The Jacksonville Jaguars' season was mired in controversy, particularly surrounding embattled former head coach Urban Meyer. Meyer recently appeared on the Dan Dakich podcast, and spoke about his experiences coaching in the NFL compared to college football.
Some of what he said was shocking, yet not surprising, as captured by Mike Florio's NBC Sports.
“It was the worst experience I have had in my professional lifetime… 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?'”
It sounds as though Meyer was seriously struggling handling losing football games. He was so accustomed to winning. He won everywhere he had coached. He won at Bowling Green and Utah, his first two college head coaching jobs. Meyer won two national championships at Florida. He then won another title at Ohio State, turning that program into perennial championship contenders.
All of a sudden, he is coaching an NFL team that struggled to win a single game.
“I really believed we had a roster that was good enough to win games,” Meyer said. “I just don’t think we did a great job. It eats away at your soul. I tried to train myself to say, ‘OK, it happens in the NFL.’ At one point, the Jaguars lost 20 in a row. Think about that . . . and we lost five in a row at one point and I remember I . . . just couldn’t function.”
Meyer was accused of racism, kicking and berating his former kicker, leaving his team behind to get a lap dance, among many other issues that led to his firing.
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