Urban-ed Out Jacksonville

By: Kipp Branch

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

The Urban Meyer experiment in Jacksonville seems to be headed in the wrong direction.

Videos popped up on social media last weekend that showed Meyer in a compromising position with a female that is not his wife.

The Jaguars are 0-4 on the season and apparently Meyer stayed behind in Ohio after a loss to Cincinnati last Thursday night.

On Monday’s episode of NFL Live, former NFL player Marcus Spears unloaded on Meyer and explained why he believes he should be removed from his role in Jacksonville.

“Shad Khan, you need to find you a new head coach,” Spears said. “It’s time for Urban Meyer to be dismissed and relieved of his duties. This is not the first distraction. This is not a visceral reaction to what Urban Meyer did, even though there needs to be one to that as well. He brought in a strength coach that had a racist history. He brought in Tim Tebow to play tight end, which he never did in the NFL before. This is a pattern that we’ve seen go on since Urban Meyer took over in Jacksonville…I played football nine years in the NFL. Every head coach I ever had said ‘don’t be the guy to take focus off of what we’re doing as a football team as we try to win games.’ It was a message that resonated throughout every locker room I’ve been. Shad Khan, you on the clock bro. It’s time for you to find a new head coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars.”

The video clips led Meyer to apologize to his team for becoming a distraction, but that hasn’t seemed to have a positive effect on the national sports media.

Questions and thoughts:

Do you think Meyer has quickly realized that he isn’t cut out for the pro game?

Meyer won everywhere he has been at the college level, but professional athletes get paid big money and you have to deal with them differently from the college player maybe. It just seems that Meyer has struggled from a public relations standpoint since he was named Jaguars head coach.

Is Meyer trying to get fired for cause by the Jags instead of resigning and being viewed as a failure at the NFL level?

I raise the question because Urban Meyer seemed to have his act together when he ran the show at Utah, Florida, and Ohio State.

Big time college jobs like USC are now open which Meyer probably has some interest in.

LSU looks like a train wreck currently and some other jobs like FSU or Miami could come open.

Rumors swirl around Jacksonville that Meyer has lost the Jaguar locker room, and if that is the case then a decision must come quickly by Jaguar ownership.

Great college coaches like Nick Saban and Lou Holtz did not succeed at the NFL level and came back to the college game.

Look at Arkansas, Notre Dame, and South Carolina under Holtz, and Saban has won more National Championships at Alabama than Bear Bryant did.

Could Urban just resign and go after the USC job?

I’m thinking that may be a real possibility now. Meyer does not seem to be a good fit for the NFL, but could take the USC job and build that program back into a national power.

He has always been able to recruit the elite athlete and he is suited for the college game much better than the dumpster fire he has created in Jacksonville.

The man looks like he is having a root canal without local anesthetic on the sidelines in Jacksonville.

The 57-year-old Meyer seems to have plenty of fire left in the tank based on the videos that surfaced so “chest pains” seem to be out of the question for now.

Shad Khan the ball is in your court.