To say that Urban Meyer’s first season as head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars has been uneventful would be incorrect. It’s just that most of those events have been pretty negative.
Meyer’s team started the season by continuing their long-standing losing streak and things got really awkward when videos and photos of him at a bar with a young woman went viral, causing ownership to sternly rebuke him publicly. Despite concerns he could lose his job or might just quit and return to college football, Meyer stuck it out and has overseen a largely disappointing season that currently stands at 2-9. While the Jags were expected to be bad, some might argue they didn’t think the team would be this bad.
Count Meyer among them.
“To say that I envisioned 2-9, I did not,” Meyer said, via News 4 Jacksonville. “I envisioned we would be a little cleaner team at this point. But I’ve coached a long time, studied this game a long time, I knew that week in week out, you’re facing the best players on the planet. But I thought we’d be a little cleaner by this point, certainly on offense.”
Trevor Lawrence struggled out of the gate for Jacksonville and, despite a couple of wins that seemed to signal the ship was turning around, the team has settled into a new losing streak. The Jaguars also have yet to score more than 23 points in a game this season and only have five touchdowns in the five games they’ve played since beating Miami.
The Jaguars went up-tempo in Sunday’s 21-14 loss to the Falcons and Meyer at least seems encouraged by the results.
“I like it. I like to change tempos on people, and I think we did it 18 times in the game. It was very efficient for us. Once again, teams will be more prepared for it. It’s a two-edged sword I just told you about,” he said. “You run a lot of zone read, you better have the compliments off it. If you run up-tempo, you better be prepared for some kind of pressure now, it’s this, so we have to be ready. But it was very successful for us.”
We’ll see if the Jaguars can keep that tempo up against the Los Angeles Rams, who feature one of the toughest defenses in the NFL. Truth be told, if Urban didn’t foresee 2-9, we’ll have to check back in when, assumedly, the team is 2-10.
[News4Jax]
