That Liam Coen will be the next head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars wouldn’t have surprised anyone at the beginning of this week. Things trended that way over the NFL’s divisional round weekend—after his first interview on Jan. 15—with a second interview initially set for Wednesday, Jan. 22.
But how the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ offensive coordinator and the Jaguars got here took a borderline unprecedented turn of events.
On Thursday night in Jacksonville, the two sides reached a verbal agreement to make Coen the Jaguars’ new head coach. A long-form contract still needs to be executed, but, at this point, isn’t much more than a formality, and its completion will close the book on one of the wilder coaching carousel stories in recent memory.
This one began before Coen did his first interview over video conference with the Jaguars. Knowing it was coming and believing that Coen had a real shot at the job, Buccaneers GM Jason Licht approached his offensive coordinator to ask exactly what it would take for Coen to stay in Tampa. Coen came back with a salary request that would make him the highest-paid coordinator in NFL history, and by a healthy margin.
Licht took the proposal back to the Glazer family, who own the Buccaneers, and got it approved. He then went to Coen, telling him he had his number, that the team loved him, and badly wanted him to stay, but didn’t want to negotiate anymore. Coen then met with the Glazers, who encouraged him to take the first interview with the Jaguars to, at the very least, get the experience of having done one.
So Coen did the interview, and he did well enough to be in a group of three finalists invited to Jacksonville to do second interviews with the team in-person—joining Las Vegas Raiders defensive coordinator Patrick Graham and ex-New York Jets coach Robert Saleh. The complication, for Coen, was his offer from the Buccaneers was contingent on him not taking the second interview.
Coen asked for time to think it over, then came back and asked for more money. The Buccaneers responded by saying that the offer was the offer, and they needed an answer by Monday. He later asked to have until Tuesday. Then, on Tuesday evening, he told the Bucs he’d have an answer Wednesday morning, with his second interview with the Jags looming.
So on Wednesday morning, Coen verbally accepted the Buccaneers’ three-year deal to make him the highest-paid coordinator in NFL history. He talked to ownership, called head coach Todd Bowles and a few players, and sent a group text to the staff to give everyone the news.
He’d told some folks that he knew the move to stay would prove correct in the long run.
It wasn’t long after that the news of the Jaguars firing GM Trent Baalke surfaced, which changed everything about Jacksonville’s pursuit of Coen.
On Wednesday afternoon, with Coen expected to be at 1 Buccaneer Place to sign his deal, efforts by team brass to get ahold of Coen failed. Around 5 p.m., Coen called back to ask Licht if it was O.K. if he came in Thursday morning to sign the contract—rather than doing it that night—and Licht told him that was fine.
Around 10 a.m. Thursday, the Buccaneers still hadn’t heard from Coen, and assistant GM Mike Greenberg had to reach out to him on a contract for another offensive coach that was being finalized. That call went unanswered, too, as did additional attempts by Licht and Bowles.
Finally, at 11 a.m., Coen’s agent got back to the Bucs and informed them that his client was tending to a personal matter. Tampa waited a few hours, and then Licht, Bowles and other staffers tried, again, to get ahold of Coen.
During the 5 p.m. hour, Coen called Bowles and told him he was still dealing with his personal matter. He also told him that things had materially changed in Jacksonville, and that he was going to travel there to explore the opening. Within an hour of that phone call, a Bucs staffer got tipped off by someone in the Jaguars’ facility that Coen was already in the building.
The Jaguars had emphasized to Coen’s camp how important it was that the visit stay under wraps, which could explain why the coordinator kept his plans from the Buccaneers. In the wake of firing Baalke, and in addition to a healthy financial offer, the Jags offered Coen a chance to effectively pick his general manager—an opportunity exceedingly rare for a first-time head coach. In fact, one colleague told Coen that Kyle Shanahan’s hire in San Francisco was the only such offer for a first-timer he could remember like the one Coen had in front of him.
The secrecy over the visit did serve two theoretical purposes. One, obviously, it would preserve the Tampa offer for Coen, which, again, was contingent on the OC not visiting Jacksonville. Two, it allowed the Jaguars to satisfy the Rooney Rule. Going into Thursday, the Jags only had one minority candidate in for an in-person interview—Saleh’s first was in-person. They needed two to comply, so Graham was slated to come Thursday for the other. But the Jags didn’t want word of their plans getting out, which could cause Graham to cancel.
On Thursday morning, with Graham in, the Jaguars called Saleh to cancel his scheduled second interview on Friday morning.
So the Jags and Coen tip-toed around everyone Thursday, with the team trying to jump through the NFL’s prescribed hiring hoops so it could make its hire, and the coach trying to make it to the finish line to capture a unique opportunity, while not losing a lucrative offer to stay where he was.
In the end, the Jags and Coen got to the conclusion they were looking for.
As messy as it might have been.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Inside the Messy 48 Hours That Made Liam Coen the Jaguars’ Coach.
