CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Urban Meyer’s true first day as the head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars will take place next Thursday in Cleveland when Trevor Lawrence becomes the No. 1 pick in the 2021 NFL Draft and Meyer’s first NFL starting quarterback.
The former Ohio State coach said Wednesday in a video conference with reporters that he’s been in round-the-clock draft prep the last three or four weeks with Jaguars execs and is gradually building his trust in the Jacksonville draft board and in his first experience in this role. But for now, he’s nervous about everything.
Lawrence will ease that, and he’ll make Meyer complete as an NFL boss. Although Lawrence won’t be in Cleveland for the draft, instead choosing to spend the day with his family, when the former Clemson star officially becomes a Jaguar, Meyer in that moment will answer the question that ruined the careers of too many college coaches who made the NFL leap.
Who’s your quarterback? Meyer will know.
Jimmy Johnson showed college football coaches how to make the jump to the NFL 32 years ago, but few since have listened like Meyer has. Sure, culture-building matters, but when Johnson, the coach of the Miami Hurricanes, accepted the overtures of friend and new Dallas owner Jerry Jones in 1989, he did so knowing the Cowboys owned the No. 1 pick in the draft and UCLA quarterback Troy Aikman was viewed as the best QB prospect to enter the league since John Elway six years earlier.
“Not only is Troy Aikman the finest quarterback to come out this year,” Johnson said at a news conference when the Cowboys signed Aikman to a contract days before they actually made him the No. 1 overall pick in the 1989 NFL Draft, “but he’s the finest to come out in several years.”
Now, Meyer and the Jaguars will select Lawrence, viewed not only as the best quarterback in the draft but also, by some, as the best quarterback prospect since Andrew Luck nine years ago.
“No negatives,” Jacksonville general manager Trent Baalke said of Lawrence on Wednesday, explaining that you’re always looking for the stars to align in the physical, mental and character evaluation of a player. “With his situation, the stars align.”
The search for a quarterback certainly isn’t unique to Meyer. It’s fundamental to football. Ask the Browns. But for a college coach coming to the NFL, it can be difficult to give up control of the most important position in sports.
In college, you must persuade quarterbacks in recruiting, but you chase any quarterback, and any number of quarterbacks, you want. In the NFL, there are draft, contract and salary cap limits.
Meyer and Johnson both made their NFL entrances more like recruiting, not by accident. The 3-13 Cowboys earned the first pick in 1989 with the NFL’s worst record in 1988, but only after the two-win Green Bay Packers won their last two games to finish 4-12. Would Johnson have been as eager to take the job, and would he have made the playoffs in Year 3 and won the Super Bowl in Years 4 and 5, without locking down his quarterback with the first pick of his NFL career?
The 1-15 Jaguars earned the first pick only because the winless Jets beat the Rams in Game 14 and the Browns in Game 15 to finish 2-14. Would Meyer be in Jacksonville if he was choosing between Zach Wilson and Justin Fields at No. 2 instead of locking in on the obvious top choice at No. 1?
Meyer is as quarterback-centric as any coach you’ll find as one of the founders of the spread offense that hinged on a quarterback who could do it all as a runner, thrower, decision maker and leader. At all four of his college stops, he quickly and precisely identified and connected with a quarterback who shaped his program. It was Josh Harris at Bowling Green, Alex Smith at Utah, Tim Tebow at Florida and J.T. Barrett at Ohio State. Meyer was adaptable -- he inherited Harris and Smith, while Tebow and Barrett were his first QB recruits at his new school. His first starting quarterbacks at Florida and Ohio State, before Tebow and Barrett, were Chris Leak and Braxton Miller. He won a national title with Leak, and went 24-0 to start his OSU career with Miller.
“One thing is for sure, when Coach Meyer believes in a guy, he might even believe in him more than the guy believes in himself,” Harris said when Meyer was hired by Ohio State in 2014. “That really propelled me, and my game, to new levels.”
