Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer once famously taught a class at Ohio State on leadership and character at Ohio State. If anyone still has a syllabus, please send it our way. We’d love to see the session taught to the college kids that you should call some of your employees overpaid and threaten the jobs of others after getting blown out by a bad team.
Note: To read more about the dysfunction in Jacksonville, PFN Insider Tony Pauline revealed more information about the Jaguars, including the fact that Meyer has lost the support of everyone in the building and could be fired soon.
Urban Meyer unravels after Jaguars’ shutout loss vs. Titans
The Jaguars have now lost five straight games, and Meyer has come undone. NFL Media’s scathing report Saturday on the Jaguars’ dysfunction echoed ours from a few weeks back: Meyer, sources say, has lost much if not all of the support of his locker room and has his assistants “coaching scared,” in the words of a plugged-in league source.
Meyer, according to NFL Network, questioned the credentials of his staff and called them “losers” and also recently got into a heated argument with wide receiver Marvin Jones that caused Jones to briefly leave the team. Meyer said after Sunday’s 20-0 loss to the Titans that those allegations were untrue.
But then he sent a message to the sources within the organization that have been spreading that information: If I find out who you are, you’re fired.
“What’s the answer?” Meyer said, when speaking broadly about fixing all that’s gone wrong in Jacksonville. “Start leaking some information or some nonsense? No. No, that’s nonsense. That’s garbage. I’ve been very blessed. I’ve not really dealt with that…not dealt with, ‘Well did you hear what he said?’ ‘What? No. Let’s improve on offense and get our quarterback in a position to be successful.’ That’s our focus.
“What someone’s brother said or someone said, someone said, that will occupy very little of my time,” Meyer added. “And if there is a source, that source is unemployed, I mean within seconds.”
Urban Meyer’s credibility gap
Meyer added that “losing sucks. That’s all I can tell you. It eats away at your soul.” He also said there is no finger-pointing inside the franchise. But that’s simply not true. Meyer is the biggest finger-pointer of them all, blaming his staff for almost everything that’s gone wrong.
“Calling someone a loser, that’s inaccurate,” Meyer added. “I have high expectations for our coaches. I am very demanding of our coaches and expect guys to be held accountable for their positions, and at times when they’re not, we address it. But I assure you .. that’s nonsense.”
Meyer’s issue is with credibility. What he says to the media doesn’t match what he says to his team privately. And that hasn’t gone unnoticed.
And sometimes, he contradicts himself in his own press conference. Indeed, he agreed with a reporter who mused Sunday that Jacksonville’s offensive line is getting paid too much money to be as bad as it has been.
Has Meyer lost the locker room?
Meyer did acknowledge that he’s worried about losing the locker room with how this season has gone, but he added that the effort his team showed, even in a loss, suggested the locker room is still engaged.
That’s fantasyland stuff, though. Furthermore, Sunday was the third time in four weeks the Jaguars have gotten blown out, and they seem to be getting worse, not better, each game. Still, there’s no way that Meyer’s my-way-or-the-highway demeanor isn’t a factor.
“The reality is that losing sucks,” Meyer said. “Losing tears you apart, especially people with pride and who work their butts off. We’ve just got to stick together and keep going.”