Sign with Jags at your peril, NFL union says

In January 2018, the Jacksonville Jaguars led the mighty New England Patriots by double digits in the fourth quarter of the AFC championship game.

The Jaguars would lose that game and less than two years later, they have gone back to being, well, the Jaguars.

On Monday, the NFL Players Association fired the latest salvo in what’s been yet another season to forget, revealing that an arbitrator ruled the franchise had improperly required players to rehab off-season injuries at the team’s facility and fined players who didn’t.

Such off-season appointments are “strictly voluntary” with limited exceptions under the NFL’S collective bargaining agreement, the arbitrator ruled.

The NFLPA is now taking the extraordinary step of advising players to be wary of signing with the Jaguars, considering that more than 25 per cent of the total grievances filed by all NFL players during the last two years were against that team.

One player alone was fined 25 times for more than $700,000 for missing the rehab appointments, the NFLPA said in its letter.

Though the union didn’t name the player, Dante Fowler Jr. — now with the Rams after a midseason trade in 2018 — seemed to suggest on Twitter that it was him.

Tom Coughlin has been the Jaguars’ executive vice-president of football operations during the period of time the NFLPA cited in the letter. Coughlin was fired Wednesday, a decision that owner Shad Khan announced while saying he initially planned to wait until after the season.

“General manager Dave Caldwell and head coach Doug Marrone will each report directly to me on an interim basis. My expectations, and those of our fans, for our final two games and the 2020 season are high, Khan said.”

“I thank Tom for his efforts . . . to put the Jacksonville Jaguars on the map.”