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Urban Unrenewed

 Remember hearing that Julia Roberts had married Lyle Lovett and your first thought was "six months, tops"? Remember watching an NFL game on TV, hearing Jim, Joe or Al read the promo for an upcoming new network show and thinking "three episodes and then boom, no way it makes Thanksgiving"?

Admit it, that's how you felt when you heard the Jaguars had hired Urban Meyer as their head coach last winter. You, me, and everybody else inside and outside the NFL world knew this was a disaster in the making, with the only question being "will this Hindenburg make it to Lakehurst, N.J. or not even reach shore before the explosion."

If you bet the latter, you won. Jags owner Shahid Khan fired Meyer this morning. Khan was the last man left not to realize the scope of his initial blunder, but he wised up, far too late for this season, but perhaps not for a season or two down the road.

How universal was scorn for Meyer as an NFL head coach? Try this. The point spread yesterday for Sunday's Houston-Jacksonville game was Jaguars -3.5. As of this afternoon, it's Jags -5.5. The bookies, not prone to either prejudice or sentiment, made Meyer worth 2 points to Jacksonville's opposition.

The list of Meyer's misdeeds as head coach is so long I won't bother to recite it here, although it must be said that when kicking one of your own players is not a coach's most spectacular shitshow, he's setting some kind of record. And we must also pause to reflect that Khan stuck with Meyer through the coach getting videoed rubbing up against young women in his own restaurant the night following a loss, with bringing back Tim Tebow, and with badmouthing his own assistances. But as soon as number one draft choice QB Trevor Lawrence started beefing about Meyer, poof! the coach was gone.

Meyer's behavior was so erratic, I can see only two possible explanations. He was driven around the bend by the realization he was hopelessly over his head in the NFL, or, he realized that very quickly and engaged in coachly leasebreaking, trying to get fired in a way he could still collect most of his extortionate contract in an "undisclosed settlement."

Meyer wouldn't be the first hypersuccessful college coach to abandon the NFL in short order. Lou Holtz did it. Nick Saban, only the best college coach in a century, did so too. Meyer's departure was funnier and possibly more underhanded than theirs, but all three stemmed from the essential difference between college and pro head coach. All coaches are control freaks, but some have more actual control than others. In college, a coach is the boss. In the pros, he's not. If he's as good as Paul Brown, Bill Belichick and Vince Lombardi, he can be first among equals -- sometimes.

In fact, a college coach at a big program who won as much as Meyer did at Utah, Florida and Ohio State can be far more than a boss. He will likely be his state's highest paid employee. He can be a Czar. In the SEC, he can be a God-King.  If Meyer was still winning national titles at Florida, and he somehow got it in his head that Critical Race Theory would help him in recruiting, Gov. Ron DeSantis would introduce legislation making teaching CRT compulsory in preschools.

In the pros, the coach is a very important employee. When he comes to a perennial loser like the Jaguars, he can be the most important employee. But he'll never be the boss. That's the owner, a billionaire who more often than not has never had a real boss in his own long life. 

The players who determine any coach's fate are grown men making big money in the NFL. They have a union, a pretty strong one, too. They cannot willy-nilly be bossed around unless the bossing delivers victories. When they perceive a coach can't do that, the victories stop and the coach is removed from the equation.

If a rookie, albeit the team's most important player, QB like Lawrence (having a terrible year BTW), can get a coach canned, imagine what the real veteran stars at that position can do if they choose. Or you could just look at Aaron Rodgers.

(Don't speak to me of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. Yes, the coach is still with the Patriots and Brady isn't, but theirs was a mutual breakup. The best guide to the end stage of their relationship is the Beatles documentary "Get Back." As with the Fab Four, Tom and Bill still liked and respected each other, but both were also quite aware their relationship had run its course.)

Some coaches can prosper as both rulers and loyal subjects in Football Kingdoms. Jim Harbaugh has, So has Pete Carroll. But the fundamentals of the two different jobs are still such that very few winning big-time college coaches move to the pros (Carroll did so one step ahead of the NCAA posse) and almost no pro coaches move to college jobs (Harbaugh lost a power struggle in San Francisco). 

Temperamentally unfit for any role below that of Coach God-King, Meyer's tenure was doomed from day one. At least his doom was highly entertaining for the rest of us. 

That says it all about the franchise Khan owns, too. The worst coach in Jacksonville Jaguars history was the only entertainment the team has provided in at least three years.

posted by Michael Gee @ 2:09 PM