AFC South 2023 Head Coach Power Rankings: Where Jacksonville Jaguars stand?

No. 1 AFC South HC Power Ranking – Jacksonville Jaguars, Doug Pederson

This is the first time in a handful of years that the Jacksonville Jaguars enter the offseason without uncertainty at head coach. Following a trip to the AFC Championship in 2017, Doug Marrone had back-to-back losing campaigns and was on the hot seat ahead of the 2022 season. To nobody’s surprise, he was canned at the end of the year.

The Jags then hired Urban Meyer to right the ship but things didn’t get much better. In fact, they got much worse. Meyer ended up not lasting even a whole year and Jacksonville once again had to embark on a search last offseason. This time though, they hit a home run when they hired Doug Pederson, who led the Jaguars to the playoffs and a division title in his first season at the helm.

From the very beginning, Pederson had a vision in place. He knew what was needed to turn things around. As Trevor Lawrence recently noted, Pederson didn’t come looking for potential fixes and instead made it about the players. While that sounds like something every head coach does, not many actually put it into practice. Pederson did and it paid off.

When Pederson became the head coach, believed turning things around was going to be a multi-year project but led an amazing turnaround in his first season at the helm. Even though he didn’t win the NFL Head Coach of the Year Award in 2022, he showed the Jacksonville Jaguars made the right decision when they hired him.