Ian Rapoport details reason why Jaguars fired Urban Meyer
According to Rapoport, this is what the firing came down to.
Former Ohio State Buckeyes head coach Urban Meyer's transition into the NFL was nothing short of a disaster, as he was fired last week by the Jacksonville Jaguars less than a year into his first season on the job that saw him amass a 2-11 record through 13 games.
The firing comes on the heels of reports that he called his assistant coaches "losers" as well as an allegation from former team kicker Josh Lambo that Meyer demeaned and even kicked him earlier in the season.
Of course, there was the controversy of his getting a bit too friendly with a young female in a bar AFTER having decided not to return to Jacksonville with the team following a game against the Cleveland Browns.
But according to NFL Network analyst Ian Rapoport, who recently spoke with Meyer, the firing came down to one simple reason.
“He actually summed that up really well for me,” Rapoport explained during an appearance on the Dan Patrick Show. “We were kind of going through things and we were talking and he was like, ‘Look, there’s always a reason someone answers the phone or someone calls back.’ I’m not holding him down and forcing him to talk to me, there’s clearly something he wanted to say. At some point he said, ‘Look, here’s the main point. We tried really hard, and we failed.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, that is what it is.’ Because there are plenty of coaches who treat people not great, there are plenty of coaches who yell at players, who are very hard on their assistants. And that’s kind of a technique where you’re really hard on your assistants so you don’t need to be hard on your players."
“In the end, he wasn’t a good enough football coach. Had he been better, then we wouldn’t be in this situation. All this stuff would have been just kind of stuff, but he kind of stopped being an Xs and Os coach several years ago. He’s more of a culture builder. He’s more of a CEO-type coach. I think in the end his assistant coaches didn’t do a good enough job, he didn’t do a good enough job and he got fired.”
Meyer may have been extremely successful in the collegiate football ranks, but he was anything but in the NFL.
