Urban Meyer was a bad hire from day one when it was announced by the Jacksonville Jags. The controversy started right away months before the season would begin. The now fired head coach called the constant losing with the Jacksonville Jaguars the “worst experience” of his professional career.
Meyer, who was fired after a 2-11 start to the 2021 campaign, made an appearance on OutKick’s Don’t @ Me With Dan Dakich (h/t Steve Gardner of USA Today) and discussed his brief tenure with the Jaguars.
“It was the worst experience I’ve had in my professional lifetime,” Meyer said. “What really got me, I almost don’t want to say people accept it, I mean, you lose a game, and you just keep … I would seriously have self-talk. I went through that whole depression thing, too, where I’d stare at the ceilings and [think] ‘are we doing everything possible?’ Because I really believed we had a roster that was good enough to win games. I just don’t think we did a great job.”
Meyer also added that losing “eats away at your soul.”
Meyer is a man who is not used to losing as posted a 187–32 record across college stops at Bowling Green, Utah, Florida and Ohio State. His .854 winning percentage ranks seventh-highest of all time, and he never lost more than five games in a single season.
It took 13 games for him to lose 11 in the NFL. To put that in perspective, the eleven losses were more than Meyer logged during his entire seven-year tenure at Ohio State.
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Beyond the losing, Meyer admitted he had trouble adjusting to the NFL practice schedule.
“It is a lot different,” Meyer said of the NFL compared to college football. “Just the amount of time you get with your quarterback. Just the amount of time you get with your team. The roster management. How you practice. You know, the amount of reps you get before you go play a game, to me, was shockingly low. For example, we would practice, you maybe get one or two reps at something, next thing you know you’re calling it in the game.
“In college, you never do that. In college, you’re gonna get at least a dozen opportunities to practice that before you ask a player to go do it in the game. So there are a lot of differences.”
Shortly before Meyer was fired, former kicker Josh Lambo told Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times the head coach kicked him.
“You know when you come out and say there was a player kicked. … That’s not true,” Meyer said Monday. “That’s not true at all. To say I didn’t tap him with my foot. … To kick someone? Come on. I’ve done this 37 years. Kick a player? The other players came up to me and said, ‘We saw the whole thing.’ Because I’d mostly forgotten about it.”
The kicking incident came on the heels of videos showing him with a woman at a bar that was not his wife. It happened after he elected to stay in Ohio following a loss to the Cincinnati Bengals instead of flying back with his team.
From the off-field stories to the on-field lack of success, Meyer is unlikely to ever get another shot in the league.
