Lets talk Del Rio (Man am I going to suck at titles)

Let me start by saying, unlike many Jags fans, I’m fine with Del Rio as a head coach. Would I have been ok or even happy if he had taken the USC job? Yeah probably, but it would’ve been for many of the same reasons I’m ok with him staying.

(Side note: he claims there was no contract offer, which I believe, but there’s a lot of smoke for this to come out of nowhere. There’s a big gap between no contract offer and no communication).

It’s a bit simplistic to call Del Rio an average coach as a few have done (there’s only a few writing about the Jags but they’ve called him average). I tend to peg the maximum plus or minus of a coach at 10% or so. The best coach in the league makes his team 10% better, the worse coach makes his team 10% worse. I think Del Rio recognizes talent well and hasn’t shown any propensity to underdevelop guys. He’s not going to take a productive player and make him into a Pro Bowler, few coaches can, but he’s also not going to miss on talented guys. The implications of this are the Jaguars should compete to their talent level, which if you believe in Gene Smith (which every Jags fan should after last April’s draft), then that’s good enough. The arrow is pointing up (Ketchism). Some support for this narrative is that not a single player comes to mind during the Del Rio era as having failed with the Jags but gone on to have sustained success elsewhere. I’m not counting a Marcus Stroud, who was successful here, but more a Matt Jones type. I imagine there are a few of these players out there who are a little below my radar screen, similar to how Panthers fans aren’t beating themselves up over losing Atiyyah Ellsion, but the general point that we haven’t been watching good players walk away holds true.

Feel free to remind me if I’ve missed someone. It is a matter of degree, I wouldn’t count Brett Romberg, who started a fair number of games for the Rams but maybe you would.

Player development and talent evaluation at this point haven’t been a problem for Del Rio. Assistant coaches, or his inability to maintain a consistent staff, has been and will continue to be a legitimate issue. With the firing of Ted Monachino, according to the Times Union, the Jags have fired 19 coaches in seven years. Firing 2.7 coaches a year isn’t good. There are only a couple of possibilities for what it means…

1) Del Rio is really, really awful at hiring.
2) When things go wrong Del Rio throws assistant coaches under the bus.

I lean pretty heavily towards the second option. Most of the coaches Del Rio has fired are still coaching somewhere (check Atlanta’s staff, it’s a who’s who of former Jags assistants) or they’ve gone on to success elsewhere (See Ken Anderson, now retired). The problem with Del Rio’s quick trigger finger is that coaches aren’t dumb. If they have their choice between a Jags job and another opportunity, all things equal, they’ll take the other job. This puts the Jags at a competitive disadvantage and lets be honest we can’t expect the Jags to outspend other teams in the coaching department. I’m not saying some of the coaches shouldn’t have been let go but I doubt there were 19 guys who deserved to be fired. Tony Dungy refused to fire coaches and he was successful in Tampa and Indy.

Del Rio is good enough to win when he has talent, he proved that in 2005 and 2007. As a fan, I’m hesitant to go chasing a magical coach cure all. There’s a risk whenever you hire a new coach and the Jags have been fortunate that Weaver has exercised sound judgment in both cases when he had to hire someone. There’s also the Gene Smith factor here. On the one hand, he would almost certainly have a role in hiring his guy, which could be encouraging, but if they hired the wrong person and the team faltered then that could undermine his public support, thus endangering Gene Smith himself. Ultimately, I view this as a risk/reward proposition with the risk too high to justify getting rid of a consistent, if unspectacular performer.

-A.Q. DUB