The Return of the Breakfast Coach

Urban Meyer, you diabolical son of a gun, we meet again.

As little as a year ago, the idea of writing an entire Rooster post about an NFL preseason game would have seemed improbable. I love my Browns, but not even my mind is twisted enough to put the inevitable blight of an NFL team’s first-preseason game, which are as usually as entertaining and notable as two fruit flies fucking on your kitchen counter on a scorching summer afternoon.

But the passage of time is a helluva drug. He we are, a mere 96 hours from the Cleveland Browns storming Jacksonville. If I wanted my accountant to never talk to me again, I’d have already booked a weekend trip to Florida to tailgate like it’s the Super Bowl.

Of course I’m excited to have the Browns back in my life after years of spending my Sunday afternoons pissed off and drunk by 4 p.m. after watching some bum quarterback throw four interceptions in a 34-10 loss that wasn’t even as close as the score indicated. This year, however, my expectations are to be the first team in NFL history to win 17 games in a regular season.

But I am also excited to watch my new, second-favorite NFL team: Urban Meyer’s Jacksonville Jaguars, the team that drafted former Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence No. 1 overall to run him up the middle 25 times a game.

Some people think I hate Urban Meyer. That’s not true; I find him to be one of the most unintentionally hilarious person in the world. He is a true sociopathic Football Guy, in that the only time he feels alive is when he’s winning football games. The man made enough money to fuck off to Titty Island, but no, he came back to be humiliated on a national stage while his wife spreads coronavirus misinformation online.

Let’s see how the Meyer experience has worked out for the Jaguars so far:

• He immediately hired a strength coach—which Meyer always said in college was one of the most important hires of any program—who was a racist that had hospitalized numerous players while coaching at Iowa. He bragged that he had personally vetted Chris Doyle and knew him for over 20 years and there would be “no issues.” He rescinded the offer to Doyle days later after a national firestorm.

• Hired an offensive brain trust of Darrell Bevell, Brian Schottenheimer, and Charlie Strong. Every single one of them have been paid millions of dollars by multiple football organizations to literally fuck off and do anything else.

• The NFL fined him $100,000 and the Jaguars another $100,000 and made them forfeit two future practices when Urban ran the Oklahoma drill during his first practice and violated NFL no-contact rules. In his defense, he’s used to coaching non-unionized players.

• Allowed 33-year-old Tim Tebow another chance to roleplay as an NFL football player and attend fall camp. Is Meyer actually insane enough to give a regular season roster slot to someone learning an entirely new position on the fly? Yes. The answer is yes.

• Took time to visit Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, the man who clown-suited Meyer twice while he coached Ohio State and basically forced him into a second retirement.

Keep in mind their owner, Shad Khan, recently decided he had been too “hands-off” as an owner, something that I’m sure a famous control freak like Meyer will enjoy having over his shoulder for the first time in his coaching career.

You gotta hand it to Meyer. It’s a win/win for him. Either he becomes a successful coach and joins the fabled pantheon of those to succeed in the NFL and college football or he gets fired and paid all the money owed to him anyway before he ultimately returns to the college level to coach some cursed institution like Southern California or Notre Dame.

He’s going to try to run the same playbook he did in Columbus by trying to “out-culture” the other teams. Only, unlike at Ohio State, he won’t have an athletic advantage over 90% of teams that he plays. He has showed zero signs of adapting, and that’s part of what makes him hilarious.

The march to the Super Bowl begins this weekend, and I’m looking forward to an appetizer of sending Meyer to the bowels of whatever they call Jaguars Stadium to eat some cold pizza after the Browns flummox his ass by 30 points on TV.

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