Trevor Lawrence won't be in Cleveland for NFL Draft 2021, but he'll be front and center as the No. 1 overall pick for Urban Meyer and the Jacksonville Jaguars.AP
But Lawrence is the quarterback Meyer has been waiting his entire life to coach. The Jaguars will draft him in the state where Meyer was born and raised. Meyer spent his life hitting the recruiting trail in search of quarterbacks. Now, in Ohio, Meyer only has to pick, not persuade, a quarterback that has everything he has always looked for.
Three decades ago, the Johnson-Aikman story featured two misses by Johnson before Aikman no longer had a choice. An Oklahoma native, Aikman picked the University of Oklahoma out of high school, though Johnson, as the head coach at Oklahoma State, had recruited him early and often. Two years later, Aikman transferred from Oklahoma, and Johnson, now at Miami, went after him again. But Aikman picked UCLA.
With the first pick in 1989, Johnson ensured there would be no strike three. Now they’re both in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Meyer doesn’t have a recruiting tale with Lawrence, a Georgia native who locked into Clemson early in his recruitment in the Class of 2018, though the University of Georgia made a late charge. Meyer and the Buckeyes were infatuated with a different quarterback from Georgia in that 2018 recruiting class, as the Buckeyes pushed for a commitment from Emory Jones, who wound up rated as the fourth-best quarterback in the state of Georgia that year. First was Lawrence, and second was eventual Buckeye Justin Fields. Jones even threw a touchdown pass to Meyer’s son, Nate, at Ohio State’s Friday Night Lights recruiting showcase in the summer of 2016.
Jones never played for the Buckeyes. He decommitted when Fields transferred to Ohio State, and he signed with Florida, where as a redshirt junior he’s expected to start this season. But Meyer and Lawrence do have an origin story, because you could see when Meyer fell in love.
This is the second story in a series, “Center Stage: Four people who will be front and center next week and help define Cleveland’s NFL Draft.” Check back Wednesday for Mary Kay Cabot on Kyle Shanahan.
Get to know four people who will be front and center and help define Cleveland's NFL Draft
It was after Lawrence beat Ohio State in a 2019 College Football Playoff semifinal 29-23, overcoming a slow start to throw for 259 yards and two scores and running for 107 yards and another score against an OSU defense that featured three first-round draft picks and at least 10 future NFL picks. A four-play, 94-yard touchdown drive in the final three minutes won it for the Tigers. In his first year since retiring as Ohio State’s head coach, Meyer watched from the sideline, there as an Ohio State assistant athletic director and Big Ten Network and Fox Sports commentator.
“Trevor Lawrence, I had no idea,” Meyer said on the Big Ten Network during the postgame coverage.
His eyes widened a bit. He paused slightly before the statement. It was the Meyer tell of genuine admiration.
“You just didn’t see him do some of the things … I think he’s a great thrower, he ran away from Baron Browning,” Meyer said, shocked that the 6-foot-6 quarterback pulled away from Ohio State’s most athletic linebacker. “How courageous he was, his toughness. That was one of the best performances I’ve seen by a quarterback in terms of toughness, as far as making plays with his legs when he had to. That was an incredible performance by Trevor Lawrence.”
Meyer was speaking his love language, praising a quarterback for the things that mattered most to him. He spelled those things out time and again in college, repeating his five key quarterback attributes while analyzing the quarterback that would help prepare him for the NFL. In 2016, Dwayne Haskins, the purest thrower Meyer ever coached in college, was fighting for a backup job when Meyer explained his thinking.
“Every great quarterback, and we’ve had great ones, the No. 1 characteristic is competitive spirit,” Meyer said. “No. 2 is toughness. No. 3 is ability to lead. No. 4 is intelligence. No. 5 is ability to extend a play. Notice I never said anything about arm strength or delivery.”
Dwayne Haskins in 2018 at Ohio State. The Plain Dealer
With Haskins, who earned the starting job in 2018 in Meyer’s final OSU season, it was about arm strength and delivery more than it ever had been with Meyer. As a result, Meyer squirmed through his final season, with second-year offensive coordinator Ryan Day implementing a quick passing offense that made up for Haskins’ relative lack of mobility.
Meyer was visibly, and openly, uncomfortable still in October of that season when I asked if he was OK playing without a running quarterback.
“That’s a good question,” he said with a smile.
