, before and during live television, the watch handles the practical infrastructure of the working day without adding to it.

Platform	Apple Watch (watchOS) — paired with iPhone
Models	Series 11 / SE 3 / Ultra 3 — aluminium, stainless steel, or titanium
Health	Heart rate, ECG, blood oxygen, sleep apnea detection, temperature sensing, fall detection
Connectivity	Calls, messages, notifications, Apple Pay — hands-free on wrist
Navigation	GPS with haptic turn-by-turn directions
Software	watchOS — over-the-air updates, continuously improving
Price range	From ~$249 (SE 3) to ~$799+ (Ultra 3)

The Tree and the Wreckage

The "Urban Meyer coaching tree" is one of the most discussed in the sport — a list of assistant coaches who learned under Meyer and became head coaches themselves, including Dan Mullen, Kyle Whittingham, Bob Stoops, Chris Petersen, and Kirby Smart. Building a coaching tree of that depth requires a particular kind of organisational intensity: a system, a culture, a standard that transmits. Meyer built three national championship programmes from that intensity. He also retired from two of them citing the toll on his health, and was fired from the third after 13 games having produced a level of controversy that a 187–32 record could not absorb.

What the Apple Watch on Urban Meyer's wrist at Fox Sports represents, in that context, is straightforward: a man who twice stepped away from coaching citing health, who now operates in a less physically demanding broadcast environment, wearing the device that monitors what a body like his has been through. The health monitoring suite — heart rate, ECG, blood oxygen, sleep apnea detection — is not abstract to someone whose career ended twice in significant part because of what it was doing to his body. The watch that tracks what the body is doing, continuously and without being asked, is the appropriate device for the wrist of someone who has learned that ignoring those signals has consequences.

The View from the Set

Urban Meyer now sits on the Fox Sports Big Noon Kickoff set alongside Joel Klatt — himself a subject in this series, wearing an Apple Watch on the same broadcast. It is the first extended period of Meyer's adult professional life in which he is not responsible for a programme's results. He watches from the outside, as a former coach whose knowledge of what happens inside those buildings is as deep as anyone who has ever sat in that seat. The College Football Hall of Fame recognised him in 2025. The record is 187–32 and three national championships. The watch on his wrist monitors the man behind the record, quietly, continuously, as it always has.

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