With Jacksonville Jaguars general manager Dave Caldwell being fired last month, many have speculated that Doug Marrone is also in his last stretch of games with the franchise. With the possibility of him and his group registering the first one-win season in team history, most feel they should suffer the same fate as Caldwell, but one report proposes that it’s not a given.
Before Sunday’s lackluster showing against the Tennessee Titans, Adam Schefter reported that some league sources believe Marrone has a chance to stick around. He also mentioned that Marrone’s ability to keep his team competitive hasn’t gone unnoticed, and it could be his saving grace cone 2021.
“Doug Marrone has had the Jaguars playing well the last couple of weeks. They played the Steelers very tough, they played the Minnesota Vikings very tough — and some people around the league believe he is actually garnering some support to stay on.”
“Even though Jacksonville changed its general manager, Dave Caldwell, firing him recently, there are some people who believe Marrone could be given a chance to stick on. We will see how this situation unfolds in the coming weeks,” Schefter said on ESPN’s “Sunday NFL Countdown.”
The Jags have three games remaining on their schedule and those games will be against the Baltimore Ravens, Chicago Bears, and Indianapolis Colts, respectively. However, if Khan conducts things the way they should be from this point on, none of those games should matter when it comes to Marrone’s future.
Simply put, the choice to keep Marrone should fall on the next general manager and it’s hard to imagine Khan, who is a businessman, taking that privilege from him. After all, when a new general manager is named, he’ll be on Khan’s payroll to make the team’s key football decisions anyway.
Besides, Khan has tried the half measure approach in the past where he kept personnel members from the past, and yet, here the Jags are again facing a one-win season. Clearly, there is a lesson to be taken from how things were handled in 2017 when the Jags kept Caldwell and Marrone, then added Tom Coughlin.
At the moment, there have been minimal rumors on who the Jags could look at, but nothing concrete. However, the most notable report to involve the Jags’ staffing situation was another from ESPN where Jeremy Fowler and Dan Graziano stated that some league sources feel the Jags’ vacancy is the most attractive. While they didn’t particularly say the Jags are interested, they also mentioned Patriots executive Dave Ziegler as a name to watch.