The Jaguars are rattled.
In the ultimate Friday-night news dump, the Jaguars issued at statement after 11:00 p.m. ET on Friday announcing the resignation of Chris Doyle, the team’s director of sports performance (for a day). The email from the Jaguars announced that it was a “statement from Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer.”
The Jaguars re-issued the statement on Saturday morning. The Jaguars re-issued the statement because, as explained in the email re-issuing the statement, the first version “inadvertently” omitted the game of Jaguars G.M. Trent Baalke.
So the exact same statement has been issued again this morning, with this title: “Statement from Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer and General Manager Trent Baalke.”
Why bother with that at this point? The email re-introduced an embarrassing subject in the light of day, and it creates the impression (frankly) that Meyer was bothered by the perception that he alone was taking the heat for hiring Doyle.
On Thursday, Meyer said that he, Baalke, and owner Shad Khan were involved in the vetting and hiring of Doyle. (Maybe Khan’s name also was “inadvertently” omitted from the statement. Or maybe it wasn’t.) Thus, the re-issuance creates the impression that Meyer doesn’t want these first-month misadventures to attach only to him.
Given Baalke’s shattered relationship with coach Jim Harbaugh when they worked together in San Francisco, it also bears watching whether the honeymoon between Meyer and his hand-picked G.M. already has ended.