NOVEMBER 18: Sunday’s lopsided loss has, as expected, left Pederson’s job status very much within the air. If a change on the sidelines is to happen, Bill Belichick stays a possible candidate to take over by the beginning of the 2025 season. On that note, The Athletic’s Dianna Russini reports a partnership between Belichick and Baalke could be “highly unlikely.” How Khan proceeds over the immediate and medium-term future will definitely be price watching closely no matter whether or not a Belichick pursuit takes place.
NOVEMBER 17: Reports from earlier this week indicated that an in-season shakeup of the Jaguars’ power structure could also be in store should Jacksonville suffer a blowout loss by the hands of the Lions in Week 11. Along with head coach Doug Pederson, Jags general manager Trent Baalke could also lose his job if the Jags are outclassed by Detroit, as Ian Rapoport of NFL.com confirms.
Owner Shad Khan publicly backed each Pederson and Baalke earlier this 12 months, and he reportedly prefers to attend until the top of the season to drag the trigger on a training and/or front office overhaul. Nevertheless, there’s a excellent probability that the 2-8 Jaguars, who’re being quarterbacked by Mac Jones while Trevor Lawrence nurses a shoulder injury, will indeed lose in lopsided fashion to the 8-1 Lions, and Rapoport says the sense contained in the Jaguars’ facility is that some type of change is inevitable.
When addressing his team during training camp this summer, Khan made a press release that’s aging more poorly with each passing day, noting that this 12 months’s iteration of the Jaguars is the very best in franchise history. Assuming he truly felt that way – and per Rapoport, rival clubs acknowledge Jacksonville sports a talented roster – then it could seem that Baalke, because the chief architect of that roster, would a minimum of have a probability to stay in his position in 2025.
Indeed, when Pederson’s seat began to heat up in September, it was suggested that Baalke was on firmer footing than the top coach. However, the team’s fall over the past calendar 12 months – the 2023 Jags won eight of their first 11 games after which lost five of their final six to miss the postseason – may very well be too dramatic for any of its top power brokers to survive.
Baalke, 60, served because the 49ers’ GM from 2011-2016, and through that point, San Francisco boasted 35 Pro Bowl selections and made a Super Bowl appearance. After head coach Jim Harbaugh departed at the top of the 2014 season, nevertheless, the Niners’ fortunes went south. The coaches that Baalke hired to switch Harbaugh, Jim Tomsula and Chip Kelly, were one-and-dones, and the team went a combined 7-25 over the 2015-16 seasons. That led to Baalke’s ouster, and he spent the following several years as a football operations consultant for the NFL.
Baalke became the Jaguars’ director of player personnel in February 2020, was named interim GM upon Dave Caldwell’s firing in November of that 12 months, and had his interim tag removed on the conclusion of the 2020 campaign. Even so, Baalke’s status as GM was believed to be turning off certain coaches during what became a long-running HC search within the 2022 coaching cycle, and the team interviewed longtime Vikings GM Rick Spielman for a non-GM position (but one that might have outranked Baalke). Although the Spielman hire never got here to pass, rumblings about Baalke’s standing inside the organization were still surfacing at the top of the 2022 season, the primary 12 months of the Pederson era.
While it has been reported that the connection between Pederson and Baalke has turn into strained, Rapoport says that there isn’t any in-fighting between the personnel department and the coaching staff in the meanwhile. Members of each parties acknowledge that the club’s failure is a collective effort, and there’s a “pall” and a “doom” hanging over the constructing as staffers brace for a minimum of one ax to fall in brief order.
