When Doug Marrone found himself elevated from member of Gus Bradley’s staff to head coach two years ago, Marrone ultimately decided to keep in place the two primary coordinators: Todd Wash for the defense and Nathaniel Hackett for the offense. And now, with the Jaguars in a 1-8 free fall, Marrone has fired Hackett.
“We would like to thank Nathaniel for his hard work and dedication to the Jaguars organization, and we wish him and his family the best moving forward,” Marone said in the press release announcing the move. “These are always tough decisions, but as the head coach I have to do what I think is best for the football team.”
Far stranger than the decision, about which Marrone offers little insight, is the timing. The Jaguars are essentially out of the playoff chase, so it’s not as if a late November shakeup will propel a 3-8 team toward contention. If anything, it feels like an effort by Marrone to alter the conversation that inevitably will happen when owner Shad Khan, who had a taste of life in the NFL’s penthouse in 2017 and has taken the Super Fun Happy Slide straight back to the outhouse, starts asking tough questions after Week 17.
Something clearly isn’t right with the Jaguars, and it’s far too easy to pin it on a collection of players who were a year ago good enough to make it to the NFL’s final four. A complacency seemed to descend on the organization in the aftermath of nearly toppling New England for a berth in Super Bowl LII, along with a sense after soundly beating the Patriots in Week Two of the current season that the Jaguars need to merely fast forward to January for another run at a championship.
The stubborn commitment to discipline that characterized the 2017 Jaguars has disappeared, as exemplified by the boneheaded decision on Sunday by running back Leonard Fournette to exit the side, cross the field, and swing fists. That discipline wasn’t instilled by Hackett; it was instilled by Marrone and, to a broader extent, Tom Coughlin. And so Hackett isn’t responsible for its disappearance.
But blaming a lost season on Hackett could go a long way toward keeping Khan from blaming a lost season on Marrone and, to a broader extent, Tom Coughlin. And that could be why Hackett has gotten a one-way ticket out of town with only five games before the official blame-placing portion of the calendar arrives.