Carlos Hyde has been cut from the Buckeyes at a most unfortunate time. Photo: USA Today Sports
Nothing good happens after midnite. Perhaps nobody knows this better this morning than Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer.
Ohio State was our runaway favorite in the Big Ten this upcoming season when we did our Big Ten preview. The Buckeyes will probably still be a strong favorite in the conference in 2013 but they will do so without last season's second-leading rusher Carlos Hyde. Hyde has been dismissed from the Ohio State program after being named as a person of interest in a police report investigating an assault outside a Columbus bar this weekend.
Men of the Scarlet and Gray was the first to bring this incident to light with a report suggesting a prominent player on the Ohio State roster could be involved in a significant legal problem. Eleven Warriors later shed light on the news with the sharing of a police report that listed Hyde as a person of interest while also revealing some of the details of the incident. According to the police report, a woman claims to have been assaulted by a man she did not know but could identify. The Columbus Dispatch followed with their report of Hyde being dismissed from the team.
Starting cornerback Bradley Roby is also working through some legal issues as well. Roby was arrested Sunday morning in Bloomington, Indiana and was charged with battery resulting in bodily injury after refusing to leave a bar when asked to leave, according to The Columbus Dispatch. Roby was to attend Big Ten media days to represent the Buckeyes. Odds are pretty good this will no longer be the case.
As of this posting, Hyde has not been charged with anything but this does not appear to bode well moving forward if Urban Meyer was willing to remove his top running back from the roster at this point. There is precedent for Meyer to bring back a dismissed player though. Last summer linebacker Storm Klein was removed from the program after being accused of a physical altercation with an ex-girlfriend. Klein was cleared of all charges and reinstated to the Buckeyes.
With Big Ten media days starting up in under 48 hours, this is certainly not the kind of news Meyer would have wanted to address this week, at a time when critics have been firing all they can at the head coach in light of his past at Florida.
Kevin McGuire is the host of the No 2-Minute Warning podcast. Follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
