Yesterday at 9:48 a.m. EST|Updated yesterday at 2:56 p.m. EST
Every minute longer Urban Meyer remained the coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars only would have added to the damage he wrought over one offseason and 13 games. Jaguars owner Shad Khan did not do the right thing late Wednesday night so much as the only thing. Khan fired Meyer, ending an experiment that set back his franchise, threatened the development of first overall pick Trevor Lawrence and obliterated Meyer’s reputation.
Meyer packed a kaleidoscopic array of controversies, embarrassments and missteps into his 336 days as Jaguars coach. When you hire a strength coach with a history of alleged racist and abusive behavior, sign a 34-year-old minor league baseball washout as a tight end, publicly flirt in a bar with your name on it as a married man, demonstrate an ignorance of which of your players are actually getting in games and kick your kicker, you have covered the bingo card.
That off-field compendium doesn’t speak to just how overmatched the Jaguars were on the field. They are 2-11 and have been outscored by 83 points during their current five-game losing streak. The culture Meyer instilled produced a team that plays like it doesn’t want to be there.
The most damaging aspect of Meyer’s partial season — and the first thing the next coach must address — is how it affected Lawrence, the franchise’s best hope. The Jaguars provided Lawrence little talent and stale schemes. As he should have been learning, he regressed. Lawrence entered the league regarded as a generational talent, a can’t-miss prospect on par with John Elway or Andrew Luck. He has not surpassed 240 passing yards and has thrown just one touchdown since Week 8. On Sunday, he threw four interceptions in a 20-0 loss to the Tennessee Titans.
The singularity of Meyer’s failure suggests he is not just the latest college coach to fail in the NFL. If there is a familiar trait to his collapse, it might be that he did not understand himself or his task.
In the summer, Meyer told Pete Thamel of Yahoo Sports that winning in the NFL was “the last mountain to try to climb.” Meyer seemed to believe he had climbed a lot of mountains. Really, he had climbed the same mountain in different ways.
In the early 2000s at Bowling Green and Utah, Meyer was a schematic innovator. He helped launch the spread-offense craze in college football that trickled up to the NFL: Andy Reid made it part of his offense after the Kansas City Chiefs acquired Alex Smith, who quarterbacked Meyer’s 2004 Utah team to an undefeated season.
By his Ohio State tenure, Meyer viewed himself as a culture creator who delegated X’s and O’s to his assistants. Meyer won because he was great at recruiting high school players and used an immense resource advantage to build some of the best facilities and staffs in college football. No one can dispute his towering success in college.
In the NFL, the advantages Meyer created in college evaporated, and his idea of winning culture was exposed as hollow. The debate between culture and scheme misses the point, anyway: You can’t pick and choose. Bill Belichick creates a culture of accountability and diligence and also can correct the right guard when he takes a false step on a trap block. The Baltimore Ravens possess one of the most solid and revered cultures in the NFL. In an interview in the spring of 2020, as NFL teams adjusted to working from home, Coach John Harbaugh discussed how he viewed the long hours of his work life.
“It’s a challenge every week just to keep your head above water, not to get blown out of the water by scheme and by ideas,” Harbaugh said then. “So you’ve got to be prepared, you got to be ready, and you got to work at it.”
Meyer was not prepared for what it took to win in the NFL. It cost the Jaguars their season and cost Meyer his reputation. Eleven months ago, Meyer was a respected television analyst and one of the greatest modern college football coaches. Now he’s the guy who sat on that bar stool in Columbus, the bully who berated his kicker, the dunce who thought Andre Cisco was playing when he wasn’t. Now he’s a punchline.
“As I stated in October, regaining our trust and respect was essential,” Khan wrote in a statement, referencing Meyer’s dalliance in the bar. “Regrettably, it did not happen.”
