Former Jaguars HC Urban Meyer doesn’t understand what went wrong

In retrospect, there’s not much to salvage from Urban Meyer’s short stint as the Jacksonville Jaguars head coach and he would probably agree. In fact, it looks like he left with a bitter taste in his mouth due to all the losing he was responsible for.

Meyer joined Dan Dakich of OutKick on Don’t @ Me and talked about his time as the head coach of the Jags. He told Dakich that losing was hard and “it eats your soul away“. Moreover, he describes his tenure in the NFL as “the worst experience I’ve had in my professional life”. During the sitdown, Meyer made it a point of emphasis to deny he ever kicked Josh Lambo.

"I certainly did not. To  kick someone? Come on. I’ve done this 37 years. Kick a player? The other players came up to me and said, We saw the whole thing."

Here’s the whole interview, in case you want to listen to it.

Urban Meyer isn’t the victim of the mess he created with the Jaguars.

While no Jaguars player has outright thrown Meyer under the bus, they haven’t rushed to his defense either and had acknowledged that it was a tough year full of distractions. Veteran linebacker Myles Jack also acknowledged that there was dysfunction in Jacksonville last season and says that their next year coach needs to be a leader of men, implying that Meyer might have not been that.

Meyer told Dakich that he “made some mistakes” but he didn’t go into specifics, which isn’t surprising but would have been a fresh breath of air since he never held himself accountable for the team’s failures. Back when he was in Jacksonville, he blamed others for his blunders and never accepted responsibility for his actions. For example, he ordered the coaching staff to bench James Robinson in favor of Carlos Hyde. When asked about it, he denied it but once he was given the boot, he conceded that he made the decision.

Meyer left the Jags in bad shape and that’s saying something when you take into account that they have had only one winning season over the past 11 years. He was supposed to right the ship and lead the team to brighter days but tore them apart instead. You would think that after having time to reflect, he would learn from his mistakes but that’s not the case. He sees himself as a victim of the circumstances and makes it seem as if he was doomed to fail regardless of what he did.

Things got so bad during Meyer’s last weeks of his tenure in Jacksonville, the question of whether the organization would fire him became a matter of when it would happen. While hiring him was a mistake to begin with, it was a good thing that the Jaguars realized they made an error of judgment and corrected it instead of doubling down on it. At least, they now know what kind of traits they should stay away from during their head coaching search.