Jaguars catching strays from Bill Belichick's right-hand man out of the blue

Before he took the North Carolina job, Bill Belichick was seen as the top candidate to replace Doug Pederson as the head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars. However, he's chosen to make the leap to the collegiate ranks and will be taking some of his familiar collaborators with him. One of them, Mike Lombardi recently took an unnecessary jab at the Jags.

Lombardi made an appearance on the Pat McAfee show and said that NFL teams must develop homegrown talent in order to be successful, bringing up Jacksonville as an example of those that have routinely failed to do it.

"We're going to systematically and strategically build the team the right way so that we have sustainable success, so that you can compete at the highest level of college football," Lombardi said when discussing their vision at UNC. "I think that's really important. I think everybody makes too much about the cap. Certainly, the players deserve to get paid. But more into the cap. There's two things that involve the cap."

Lombardi continued, "It involves how do we develop players to become good players, and how do we pay the players that already are good players. So there's two systems that are going on simultaneously, and you need a head coach like coach Belichick who understands that player development is the key to salary cap. We've seen this. The Jacksonville Jaguars have done this for years. They buy players. They haven't won enough games. You got to develop your own player from within you."

While it's true that Belichick turned the New England Patriots into a dynasty during his 24-year stint, Lombardi isn't that great of a team executive. In fact, he performed poorly when he was the general manager for the Las Vegas (then Oakland) Raiders and the Cleveland Browns in the 2000s and early 2010s, respectively.

With the Raiders, he was mostly a general manager in name, as the late Al Davis was the one calling the shots. On the other hand, he only lasted a year in Cleveland, and all the moves he made failed to have an impact in the NFL.

But because he had a fancy title, Lombardi gets a mic and has wasted no time taking unnecessary shots at the Jags. Last year, he said that Trevor Lawrence was closer to being Daniel Jones than Patrick Mahomes.

Granted, Lawrence has dealt with injuries the past two years, but you will be hard-pressed to find someone who legitimately thinks he has Mahomes-like talent. Similarly, his comparison to Jones was inaccurate, as the Giants released him earlier this year. Here's the full exchange.

The Jaguars should take everything Mike Lombardi says with a grain of salt

Mike Lombardi isn't necessarily wrong when he says the Jacksonville Jaguars have failed to develop homegrown talent. Throughout the 2010s that was the case, and they frequently had to overpay free agents to lure him into playing for them because they were one of the worst teams in the league. Having said that, things have changed a bit in recent years.

Apart from locking up Trevor Lawrence, Jacksonville has locked up cornerback Tyson Campbell, defensive end Josh Hines-Allen, and more recently left tackle Walker Little, all homegrown players. But even if they still haven't been able to enjoy sustained success, Lombardi is the last person who should talk about it.

The bottom line is that Mike Lombardi can take a shot at the Jaguars only because he's freeloading off Bill Belichick's success because his track record as an NFL executive is equally bad if not worse.

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