• The Jacksonville Jaguars’ decision to retain Trent Baalke as general manager had been rumored in NFL circles for weeks—but few believed that owner Shad Khan would go through with it.
Yet, Doug Pederson is gone, and Baalke remains.
This follows a familiar pattern.
Baalke got his first shot at GM after the San Francisco 49ers fired Scot McCloughan. He was given decision-making power in the interim, then the job in 2011. There, he survived a feud with, and the firing of, Jim Harbaugh, then the firing of his hand-picked replacement Jim Tomsula. The Niners caught on in ’16, finally letting Baalke go as they fired Chip Kelly, giving the football operation the reset it needed (I’d say it’s gone pretty well since).
The thought, then, was that Baalke was toxic. But, with years having passed, then-Jaguars GM David Caldwell hired him in early 2020. That November, Caldwell was fired, and Baalke replaced him, first on an interim basis, then permanently as Urban Meyer (who was more concerned with hiring support staff and getting a new facility built) came in. From there, Baalke survived Meyer’s firing after a disastrous year, and now Pederson’s.
This latest shake-up hits some of the same-old notes. There was division over the past year-plus in Jacksonville between coaching and scouting, with Baalke taking aim at Pederson’s offensive coordinator, Press Taylor, and pushing hard for changes elsewhere on the staff after a disappointing finish to the 2023 season.
So where does this leave the Jaguars, with a coaching search kicking off? Put yourself in a candidate’s shoes. Would you trust that things would go differently than they have with coaches who previously worked with Baalke?
I suspect that we will see in the coming days and weeks, a lot of coaches would say, .
What remains to be seen, of course, is what would happen if someone such as Detroit Lions OC Ben Johnson asked to bring, say, Lance Newmark aboard, or if Mike Vrabel asked to bring Ryan Cowden in with him. How they approach this, I believe, will seriously impact the pool of candidates they can realistically evaluate.
