Well, I got it to verify for now. Have to delve deeper into some things. I have the theme for the admin blog set as the home wp-default theme and tried the tags in the home/header.php. Wouldn't verify. Went to the default/header.php and dropped this in at the top before the
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
and it worked.
html>
<head>
<meta name="verify-v1" content="x1c7FPayFngqncWE0jJpetg8gnusIvwn7HJ+/PISb8g=" />
</head>
</html>
Which leaves me scratching my head about which theme is which. I disabled the home default sitewide and enabled it just for the main blog. Even disabled the default sitewide to see if it removed that from the themes available for others, which it did. The admin blog still maintained it. So it must be the right one, huh? The home default?
Confusing. I am using the global theme options plugin.