Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Urban blight

 Look, maybe there's a completely rational explanation for why Urban Meyer got caught in a dive bar getting a quasi-lap dance from a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. I'm just sayin'.

I mean, maybe he was just demonstrating the proper technique for the center-quarterback exchange. Could be true, right?

OK, so, no. OK, so this is all unraveling faster than even the Blob figured it would.

The Jacksonville Jaguars, those lovable NFL ragamuffins, brought Meyer aboard with great fanfare, because, golly, look what he did in college. Forget the way all those other college coaches crashed and burned in the NASH-unal FOOT-ball League. Urban was different! Urban was the perfect CEO head coach! And he had Trevor Lawrence to work with!

Well ... the Jags are still lovable ragamuffins, four games into Meyer's regime. Lawrence is a rookie quarterback with a cruddy team doing what rookie quarterbacks with cruddy teams do, which is struggle. The Jags are 0-4 and Meyer is doing what college coaches almost always do in the NFL, which is lurch from one culture-shock crisis to the next.

First he hires, and then fires, a racist strength coach.

Then he says out loud a player's vaccination status would be a factor in whether or not he makes the roster, which gets the players' union ("Players union? What's that?" you can almost hear Urban saying) up in arms.

Then word leaks that his Joe College routine ain't cuttin' it with the grown-ass men he's now coaching. 

Then he doesn't fly back with his team to Florida after losing to the Bengals' Thursday evening, and winds up in that dive bar with that embarrassingly young woman. 

Now he's apologizing again, and his players are reportedly laughing at him behind his back, and the owner who placed such faith in him (and paid him a nice chunk of change) is issuing a public reprimand of his head coach. 

"Just the Jags being Jaggy," you're saying now, and that might be true.

"Just another college coach who doesn't get it," you're also saying, and that might be true as well.

"Looks suspiciously like self-sabotage," you're also saying, and, well ...

Hmm.

Now, this is not the part where I let my inner conspiracy kook out to roam free, but if I did, there'd be some grass there for him to crop. I don't really think Urban consciously put himself in a compromising position to get out of a situation that's more than he bargained for. But given his history of abruptly bailing on sticky wickets at Florida and Ohio State, it's reasonable to wonder if he's not gearing up to pull the ripcord again.

He's 0-4 a month into the season, and if the rumors are true (and who knows, with rumors) he's all but lost the locker room already. So it's easy to surmise that, if only fleetingly, he's looking longingly at the cushy analyst gig he had before deciding to take on the NFL.

Maybe he's not. Maybe he is. 

And maybe the Jags aren't already looking longingly for their next coach.

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