Jacksonville Jaguars HC Urban Meyer hit with reality check

The Jacksonville Jaguars hired Urban Meyer as the seventh head coach in franchise history because they think he is the right man to turn the team into a perennial winner. It won’t be easy though. In fact, it may be more difficult than Meyer originally thought, based on an exchange he recently had with Denver Broncos head coach Vic Fangio.

On Wednesday, Fangio met with the media and touched on several topics, including a conversation he had with Meyer during the Jaguars’ Week 2 matchup versus the Broncos. Fangio claims that Meyer told him that coaching in the NFL was like playing against Alabama every week. It’s possible that Meyer was half-joking, or maybe he want to get that off his chest. Regardless of the reason, it’s interesting to learn that he’s found the level of competition in the pros to be significantly higher than he originally expected.

"I don’t know Urban Meyer at all really. I met him the other day, shook his hand before the game and after the game. And his comment to me was, “every week it is like playing Alabama in the NFL”. That’s it. Everybody is capable of beating everybody in this league."

Here’s the snippet in case you want to listen to it.

The Jacksonville Jaguars head coach is going through a learning curve.

The case could be made that Meyer underestimate how steep a challenge this was going. After all, he’s won everywhere he’s been. From Bowling Green to Ohio State, he’s had success right out of the gate. Thus, it’s reasonable to think that he didn’t expect Jacksonville to be much different.

On the bright side, Meyer quickly found out that it will take an insane amount of work to turn things around in Jacksonville. He recently told the media that he’s not concerned with what happened before he arrived. Instead, he’s focused on fielding the best available team. Also, he now knows the rebuild will take a bit more than expected, which is why he might have asked fans to “hang in there“.

There’s no way to sugarcoat that the Jaguars are currently 0-2, and Meyer will keep getting plenty of heat until he starts winning. Will that happen towards the end of the 2021 season? Probably not, change doesn’t happen overnight. This will take a while but as long as the head coach faces the reality of coaching in the NFL, and adjusts accordingly, the Jaguars should have no trouble getting better and eventually win games.