The Jacksonville Jaguars need a head coach.
The top two candidates in the 2025 hiring cycle barely paid them any mind. Mike Vrabel marinated over the course of a year as a consultant with the Cleveland Browns before returning to the New England Patriots to guide Drake Maye. Ben Johnson finally cashed in his chips as the league’s foremost rising young coordinator to work with Caleb Williams and the Chicago Bears.
The Jaguars, in theory, can offer similar benefits. They’ve got Trevor Lawrence waiting for a hero. Brian Thomas Jr. looks like a perennial Pro Bowl candidate after a stellar rookie campaign. There’s potential here.
That potential does not outweigh the proven negatives that come with the job. On Wednesday, rumored top target Liam Coen examined the situation and told Jacksonville “nah, I’m good” in order to return to his spot as offensive coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Breaking: #Buccaneers OC Liam Coen will remain in Tampa Bay — and no longer be in the mix for the #Jaguars head coaching job, per sources (as @AdamSchefter reported).
Coen will be one of the highest-paid coordinations in the NFL. Big news for Baker Mayfield and the Tampa offense.
— Jordan Schultz (@schultzreport.bsky.social) January 22, 2025 at 9:20 AM
This would have been a massive promotion from an assistant who was calling plays at the University of Kentucky in 2023. Coen’s star has fluctuated in nearly two decades as an assistant but has never been higher than it is today. That momentum isn’t guaranteed to last. The Jaguars’ head coaching job, whether it was about to be offered or not, may be the closest he comes to commanding an NFL franchise.
He said no. It was the right decision.
Jacksonville has been a tapestry of dysfunction since its inception, but never been more intricately woven than under the stewardship of franchise owner Shad Khan. In his 13 years at the helm, the Jags have won exactly three playoff games — mostly in a defense-led roll through the 2016 postseason that served as a brief rebuttal to four seasons worth of The Good Place jokes. His team’s overall record is 64-148. The average Khan season ends with fewer than five wins.
In a league defined by parity, Jacksonville remains anchored by chains of its own making. The Jaguars have had a top five draft pick eight times in the Khan era. The players selected with that premium draft position have made it to eight Pro Bowls. Take away Jalen Ramsey’s contributions and you’re down to one (Lawrence). Then you’re left with good-not-great players like Dante Fowler, Luke Joeckel and Leonard Fournette.
This isn’t a function of bad luck. This is a franchise with a huge tolerance toward [expletive] roster building. David Caldwell got eight seasons as the team’s general manager (three of them with help. We’ll get to it later). He drafted Ramsey. He also torched high value picks with selections like C.J. Henderson and Laviska Shenault. He handed big money free agent contracts to guys like Julius Thomas, Jared Odrick, Kelvin Beachum, Joe Schobert and Nick Foles, none of whom spent more than two seasons in Jacksonville.
Caldwell gave way to Trent Baalke, the general manager who made the San Francisco 49ers recent revival possible by not being a part of it. Baalke survived the post-Urban Meyer purge because that was an acceptable do-over. But after Frank Reich finished his Jacksonville career on a 5-18 skid, Baalke seemed primed for the chopping block.
Except, nope! Baalke’s teams have been worse than Caldwell’s but he seems set to get a similar amount of leash before eventually earning a way-too-late firing for loading up the roster with bad fits. The biggest ticket signing of his 2021 debut offseason was Shaquill Griffin (three years, $40 million), who gave up a 109.8 passer rating in 19 games as a Jag before being released. One year later he gave Christian Kirk $18 million annually.
Baalke drafted a pretty good Travon Walker over a legit star in Aidan Hutchinson in 2022. He capitalized on the momentum of 2022’s playoff breakthrough with an offseason in which the highest salary he doled out was $3.5 million. He’s had two first overall picks and given out more than $600 million in contract value since 2021. The Jaguars have 25 wins in four seasons to show for it.
Baalke won’t just return for 2025. The lingering hint of 2022’s success could sustain him even beyond that. After all, Tom Coughlin got three seasons as Caldwell’s boss even after it was clear his players hated him thanks to Bortles’s 2017 breakthrough. Jacksonville is a universe where success is fleeting but failure lingers, eventually settling into the foundation of the franchise.
That’s what the Jaguars offered Coen. A struggling franchise quarterback and a general manager unable to secure the complimentary pieces to make him a star. Coen, the guy who spent 2024 making 2022’s worst quarterback one of the league’s most prolific passers, took his job interview and decided this was too much of a challenge for even him.
This is Jacksonville’s reality. The Jaguars are a franchise no one takes seriously because ownership gives us no reason to think otherwise. This is not a team taking wild swings in hopes of hitting a home run; it’s trying to slap bunt its way to prosperity and angling fastballs into its own face in the process.
Coen is out of the coaching search and now 2025’s hiring cycle threatens to be nearly as embarrassing as 2022′s. Jacksonville is looking for a savior. It will wind up settling for a martyr instead.