A Spectacularly Jaguar-like Mess

We all knew that the Urban Meyer In Jacksonville experiment was likely going to fail, but I don't think any of us expected it to fail this quickly and this spectacularly.  There were rumors that they were ready to fire him if they didn't beat the Texans in Sunday's battle of 2-11 teams, at which point I was thinking "Why not let him finish the season?  What difference does it make?"  But this week's turn of events prompted immediate action and Meyer was let go immediately, with owner Shad Khan admitting he got it wrong less than a year after proclaiming he finally "got it right."

I don't mean to minimize it, but things like this are exactly why the Jaguars are a laughingstock.  They're a team that, outside of one random year where they made the AFC Championship Game, you can count on for double-digit losses every season and, despite always having high draft picks, being in a constant state of rebuilding.  It doesn't matter who the coach or GM is.  It's one of the three certainties in life.  Death, taxes and the Jaguars sucking.

It hasn't always been like that, of course.  The Jaguars were actually really good in the late 90s.  They made the AFC Championship Game in 1995, just their second season in the league, and went 14-2 in 1999, when they lost to the Titans (for the third time that season) in the AFC Championship Game.  But, ever since Tom Coughlin and Mark Brunell left, it's been a whole lot of losing in North Florida.

That was all supposed to change with Urban Meyer, Shad Khan's white whale.  The guy he'd wanted for years and was finally able to lure away from the college ranks.  And this new era was gonna start with both Meyer and No. 1 overall pick Trevor Lawrence, the franchise quarterback they've long needed.

There were, of course, the skeptics who thought Meyer's stay in Jacksonville was only temporary and he'd bolt as soon as the right college job popped up.  (Like when he "retired" from Florida, only to resurface at Ohio State a year later.)  After all, Nick Saban lasted one season with the Dolphins before leaving for Alabama and Bobby Petrino bolted the Falcons for Arkansas with three games left in his first season.  Those are just two recent examples, and many expected Meyer to follow suit.  Whether he actually would've or not, we'll never know!

Meyer didn't give Khan much of a choice, either.  The writing was on the wall.  Meyer getting fired was as inevitable as Jon Gruden's "resignation" in Las Vegas.  The team's record was a completely separate problem that had absolutely nothing to do with why Meyer is now out of a job.  It didn't help, but even if they were 11-2 instead of 2-11, the off-the-field problems were simply too much to ignore.

The problems started almost immediately when he hired the guy who got fired at Iowa for bullying players and making racist comments as the Jaguars' director of sport performance.  That drew a strong rebuke from the Fritz Pollard Alliance and an admission that neither Meyer nor GM Trent Baalke had considered the implications of the hiring.  And that was just the start.

Then there was signing Tim Tebow as a tight end--a position he had never played before--and cutting him during training camp; the OTA violations that led to fines for both Meyer and the team, as well as the loss of two OTA's next offseason; having Lawrence and Gardner Minshew alternate snaps with the first team in preseason, only to trade Minshew to Philadelphia before the season started.  As it turns out, that was all just the precursor.

He also publicly stated that the Jaguars considered a player's vaccination when making final cuts, a rules violation that prompted an NFLPA investigation; he benched running back James Robinson, Jacksonville's best player, for long stretchs; then, when asked about it, he threw his assistant coaches under the bus.  He also lost several assistants because of the way he treated them, and his relationship with the players clearly wasn't much better.  Still, Khan didn't want to be "hasty" when it came to Meyer.  Until the last two incidents, that is.

In October, after losing a Thursday night game in Cincinnati, Meyer didn't travel back with the team so that he could visit his grandchildren in Columbus.  Two days later, a video of Meyer with a woman who's not his wife began circulating online.  After he apologized, another video of him with the same woman came out.  That drew a public rebuke from Khan, but it still wasn't enough for Meyer to get fired.

Finally, there was the last straw, the incident with ex-Jaguars kicker Josh Lambo.  According to the Tampa Bay Times, the incident happened during the last week of the preseason.  Lambo alleged that Meyer kicked him in the leg while stretching and, when Lambo told him never to do it again, responding by saying, "I'm the head ball coach.  I'll kick you whenever the f*** I want."  Meyer has denied this, but that doesn't matter.  It was clear that the Jaguars had to sever ties with him immediately.

So how did it go so spectacularly wrong so quickly?  It's clear that Meyer's coaching style simply didn't translate to the NFL.  (In fact, I think that was a big part of it.)  Or maybe he just couldn't handle losing.  It's not like his teams lost very often at Florida or Ohio State!  And, it's also worth noting that there were plenty of problems in both of those programs that should've been red flags.

Simply put, Shad Khan took a gamble with Urban Meyer and clearly lost that bet.  He somehow managed to take the most dysfunctional organization in the NFL and make it even more dysfunctional!  And it's not like the Jaguars can write this off as a one-time miss, either.  Meyer's the latest in a long line of coaches who couldn't win in Jacksonville.  What makes things worse this time, though, is that it sets the franchise back even further.

Where the Jaguars go from here is anybody's guess.  It's pretty obvious that a lot of things need to change for Jacksonville to be competitive at all, let alone consistently.  They at least have Trevor Lawrence.  Now they need to find the right coach.  Because Urban Meyer clearly wasn't it.