Editor’s note: This article was originally published in USA TODAY Sports and has been republished in its entirety below.
But Meyer was sure a locker room of grown men, in a league where more than two-thirds of the players are Black, would accept Doyle just because Meyer said so.
“I feel great about the hire, about his expertise at that position,” Meyer said Thursday.
“I vet everyone on our staff, and the relationship goes back close to 20 years, and a lot of hard questions asked, a lot of vetting involved with all our staff,” Meyer said when pressed further. “But we did a very good job vetting that one.”
So good that Doyle was gone a day later.
If this sounds familiar to the scenario that helped speed Meyer’s departure from Ohio State, well, it is. He turned a blind eye to credible domestic violence accusations against assistant Zach Smith, enabled him, and, then, when it blew up in his face, remained defiant in his certainty that he had done nothing wrong.
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To succeed in the NFL, you have to learn from your mistakes. And that’s going to be a problem for Meyer, because he won’t even acknowledge he makes any.
It wasn’t even a month ago that Meyer was introduced as the Jaguars’ new head coach, oozing a striking amount of self-assuredness for a guy who’s never coached a day in the NFL. The NFL has chewed up and spit out Nick Saban, Chip Kelly, Bobby Petrino and any other number of top college coaches, but Meyer is certain he’ll succeed where they failed.
“(Jimmy Johnson) told me that you have to be much different when you’re in college than you have to be in professional football,” Meyer said last month. “But he made clear that players want to win.”
They do – and they won’t suffer fools they believe are getting in the way of that. Just look at what’s going on in Houston these days.
Meyer has always been quick to make an impression, and his tenure with the Jags is shaping up to be no different. Instead of proving he can be a winner yet again, however, he’s showing just how much about the NFL he has to learn.
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