Jaguars’ new bosses make life grueling
Players understand tougher approach by Marrone, Coughlin after 3-13 season
Calais Campbell is one of a handful of players on the Jacksonville Jaguars roster who remembers life before the new collective bargaining agreement. Training camps featured two-a-day practices and consecutive days of full contact and pads.
And yet Campbell, a 30-yearold defensive tackle who signed a four-year, $60 million free agent contract in March, said he never has been through a training camp as grueling as the one that new Jaguars head coach Doug Marrone and executive vice president of football operations Tom Coughlin are running in Jacksonville this year.
“Everyone is working hard, there are lots of teams that are working hard, but this is a definitely a different level,” Campbell told USA TODAY Sports.
Jaguars camp features practices that start in the late morning and stretch into the middle of the day under the north Florida sun. The sessions are heavy on no-huddle team drills to minimize downtime and maximize the number of snaps, and after- noons end with several sets of 80yard sprints for every player.
Breaks throughout the rest of the day are shorter, and the schedule is rigid. In true Coughlin fashion, being on time is considered late, and players will be fined for tardiness.
Former head coach Gus Bradley, fired in December after nearly four years in Jacksonville, was known for running a playerfriendly regime. This is most certainly the opposite.
“If we wanted it different, we should have won with Gus,” defensive tackle Malik Jackson told USA TODAY Sports. “Now we can’t complain when we have someone else here who has a totally different mind-set. (Marrone) is a disciplinarian, and this is the way he feels we’re going to win, and this is what he feels we’ve got to do.
“Who are we to (complain)? We went 3-13 last year. Suck it up.”
Indeed, the Jaguars were in need of a culture change, and they tried to find it by bringing back Coughlin, the former head coach in Jacksonville and with the New York Giants, to oversee football operations, and promoting Marrone, a longtime offensive line coach who has an old school mentality.
Marrone, who was promoted after serving as interim coach late last season, has been clear that he wants a tougher team that will be stronger up front and one that will be better equipped to play better late in games. Of the Jaguars’ 13 losses last season, four came in games in which they led in the fourth quarter, including a 21-20 loss to the Houston Texans in Week 15 that resulted in Bradley’s firing, and a 24-10 loss to the Indianapolis Colts in Week 17.
“It’s more of a discipline, tough, get some gristle on your bones-type mentality, because it’s going to be a grind and we’re going to make teams wilt. I think that’s good for us,” tight end Marcedes Lewis told USA TODAY Sports. “The fact that we’re a young team, it’s good that they get this type of tone right now.”