The Jaguars have parted ways with Chris Doyle, but the damage is already done

Doyle should never have gotten this opportunity in the first place.

The Jacksonville Jaguars announced that they accepted assistant coach Chris Doyle’s resignation from the team on Friday.

On Thursday, just a day before, Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer made a slew of hires for his assistant coaching staff. Doyle was one of those hires. And, a day later, he’s resigning.

The team announced his resignation late on Friday night in typical news-dump fashion at 11:17 p.m. ET. ESPN’s Adam Schefter broke the news via Twitter. The Jaguars sent him a team statement.

The statement said Doyle didn’t want to be “a distraction to what we are building in Jacksonville.”

This all stems from Doyle’s past. Before he was an assistant in Jacksonville, he was the strength coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes from 1999 to 2020 when he was fired in June after a swath of former players accused him of racism, bullying and mistreatment.

There was a groundswell of backlash from the hire, of course, with everyone knowing Doyle’s past. Particularly from Rod Graves, the executive director of the Fritz Pollard alliance who made a great point about the NFL’s racial hiring practices.

Nonetheless, Urban Meyer — the perfect moral arbiter — assured everyone that he vetted his friend of 20 years and that he was a good guy. No worries! Everything is fine.

Now, a day later, he’s out. And the Jaguars claim he didn’t want to be a “distraction” which, somehow, made things worse.

This wasn’t the Jaguars firing Doyle. This wasn’t Meyer and the organization separating themselves from a problematic coach. Nope. Instead, this it’s being couched as avoiding a “distraction.” It’s being painted as Doyle making a decision to remove himself from the organization for the betterment of the team as if he was done some sort of wrong.

And that’s just wild in all sorts of ways. Not only was the organization willing to hire Doyle, but they also briefly backed him in the face of all this. And they let him be part of the decision to walk away.

This just goes to show us that, yes, Urban Meyer is a joke just as my colleague Andy Nesbitt wrote. And the NFL’s anti-racism campaign is toothless as my colleague Chris Korman wrote.

It’s clear that Urban Meyer hasn’t learned from his mistakes at all. He still believes he has the run of the land as he did in Ohio State, and that just doesn’t work in the NFL. Every decision is way more scrutinized. And they come with backlash.

It really boils down to this. Coaches like Eric Bieniemy can’t even get a look for a head coaching gig after running the offense for a team that has made two straight Super Bowls. Yet, Doyle so easily got an assistant job after being disgraced at Iowa and accomplishing absolutely nothing.

The truth is, Doyle should never have gotten this opportunity in the first place. But he did. And he was able to step away from it with ease. And he’ll probably get another one down the line, too, because that just seems to be how this thing works.

Doyle and the Jaguars may have parted ways, but it doesn’t matter. The damage has already been done.