The final nail in the coffin of Urban Meyer’s terrible tenure in Jacksonville came full circle with a story by Rick Stroud in the Tampa Bay Times in which the coach was accused of kicking his former kicker, Josh Lambo.
On Monday, Stroud revealed that he was threatened by Meyer’s legal team in advance of publishing that piece.
Stroud said that the Jaguars had been aware of the incident since Lambo reported it to the franchise in August, as he told his story on the “Rich Eisen Show.”
“Nobody is disagreeing the event happened,” Stroud said. “It’s just to what degree. If we’re talking about how hard he kicked a guy, that’s not a great argument on his behalf.”
“When I did the story, they were in crisis mode in Jacksonville,” Stroud said, “I had a lot of conversations with them. They begged me to hold the story till 4 o’clock. I got a statement from their legal counsel first. I got a threatening letter from [Meyer’s] attorney about publishing the story without certain information. We waited for their statement.”
Stroud reiterated that the issue wasn’t whether Meyer had kicked Lambo, but how hard.
Click on ‘Follow Us’ and get notified of the most viral NFL stories via Google! Follow Us
“They wanted to offer up a couple players, but only off the record, to corroborate not that he didn’t kick [Lambo], but the degree of which he kicked him,” Stroud said.
“It’s funny, because during this whole drip-drip-drip process, everybody was using sources. ‘Who are these people? If I catch him he’s gone tomorrow.’ You hear this stuff from the Jaguars organization. Then when their guy’s under fire, they want to offer up unnamed sources and players that will back the coach, which is fine except that this was a guy who showed enough courage to put his name on the incident and was willing to speak on the record.”
Stroud was not buying that the organization had plans to fire Meyer before his story broke.
