Meyer’s visceral distaste for losing and difficulty transitioning to leadership of professional athletes marked a painful chapter for the long-struggling franchise.
TWO WEEKS TO the day before Urban Meyer would be fired by the Jacksonville Jaguars — less than one year into his fraught, scandal-ridden tenure — he stands at a small black lectern deep in the bowels of TIAA Bank Field. He’s here to offer up the latest reckoning for his inaugural season as NFL head coach, an experiment that is rapidly spiraling. Meyer ruminates on the challenges of transitioning from college football to the NFL — a leap that has claimed a litany of coaches before him. «It’s about what I thought,» he says. His team is 2-9. He expresses awe at the Los Angeles Rams, who are up next on the Jaguars’ docket (and will defeat Jacksonville 37-7), referring to them, with admiration bordering on reverence, as an «all-star team.» And this, perhaps, is the more honest, if unintentional, glimpse at Meyer’s introduction to the league. Two months earlier, when the season was still new and hadn’t yet curdled into one more double-digit-loss affair (the franchise’s 10th in the past 11 years), he met Denver coach Vic Fangio on the field postgame and told him, «Every week it’s like playing Alabama.» Meyer was, for the first time in his career, in a league that was out of his league. He seems cowed today at the stadium, as he often has this season — on the sideline during games, at the dais afterward detailing what went wrong in those games. His voice doesn’t carry, often receding into a near-whisper. He looks down to his left, like the answers might be scrawled on the wood floor. Meyer’s self-ascribed mantra for this season — «OWN IT» — is plastered on the hallways in the stadium, on the signposts in front of meeting rooms and on the walls surrounding the practice field. But instead of owning it, he deflects. Why doesn’t the offense have an identity this late in the season? «Good question.» He dodges. Was running back James Robinson, the team’s most reliable offensive threat, benched? «You’d have to ask [running backs coach] Coach Parmalee.» He sows a constant sense of disorder. Twice, in a span of two weeks, he’ll answer a question — one about his chief of staff, Fernando Lovo, departing Jacksonville for a role with the University of Texas; the other about Robinson, again, being sidelined — by insisting «there’s no something behind Door No.2.» But what has become clear in 2021 is that for this entire season — for this entire Urban Meyer exercise — there has always been something behind Door No.2. There was problematic decision-making: the offseason hiring of strength coach Chris Doyle, who had just left the University of Iowa after two decades because of accusations of mistreatment of Black players. There was problematic behavior: a leaked video of Meyer touching a young woman’s backside. There was tension among coaches: assistants unhappy with everything from how Meyer treated them, to having to stay late to game-plan for preseason games, to Meyer’s aforementioned calling out of Parmalee. There was discord among players: Sources confirm Marvin Jones Jr. had to be convinced to come back to the team facility after frustration with Meyer’s criticism of the wide receiver group, and Josh Lambo publicly accused Meyer of kicking him in warmups before practice, an allegation that, when made public, would culminate in Meyer’s undoing. In interviews with nearly two dozen coaches, former front office staff members, agents and current and former Jaguars over the past two months, one recurring theme arose: The organizational culture Meyer fostered proved problematic from the start. And all the while, Meyer was leading yet another season of futility in Jacksonville, now with Trevor Lawrence, a generational talent at quarterback. Meyer, perhaps the coach most visibly and pathologically destroyed by losing, was losing like never before. What’s more, the team wasn’t just losing; it was regressing. Back at the news conference, when he’s finished speaking, he sidles off to the corridor just beyond the interview room to answer one more question in relative quiet. What has he learned this year, when wins — his lifeblood — have been so hard to come by? «That my distaste for losing is as strong as it’s ever been,» he says. It’s the rare moment when there doesn’t seem to be anything else behind Door No.2. Earlier in the season, as the losses started to snowball, he ran into one of his players in the hallway. Meyer’s face was grim. «I’m not used to this s—,» he told the player. So what does that distaste look like now? «Trouble eating, trouble sleeping,» Meyer says. «Trouble functioning as a human being.» THE STARTLING EXTENT to which Meyer has trouble functioning as a human being amid the losses was laid bare on Wednesday evening. That’s when Lambo — the most accurate kicker in franchise history, who was released by the Jaguars on Oct.19 — revealed in an interview to the Tampa Bay Times that Meyer, frustrated with a rare bout of inconsistency from Lambo earlier in 2021, kicked Lambo in the leg during a preseason warm-up. Lambo alleged a slew of other misdeeds on Meyer’s part. That Meyer, the self-professed special teams evangelist, wouldn’t address his specialists by name, but rather by position («kicker, punter, long snapper») or crude epithet («s—bag, dips—«). That Meyer took exception to Lambo taking exception to being kicked in the leg, and voiced as much in practice, within earshot of the rest of the team. «I’m the head ball coach, I’ll kick you whenever the f— I want,» Lambo says Meyer told him. Meyer denies Lambo’s description of the interaction. That revelation, or at least the public airing of it — Lambo says he told his agent about the incident, and he, in turn, informed Jaguars legal counsel — exhausted team owner Shad Khan’s once-expansive well of patience. (Just eight months ago, Khan was so enamored of Meyer he pronounced, «This time, I got it right,» a notion he clung to even as he stood by Meyer in the wake of his viral night out in Ohio.) As Wednesday night bled into Thursday morning, just about seven hours after Lambo’s allegations broke, news broke that Khan had fired Meyer. He was the Jaguars’ head coach for 336 days. There had been fleeting moments of hopefulness, or at least not catastrophe, in those 11 months. He engendered the goodwill of his players after he convinced Khan to spend $1.5 million on the installation of a «rejuvenation room» at the stadium — a one-stop shop where players could recover with massages, red-light therapy, acupuncture, cupping, a cryotherapy chamber, a flotation tank, and an infrared sauna. In the waning minutes of one demoralizing loss, this one in late November against the 49ers «at home» — the stadium boasted as much scarlet as teal that afternoon — Lawrence stood on the sideline with his arm around Meyer, and Meyer’s arm around him. «I just told him I’m going to keep fighting,» Lawrence said in the aftermath of the 30-10 loss. «Like, it doesn’t matter the situation, I’m always going to be me.
