Mike Vrabel recalls how unlikeble Urban Meyer was during Jaguars tenure

When the Jacksonville Jaguars hired Urban Meyer, they thought they had brought in the right coach to take them to new heights. What they got was someone who didn't know what he was doing most of the time, but thought too highly of himself and somehow managed to sink the team even lower. Just recently, former Tennessee Titans head coach Mike Vrabel shared an anecdote about the two in 2021.

During his lone season with the Jags, Meyer raised eyebrows for several reasons. In one of the games against rival Tennessee, he made the news because he refused to shake Vrabel's hand after losing. Just recently, the former Titans head coach talked about their pregame encounter.

Vrabel appeared on the Manningcast in the Week 12 Monday Night Football bout and told the Manning brothers that Meyer asked him who he was.

Confused, Vrabel told his former employer that he was the head coach for Tennessee and had worked for him for two years at Ohio State. Here's the clip of the exchange, which he brought up because actor Owen Wilson experienced something similar when he met Meyer.

Keep in mind that Vrabel wasn't a low-level intern under Meyer. He coached the linebacker and, later, the defensive line at Ohio State from 2011 to 2013, so he could not say with a straight face that he didn't know who he was. Then again, this anecdote isn't much different from many of the ones players and coaches remember from Meyer's stint as the head coach with the Jaguars.

Urban Meyer was a megalomaniac who thought he could lead an NFL team through intimidation and fear. He quickly found that it didn't work, wearing his welcome down in just a few weeks. The embattled head coach routinely threatened players with cutting them, and told his assistants, the ones himself handpicked, to prove that they deserved to keep their job, often bragging about how much of a winner he was.

Shad Khan is at fault for hiring Urban Meyer to coach the Jaguars

As bad as Urban Meyer was, Shad Khan deserves to shoulder plenty of the blame for hiring him. After all, he didn't properly vet him, and instead of conducting a proper search, he courted the head coach and asked him to coach, what could go wrong?

Khan has never been a particularly involved owner. That allowed Meyer to run the team unsupervised, which led to controversies. On the field, the Jacksonville Jaguars were bad and routinely outcoached. Off the field, he got caught dancing improperly with a woman who wasn't his wife Shelley, and made headlines because he didn't travel with the team after a loss on Thursday Night Football. Moreover, he didn't know the namesof his and opposing players.

It wasn't until former Jaguars kicker Josh Lambo went public with the allegation that Meyer kicked him during practice that Khan finally pulled the trigger and fired the head coach. In the end, he lasted less than a year on the job, but you could make the case that whatever time he spent with the team was too much.

The bottom line is that only Khan and Meyer himself thougth higher of him than most people did, and his exchange with colleague Mike Vrabel is proof of this.

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