Doug Marrone to be the next Jacksonville Jaguars head coach, according to reports

After a mildly goofy coaching search, the Jacksonville Jaguars ended up paying a search firm to tell to hire their own offensive line coach – Doug Marrone.

The Jacksonville Jaguars are a lot of things, but a functional organization does not appear to be one of them.

Adam Schefter of ESPN recently reported the team plans to hire Doug Marrone has the head coach.

In a vacuum, hiring Doug Marrone is not the worst thing in the world. By most accounts, he is a solid head coach who knows how to lead a team and did a nice job with a ton of constraints with the Buffalo Bills.

The problem here is the optics of the situation.

The Jaguars could have given Marrone a legitimate trial run as the head coach this year if they had done something brutally easy – fired Gus Bradley earlier in the season. After the Jaguars got embarrassed by the Tennessee Titans on national television on Thursday night, LITERALLY EVERYONE expected the Jaguars to fire Bradley.

Nope.

Instead, the Jaguars cruelly trotted Bradley out as the coach all the way until week 15 when the team blew another winnable game.

Doug Marrone took over as the interim coach for a scant two weeks, not nearly enough time to draw a conclusion about his potential with this franchise.

After that debacle, the Jaguars hired a search firm (Korn Ferry) to help with the process of finding a new coach.

THIS LOOKS BAD.

This is what dysfunctional franchises do. The Jaguars could have made this much more amenable for fans if they had fired Bradley a long time ago.

Now? Even if you make a good argument for Marrone being the right guy, there’s absolutely no reason to trust the group of people who kept Bradley employed for this long.

Congrats to Doug Marrone and I hope he does a good job with this team, but a full-scale overhaul of the coaching staff was the better move.