Urban Meyer and the Miami Dolphins Angles
The big story around the NFL this week besides all the positive COVID-19 tests popping up and players being sidelined, involved the firing of head coach Urban Meyer by the Jacksonville Jaguars with four games left in his first season at the helm.
The firing came hours after former kicker Josh Lambo asserted in a story that Meyer kicked him while he was stretching at practice and told him (in colorful language) he could do whatever he wanted because he was the head coach.
As is often the case with major stories around the NFL, there are several angles to the Meyer story.
MEYER’S FIRST NFL WIN
This is the most obvious and most painful for Dolphins fans, Meyer getting his first win as an NFL head coach in London, England against Miami.
Jacksonville won 23-20 after kicker Matthew Wright made field goals of 54 and 53 yards in the final four minutes after he had come into the game with four career made field goals, none longer than 46 yards.
The Jaguars went into the game with an 0-5 record, which made it an upset even though the Dolphins were 1-4 at the time.
It wasn’t nearly as big an upset as Meyer’s other win, the 9-6 shocker against the Buffalo Bills, and the Dolphins and/or Bills will look back at those Jacksonville losses if either team ends up missing the playoffs by one game.
BAKER CHIMES IN?
Linebacker Jerome Baker is one Dolphins player who knows what Meyer is like as a head coach, having played for him at Ohio State from 2015-17.
It’s why his tweet about “karma” after the Lambo story, from longtime NFL writer Rick Stroud, came out Wednesday. Because Baker already had done his weekly media session at the Baptist Health Training Complex when his tweet came out, it’s impossible to say for sure whether it referred to Meyer, though it’s certainly not an out-of-line assumption.
It should be noted the tweet came after the Lambo story came out but before the Jaguars fired Meyer, so it’s not fair to say with 100 percent certainty that the tweet referred to the coach.
SABAN AND THE OLD COLLEGE TRY
Meyer wasn’t the first highly successful college coach to flop in the NFL, and Dolphins fans certainly can relate.
But, to be fair, Nick Saban’s tenure with the Dolphins wasn’t anywhere near as disastrous as that of Meyer.
For one thing, the Dolphins went 9-7 and 6-10 in Saban’s two seasons and there was nothing reported that he did as egregious as Meyer’s incident with Lambo. But that’s not to say that Saban didn’t have problems relating to NFL players instead of college players and the story that former linebacker and now radio host Channing Crowder tells of Zach Thomas warning Saban not to talk down to him illustrates that.
In the end, though, Saban’s Dolphins tenure will be remember for two things: Trading for Daunte Culpepper instead of signing Drew Brees in the spring of 2006, and the famous “I’m not going to be the Alabama coach” denial shortly before he indeed did become the Alabama coach.
CAMERON AND THE ONE AND DONE
Hired to coach the Dolphins after Saban left for Alabama, Cameron was done after the disastrous 2007 season when Miami went 1-15 and escaped an 0-fer thanks to Greg Camarillo’s 64-yard overtime touchdown against Baltimore in December.
Like Saban, Cameron had been a head coach in the college ranks, but he didn’t have Saban’s success (at Michigan State and LSU) prior to joining the Dolphins, going 18-37 at Indiana from 1997-2001. Rather, Cameron was hired by the Dolphins based on his work as offensive coordinator of the Chargers from 2002-06.
Cameron’s one season with the Dolphins was his only one as head coach in the NFL. He spent the following nine years as an offensive coordinator, first with the Baltimore Ravens and then at LSU.
