A lengthy article published Monday in The Athletic, which detailed the dysfunction and turmoil inside the Jacksonville Jaguars complex during Urban Meyer’s brief tenure as head coach, took sports media by storm.
The piece written by Jayson Jenks and Mike Sando quoted sources and anonymous players and team staffers who said the former Florida and Ohio State coach was unhinged.
Instances of Meyer belittling players, coaches and staff members, threatening people’s jobs, and even going as far as to say if a player got cut they couldn’t get a job paying more than $15 an hour made the rounds on sports radio.
“This thing is not great for the Urban Meyer era,” Pat McAfee told co-host A.J. Hawk on The Pat McAfee Show.
McAfee referred to the Jaguars as “Clahn Tahn” after Jacksonville beat the Indianapolis Colts in Week 18 to eliminate Indy from playoff contention. It was in reference to Jags fans who showed up to the game wearing clown noses and make-up as a call to make wholesale changes within the organization. He said it was clear there were problems but in terms of how bad it really was based on the reporting.
“We could never tell from the outside that was the case,” said McAfee.
One of the items in the story that sent a lot of hosts’ heads spinning was Meyer apparently being unfamiliar with some of the top players in the league, including Los Angeles Rams defensive star Aaron Donald.
“How do you not know who Aaron Donald is?” Shan Shariff said on 105.3 The Fan’s Shan & RJ in Dallas. “That’s the wild part.”
Over on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, the whole gang couldn’t help but laugh as they tried to wrap their heads around it.
“This is after he said he did a six-month deep dive into the NFL,” Stugotz said. “I mean, Jesus Christ.”
“This cannot be true,” Le Batard added.
Filling in for Greeny on ESPN Radio, Courtney Cronin said the article should be damning enough that it will ensure Meyer doesn’t coach again at the highest levels of football.
“I don’t know if Urban Meyer is ever going to have another job ever again when stuff like this continues to come out,” she said. “He most certainly will never see the NFL level again. Which college program is going to hire him as a coach knowing that he has to groom young people to be upstanding members of society and teach them how to do things the right way when he can’t do anything the right way?”
Meyer has yet to make any public statements to corroborate or refute claims in the article, and there’s no telling he ever will. He has, in the last week or so, taken a new job on the board of a foundation aimed at paying Ohio State football and basketball players for doing charity work.
McAfee figured when you factor in Meyer’s side of the story, the truth isn’t at the end of either extreme.
“Truth probably lies somewhere in the middle,” he said. “But that was a failure. An absolutely abysmal failure.”