The answer was clearly no, but Meyer knew he had to turn that into a yes. He eventually did by the end of that season, as Haskins finished third in the Heisman Trophy race and the Buckeyes went 13-1 and finished third in the final AP poll. When Day took over as head coach, he and Fields took the OSU passing game to another level, but Meyer was never part of that. Haskins was his transformation, because he always bristled a bit in the past whenever it was suggested that he didn’t develop NFL quarterbacks.
Meyer always had counted three first-round quarterbacks on his watch: Smith at Utah, the overall No. 1 pick in 2005; Tebow at Florida, the overall No. 25 pick in 2010; and Cam Newton, a Meyer recruit at Florida who left, went to junior college, and became a Heisman winner at Auburn and the overall No. 1 pick in 2011. (Haskins became Meyer’s fourth in the 2019 draft.)
“So it’s from Josh Harris to Alex Smith to Tim Tebow to Cam Newton, and then obviously Braxton will get drafted,” Meyer said in 2014, as that conversation was focused around Braxton Miller’s quarterback future. “So they’re learning how to play the game of football and they’re very good throwers.”
Miller, of course, injured his shoulder, moved to receiver and never played quarterback in the NFL. Barrett, a four-year starter at Ohio State, never played in the NFL. Cardale Jones, the hero of the 2014 national title run, was a fourth-round pick who threw 11 NFL passes. Tebow had one season as a starter but didn’t sustain it and was out of the league in three years. Newton had the goods, but was somewhat of a stretch to count as a Meyer product. Over 16 years, Smith started 167 NFL games, but the appreciation for him didn’t arrive until the second half of his career. He was 19-31 his first six years in the league, and 80-36-1 over his final decade.
So this is what happened.
For years, Meyer searched for run-first, tough leaders at quarterback, while the NFL worried only about throwers, neglecting the running aspect of most college quarterbacks. In 2008, Meyer’s ideal quarterback was Tebow, while the NFL MVP was Peyton Manning. Different ways to win.
A decade later, Haskins opened Meyer up to the modern passing game, while the NFL has now come around on quarterbacks like Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, Kyler Murray, Russell Wilson, Daniel Jones, Deshaun Watson, Patrick Mahomes and Newton who made running the ball an actual part of their game.
Meyer’s five-part quarterback list, the list that made him so surprised and excited about Lawrence that night in December 2019, had nothing to do with throwing the ball: Competitiveness, toughness, leadership, intelligence, keep a play alive with your feet.
The NFL leans a little more toward those attributes, especially the last one, now, too. The league has come around on his list. But Meyer also knows if you can’t also sling it, smarts, toughness and leadership alone won’t win a Super Bowl. So he’s adjusted some of what he wants as well.
There, at the intersection, is Lawrence.
Honestly, Fields and Wilson and Trey Lance are at that intersection as well. But Meyer doesn’t have to think about the other quarterback possibilities in this draft. He’s making the obvious choice. At Clemson’s Pro Day on March 11, Meyer stood almost on top of Lawrence to take it all in.
“I do like to get very close to a quarterback and hear it,” Meyer said on the Jaguars’ in-house show about their draft process. “I wanna hear that ball leave his hand, I wanna hear that ball go by my head. I do the same thing at practice. I do wanna apply a little ... I want him to know we’re right there. That’s what life’s about. How are you going to respond to pressure?”
Meyer, who left Ohio State in part because of a cyst in his brain that was causing him regular headaches, will now figure that out about himself. He’s handled college pressure, but he’s never done it in the NFL. Meyer is a culture builder first, a program CEO, and he should execute that part of the job in Jacksonville. He should be able to build a football program. But he has always relied heavily on assistants, and he has been his most successful with innovative offensive minds he trusted completely. He had that with Dan Mullen in 2001 and 2002 at Bowling Green, at Utah in 2003 and in 2004, and at Florida from 2005 to 2008. Then Mullen left to become a head coach, and the end of Meyer’s Florida run was near. At Ohio State, he had that with Tom Herman from 2012 to 2014 and with Day in 2017 and 2018. When he didn’t have that in 2015 and 2016, the offense wasn’t as sharp and the Buckeyes didn’t maximize their potential.
