Now that Urban Meyer is no longer coaching for a university, he seems a bit more open to sharing information than he ever would during his years coaching for Ohio State and Florida.

The latest example of the FOX Sports analyst opening up comes from a recent interview Meyer did with 247Sports “Social Distance” series to discuss a wide range of college football topics.

When it comes to recruiting, at least in Meyer’s experience, college coaches really do check the recruiting rankings and sites for information.

“I don’t want to speak for other coaches but if they’re telling you they’re not paying attention, I would say they’re probably not telling the truth,” Meyer said on the show. “I would always study that, as a matter of fact, every day, and I went to your site, 247Sports and it said class rankings and I would hit that. And I always knew exactly who the rival was recruiting and teams we were going to play. And of course it’s not an exact science but you know what, you guys do a pretty good job.”

Meyer then went on to share that Ohio State got competitive with the rankings and would even discover prospects from time to time by studying the recruiting rankings.

“I think recruiting has become big-time business. The fact that your fan base follows it. And the fact is you’re keeping score. I’ve always said many, many times, as long as we’re keeping score, we’re gonna go try to win this thing,” Meyer continued. “And we’ve tried to win recruiting but did we ever make a decision because you or a service had a guy ranked higher than us? No.

“I’d be shocked if a coach said. ‘We’re going to take him because it will enhance our standings.’ However, I’ll tell you this. I probably, over the years, I’ve found a couple dozen players, because I wasn’t aware of them until I checked the recruiting sites and I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Who is this guy?’ And we jumped in the middle of it. Sometimes we got him.”

There’s no chance Meyer would have ever said that during his coaching days but now that he’s an analyst, he seems a bit more eager to peel the curtain back on the way his program was run at Ohio State.