Twenty months ago, Jaguars coach Doug Pederson was three wins away from becoming the first coach to win a Super Bowl with two different teams. Now, he might not have three games left in his tenure with the Jaguars.
Hell, he might have only one.
After an 8-3 start in 2023, the Jaguars have lost eight of nine games. They’re currently 0-3, punctuated by a 47-10 blowout loss to the Bills.
While that in and of itself might not be enough to turn up the heat on Pederson, consider what owner Shad Khan said last month: ‘[W]inning now is the expectation. . . . Make no mistake, this is the best team assembled by the Jacksonville Jaguars, ever. Best players, best coaches. But most importantly, let’s prove it by winning now.”
After building a 17-7 lead at Miami in Week 1, the wheels have come off. They blew the game against the Dolphins, and then the Jaguars were overpowered by a Browns team that doesn’t look like the playoff qualifier it was a year ago. Tonight came an ugly display in Buffalo.
While it would be a major shock to see Pederson not on the flight back to Jacksonville (for reasons entirely different than the time Urban Meyer stayed behind after a prime-time road loss), it feels like Pederson is running out of chances.
On Sunday, after traveling back from Western New York, the Jaguars head to Houston. Next, the Jaguars host the Colts. Then comes the now-annual two-game trip to London, for games against the Bears and the Patriots.
Although there’s no bye week after the Week 7 game at Wembley Stadium, failure to turn things around in the near future could trigger a change as soon as next week, and (more likely) after wrapping up the annual England trip.
They can still turn it around, as fast as things turned around in a bad way last season. If they don’t, Khan’s words will loom larger and larger.
Since buying the team in December 2011, Khan has fired four coaches. And he’d never applied to any of them the pressure that was applied to Pederson just before the current season started.