That means Meyer will be relying upon offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell and passing game coordinator Brian Schottenheimer, two NFL lifers that Meyer didn’t know until the hiring process. Bevell was the coordinator in Seattle when Wilson was drafted by the Seahawks.
“His ability to get Russell Wilson in the NFL and performing at a high level rather quickly, was a big reason why he’s here,” Meyer said Wednesday.
There is also the rest of the roster, and the Jaguars had a lot of cap space to hit free agency hard this offseason. Johnson obviously built a roster around Aikman that allowed the Cowboys to win at the highest level. Meyer should hold back on exerting the same control over the roster that Johnson did, which is why Baalke, the former GM in San Francisco, was retained after taking over as the Jags’ GM late in the 2020 season. Meyer must realize what he doesn’t know, and he can’t torpedo his chance to coach a winner with roster mistakes that former college coaches with too much power can fall into it. That’s what happened to his friend Chip Kelly, the former Oregon coach who flamed out in the NFL with the Eagles and 49ers.
“This whole idea of value is completely new to me,” Meyer said Wednesday, admitting he has an instinct to chase need in the draft and he knows he has to fight that and rely on the other front office members and coaches to insist the Jags take the most talented players, not the ones that fit specific, momentary holes. “I’m a quick learner. ... So trusting the board is key. I’m at the point, almost there, that I will trust it.”
In the end, Meyer will rely the most on the quarterback the Jaguars will pick next week.
Between Johnson in 1989 and Meyer this year, there were 21 NFL head coaches hired from college football. Nine of them eventually made the playoffs with their new team, and 12 did not or have not yet. Much of that is quarterback.
In 1995, 18-year Oregon coach Rich Brooks was hired and went 13-19 in two years with Chris Miller and Tony Banks as his starting quarterbacks. The often-cited Steve Spurrier, a national championship coach at Florida, left for the NFL in 2002 and lasted two years in Washington, going 12-20. He tried to win with the last pick in the first round of the 2002 draft, Patrick Ramsey, as well as Danny Wuerffel, Shane Matthews and Tim Hasselbeck at quarterback. In 2012, Meyer’s good friend Greg Schiano was hired from Rutgers by Tampa Bay, and he was bounced out of the NFL after two seasons and a record of 11-21. His starting quarterbacks were Josh Freeman and Mike Glennon.
And then there’s the successful college coach who flamed out after two NFL seasons with Gus Frerotte, Joey Harrington and a fading Daunte Culpepper as his primary quarterbacks. He left the Miami Dolphins after going a combined 15-17 in 2005 and 2006. And he left wishing his team had signed Drew Brees, as he wanted to do.
“If we’d had Drew Brees, I might still be in Miami,” Alabama coach Nick Saban told ESPN in 2015.
Meyer isn’t comparable to those situations. He’s more akin to coaches like former USC boss Pete Carroll, who went 14-18 in his first two seasons with the Seattle Seahawks, but has made the playoffs eight of the last nine seasons once Wilson arrived in Year 3. Boston College coach Tom Coughlin left to become the first coach of the Jaguars, and he built the team and started a four-year playoff run in his second season by finding and believing in quarterback Mark Brunell.
And while Meyer can learn from the NFL mistakes of Saban, he can also learn from the NFL success of Jim Harbaugh, who jumped from Stanford to the San Francisco 49ers and went 36-11-1 his first three seasons with a roster ready to win and quarterbacks ready to lead. First was Alex Smith, followed by Colin Kaepernick.
Meyer knows what he wants in a quarterback. That’s why he tried to get Smith, who played in Washington last season, to come to the Jaguars this season as a mentor to Lawrence. It would have brought Smith and Meyer full circle from their days together at Utah. It would have paired the No. 1 pick in 2005 with the No. 1 pick in 2021. But Smith, 36, chose to retire instead.
It’s OK. The most important quarterback is still coming to Jacksonville. Meyer needed this career path to find the quarterback he wanted. Just as important, like Jimmy Johnson showed, he had to take a job where he could get that quarterback.
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