Jaguars owner Shad Khan held a press conference after firing head coach Doug Pederson on Monday and his decision to hold onto General Manager Trent Baalke was the subject of several questions.
Khan called the 2024 Jaguars the best team of his ownership tenure before the season and he cited Baalke’s “body of work” putting together the roster as part of his explanation. He rejected the notion that there was a need for a “complete overhaul” of the franchise by citing multiple strong areas of the organization while making it clear that he thought a coaching change was the most meaningful way to improve the franchise.
“Don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” Khan said. “We have a lot of things that are working, that can always be improved and will improve. And there are other things that are not working that need to be fixed. The coaching, that is an area that we need to fix now. But certainly over the last few years, we’ve built a football administration and things are working well there.”
Khan said that he doesn’t think that retaining Baalke will limit the pool of candidates for the coaching job and the names of those candidates should start to appear in the near future.
