Jaguars firing Doug Pederson, keeping Trent Baalke won't solve their problems

The Jacksonville Jaguars decided to end the Doug Pederson era on Monday, announcing their decision to fire their head coach after three seasons in which the team failed to win more than nine games.

However, according to ESPN, Jacksonville opted to keep general manager Trent Baalke at the helm, with owner Shad Khan citing organizational stability as the primary reason for the decision.

"What is a complete overhaul of the franchise?" Khan asked on a Zoom call with reporters Monday afternoon. "Health and wellness of the players, medical statistics, analysis, scouting, and a number of other elements along with contract administration, all of those areas we have really changed [and] improved certainly over the last four or five years. So to change all of that is almost like suicidal.

"You've got 85 people working on that side [of the organization] and you say, 'I'm going to get rid of them and find 85 new people that are going to be better than that?' That's like shooting yourself in the foot. I mean, we need to go to work on something that is broken, that needs to be fixed, and continually be improving things that are working."

But are the Jaguars really in good shape? Are things actually working on the organizational side of the field? And does Baalke really deserve the credit to keep the job?

In Baalke's tenure with the team, which begin after the 2020 season, Jacksonville has gone 25-43. Outside of drafting Trevor Lawrence (who also hasn't really lived up to expectations due to the team around him), there aren't really a lot of success stories Baalke can point to as cause for celebration. The team backed into a playoff berth in 2022, but even that season, the team and its much-hyped free agency signings failed to live up to the hype.

Christian Kirk has been fine, but hardly the star you'd expect for a 4-year, $72 million contract. The Jaguars' search for a number one wide receiver continued for three full seasons, and may have finally concluded after drafting Brian Thomas this year.

The majority of Baalke's decisions have failed to substantially improve the Jaguars on the field; even before the rash of injuries decimated the latter half of their campaign and saw Lawrence out for the vast majority of the second half, they looked like one of the worst teams in football on a pretty consistent basis.

Some of the blame for that falls on Pederson; the coach made his fair share of mystifying decisions. But if you're going to blame the coach, you should also blame the architect of your futility, the man whose decision making around draft picks and signings led to the creation of one of the NFL's strangest rosters, top to bottom.

After all, it's Baalke who built the defense, which finished dead last in yards allowed and 27th in points. It's Baalke who has failed to find more than one consistently functional wide receiver in four years. It's Baalke who built the team that has yet to be more than one game over .500 in four seasons, and just spent most of this season looking like a team at the very beginning of a rebuild, rather than a team who should be in its contending window right now.

Khan talks about organizational stability, predictability, and consistency. But what about the last four years of performances is something you want to continue replicating? What have you seen in that time that makes you say "you know, this project is going great, and the guy in charge of building it is doing a great job"?

If the Jaguars are serious about contending, and serious about building something special in Jacksonville, then Khan needs to realize that while Pederson was part of the problem, he was far from the whole problem.

And that by getting rid of Trent Baalke, he can actually begin the work of shaping this roster into something that can contend.

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