One afternoon this summer, Urban Meyer was a special guest at a luncheon at the stadium with one of the Jaguars’ largest corporate sponsors. For about 20 minutes, he gave a speech about leadership. Like the entirety of his brief, 11-month tenure in Jacksonville, it was based wholly on Meyer’s past coaching successes.
A theme of the speech was trust—ironic because the lack thereof would be the reason normally-patient Jaguars owner Shad Khan would cite in firing Meyer on Wednesday night, before the end of his first season. One of the things Meyer told the room that day was that if someone on your team, in business or in football, is not succeeding, you have to take the time to get to the root cause.