Urban Meyer said he never recruited a player from Louisiana when he was running Florida, a boundary he said he stuck to even after his staff came close to landing a top prospect there. On The Triple Option podcast, Meyer said the near-miss was enough to end the chase: “enough,” he said. “I’m not flying into Louisiana again.”

The comment is getting attention now because Ohio State under Ryan Day has done the very thing Meyer avoided. Day landed safety Blaine Bradford in March 2025, after the Baton Rouge Catholic star publicly said he would not be flipping to the Tigers anytime soon even after Lane Kiffin’s hiring. Day also flipped Lafayette-area star Darryus McKinley in November, after Brian Kelly was fired from the LSU Tigers, and the Buckeyes got their first Louisiana commitment under Day back in April 2020, when a Warren Easton High School defensive back pledged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meyer’s explanation was blunt. He said that when he was at Florida, his staff got close to a great player in Louisiana but could not close the deal, and he decided the effort was not worth the trip. “There’s enough good players around Georgia and Florida that I’m not gonna go beat my face against the wall and go into Louisiana,” he said. The remark fits the way Meyer built his rosters in an earlier era, when geographic limits could still be treated as a choice rather than a necessity.

That part of the story matters because Meyer retired three years before NIL arrived and five years before pay-to-play rev-share payments were introduced, two changes that have pushed college recruiting into a very different world. Ohio State’s recent run in Louisiana shows how quickly those old boundaries have blurred. Meyer drew a line and stayed on his side of it. Day has crossed it repeatedly, and the latest names out of Baton Rouge and Lafayette suggest that line may not mean much in the modern recruiting race.