Opinion: Jaguars had to fire Urban Meyer for his embarrassing NFL tenure
Despite his reputation as one of the NFL’s most patient executives, Jaguars’ owner Shad Khan clearly had enough. He couldn’t stand any longer to put up with the bad optics attached to his head coach, Urban Meyer.
So around 12:30 a.m. Thursday, one of the shortest coaching tenures in league history officially ended when Meyer got the firing he richly deserved for his plain all-around incompetence.
There was no one thing that ended the tumultuous Meyer era. Due to the timing of the firing, many connected former kicker Josh Lambo going public Wednesday with his accusation that Meyer kicked him during a warmup stretch in the final week of preseason – and used vulgar language in the process – as some sort of last straw.
Actually, the report in the Tampa Bay Times and the follow-up Lambo salvo to First Coast News that Meyer was "completely unfit" to be an NFL head coach, was more of a remarkable coincidence. No matter how it was framed in some media circles, Meyer didn’t get the boot because a kicker he released piled on.
Khan knew of the alleged kicking incident for several months because Lambo’s agent had reported it to the Jaguars one day after it happened. Plus, as the Jaguars’ owner said in a statement, the firing of his fourth coach in the last decade was a result of weeks of deliberation and "thorough analysis of the entirety of Urban’s tenure with our team."
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Before the NFL owners’ meetings had concluded Wednesday in Dallas, the decision to cut ties with Meyer had already been made. Khan just waited until the middle of the night to go public with it.
A divorce from Meyer was about a body of work that became too much for Khan to tolerate. It was simply a lethal combination of never-ending controversy, horrific judgment, bad public relations and a 2-11 record, also accompanied by a regressing offense that put rookie quarterback Trevor Lawrence in a terrible bind.
Too many missteps
The truth is Meyer was out of his league as an NFL head coach. He failed to grasp the concept that he couldn’t run the Jaguars like his college teams, where his superb recruiting skills allowed him to acquire far greater talent than 80-90 percent of the opponents he faced.
In college, Meyer proved to be a masterful CEO because 18-to-22-year-old kids starved for a leader that could help them get to the NFL.
But when the 57-year-old coach had to deal with grown men and went up against teams every week with equal or mostly better rosters, Meyer often looked lost. He discovered the pro football world was a more difficult adjustment than he ever cared to admit publicly.
Winning 85 percent of his games in college made it easier for administrators to ignore Meyer’s acerbic manner, sense of entitlement and assorted controversies, but that didn’t happen on football’s biggest stage.
One faux pas after another peeled back the onion of a coach who was not only ill-equipped for the NFL, but seemed to lose the confidence and swagger that made him ultra-successful at Florida and Ohio State.
A prime example was the season-opening loss to the Houston Texans, where the Jaguars looked woefully unprepared, falling behind 34-7 before falling 37-21. Except for a brief midseason stretch, the Jaguars never found any kind of rhythm, especially with an offense averaging a measly 13.8 points per game (second-worst in NFL).
But what really earned Meyer a pink slip from Khan was his inability to stop being an off-the-field distraction and a poor representative of the Jaguars’ brand. His lapses in judgment were prolific and embarrassing.
It started with the ill-advised hire of strength and conditioning coach Chris Doyle, who was accused at Iowa by several Black players of bullying. That hiring was so roundly criticized, Doyle offered up his resignation the next day and it was accepted.
As time went on, Meyer had one miscalculation after another. He incurred NFL fines for himself ($100,000) and the Jaguars ($200,000) for excessive contact at a June 1 OTA. There was the failed Tim Tebow experiment, then letting Gardner Minshew alternate first-team reps with Lawrence, his No. 1 overall draft pick, for most of the preseason.
A public relations nightmare
From a PR standpoint, Meyer did himself no favors. He became a national laughingstock with foolish behavior at his Ohio bar/restaurant, getting too cozy with a young woman who wasn’t his wife, which got recorded on a patron’s cell phone. That came 24 hours after Meyer didn’t fly back with the team following a Thursday night loss to the Cincinnati Bengals, which stunned the NFL coaching fraternity.
Khan admonished Meyer publicly for the video, saying he needed to earn back the franchise's trust and respect. Five words in Khan's statement were a pretty good indicator on why he pulled the plug, saying: "Regrettably, it did not happen."
As the season wore on, his body language – whether at press conferences or on the sideline – consistently revealed a coach who lacked vitality. In too many sessions with the media, Meyer acted like he had just been pulled into a dentist chair.
The Jaguars’ franchise had energy and juice in Meyer’s first five months on the job, but it quickly evaporated. With the Jaguars mired, or Meyer-ed, in another five-game losing streak, the optics only got worse.
Meyer's awkward handling of the whole James Robinson saga – being coy about who benched the Jaguars' running back after his fumble against the Atlanta Falcons and not owning up to it – should have never been a two-week storyline.
Sunday’s 20-0 loss to the Tennessee Titans was particularly damning. It featured a quick, sub-freezing handshake with Titans’ coach Mike Vrabel, a former Meyer assistant at Ohio State, right after the game that was lampooned on social media.
At his news conference shortly thereafter, Meyer spent most of it awkwardly denying an NFL Network report about him belittling assistant coaches for not winning as much as him over their careers. He also pushed back on the characterization in the same report that he got into a heated argument with receiver Marvin Jones.
It didn’t end there. Meyer then stepped into another PR mess by saying he would instantly fire anybody in the Jaguars’ building if they were caught leaking information to the media. It was a cringe-worthy remark that likely didn’t go unnoticed by his players or the man signing Meyer’s checks, and certainly not by ex-employee Lambo.
Tough blow for Khan
This franchise couldn’t escape the fact it was losing momentum with a disingenuous head coach, one who grated on his assistants and many players as his credibility diminished with almost every move.
Khan took stock of it and reluctantly determined this train wreck couldn’t go on. He had to dismiss the coach he had long admired or risk losing a good chunk of the Jaguars’ fan base.
Undeniably, it’s crippling blow for Khan. He was the one who smugly declared after the Jaguars drafted Lawrence that "I got it right this time, OK," in response to a question about his previously disastrous coaching hires.
No, it turns out Khan needed just 336 days to figure out that he got it all wrong. Again.
So where does the Jaguars’ owner go from here for his next coach? Well, first he has to determine what to do with GM Trent Baalke. And even if the Jaguars go 2-2 in their last four games with interim coach and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell, that better not earn him the job or the fan base will organize a protest like never seen before outside TIAA Bank Field.
A housecleaning would seem to be in order, given that the Jaguars are 3-26 since Baalke came aboard as Director of Player Personnel in February, 2020. He got promoted to interim GM after the Dave Caldwell firing last November, then earned Meyer’s approval and became the full-time GM.
Unless Khan is convinced Baalke’s front-office experience is worthy of him picking the next head coach – not likely since he retained GM Gene Smith in 2012 and let him hire Mike Mularkey – the Jaguars are better off starting fresh.
Suffice to say, whoever comes next doesn’t have a high bar to surpass Meyer. He may go down as the worst college-to-NFL coaching hire in league history.
Meyer’s arrival elicited substantial hype on January 14 when Khan lured the three-time college national championship coach out of the Fox television booth. Yet just 13 games into an unmitigated disaster, his firing should rightfully be greeted by Jaguars’ fans with cheers and a massive sigh of relief.
So much for Urban renewal.
Gene Frenette Sports columnist at Florida Times-Union, follow him on Twitter @genefrenette