A healthy Urban Meyer returns to coaching

From Dayton Daily News
Gene Smith was explaining why Urban Meyer was the search committee’s first choice, its only choice, its perfect choice to become Ohio State’s new football coach.
“He gets it,” the OSU athletics director said on two different occasions at a Monday evening news conference to announce the big-splash hire. “We’re fortunate to have a man who gets it.”
Whether Meyer truly does, that is the big question.
Sure he’s a born and bred Buckeye — he grew up in Ashtabula infatuated by the Ohio State Buckeyes, the Big Red Machine and the Cincinnati Bengals.
And, yes, he understands what it takes to run a big-time college football program and win a national championship. In six seasons, he took the Florida Gators to two national crowns.
But the real test for him will come with the contract he just signed.
Not the one he supposedly inked earlier Monday. That one is for six years and is thought to pay him at least $4 million a year to lift the scandal-nicked Buckeye program back to national prominence.
To hear him, that’s an easy task compared to the other pact he signed.
When he took his turn at the microphone, Meyer reached into a pocket of his dark suit coat, pulled out a folded-up pink piece of paper and held it up so the media crowd that jammed the Fawcett Center could see.
“This is the contract my kids made me sign before I was allowed to sign a real contract. And it’s tougher than any other contract I’ve signed in my life,” he said in reference to his three children — two daughters who are playing college volleyball and 13-year-old son Nate who sat next to his mom, aunt and uncle at the gathering and was nodding vigorously as his dad explained.
Although Meyer never revealed the provisos he had agreed to, his family later filled in some of the details…(full story)

Barney Frank: Don't Blame Me for Fannie, Freddie Problems

From Wall Street Journal
Rep. Barney Frank is blamed in certain quarters for spurring the financial crisis of 2008 by encouraging the government to make more loans to the poor.
In announcing his plans to retire from Congress at the end of 2012, the Massachusetts Democrat offered a characteristically detailed and spirited defense of his actions, and cast blame at Republicans for a failure to act.
Mr. Frank acknowledged that he did not see the financial crisis coming and believed that government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “doing well” until 2003.
However, Mr. Frank said that in 2004, he became concerned about the growth in the market for subprime loans, those made to borrowers with weak credit. Those loans are often faulted for sparking a financial panic starting in 2007…(full story)