Liam Coen, Jaguars not ranked highly in ESPN's 2025 coaching staff rankings

USA Today

3 days ago

Liam Coen and the Jaguars' coaching staff are not ranked very highly in ESPN's 2025 coaching staff rankings.
Where does Liam Coen and the relatively newly formed Jacksonville Jaguars' coaching staff debut on ESPN's 2025 coaching rankings?
ESPN's Ben Solak recently set out to rank all 32 coaching staffs. Admittedly, as Solak detailed, there's a lot of guesswork that comes with this exercise.
We can look at stats to see who the good offensive and defensive teams are, but the head coach is the CEO of the entire operation, and quantifying locker room management, game plan construction, and how the staff is built, among many other things--like who has the best tight ends coach-- is an impossible task.
But Solak powered through with the information and "vibes," as he put it, to construct his rankings. As far as the Jaguars go, they come in at No. 31, although Solak acknowledges that they shouldn't be there.
"The Jaguars don't deserve to be here," Solak wrote. "They really don't. To be fair, I had the Commanders at this spot in 2024, and that looks tectonically dumb now -- so maybe it's a blessed spot. But the Jaguars rank this low simply because of how inexperienced and unproven this staff is.
"Coen's first season calling plays in an NFL game was last season; he has only five years of NFL coaching experience heading into this job. Don't get me wrong -- he absolutely shredded it. Tampa was in the top five in pretty much every offensive metric we've got, but we know that offensive ingenuity does not always spell head coaching success."
Ultimately, inexperience on the staff and unknowns landed the Jaguars near the bottom of Solak's rankings. But as he alluded to, it's difficult not to look at this coaching staff and see a path towards success.
For one, as an offensive play caller, Coen orchestrated one of the best offenses in football last season. The multiplicity component that Coen wants present throughout the offense keeps defenses off balance and guessing, while also helping to shoulder some of the playmaking burden with the scheme doing some of the heavy lifting to get players open.
Under Anthony Campanile on defense, that multiplicity element will be prevalent as well. This will be a more aggressive defense and one that prioritizes movement to throw a variety of looks at the quarterback.
Both Coen and Campanile's schemes will be malleable as well, quick to adjust to what the opponent is doing while also molding to the skill sets that are on the roster.
As Solak said at the start of all this, there is a lot more that goes into being a head coach than just the Xs and Os, but the Jaguars certainly seem to be on the right path with all the moves made throughout the organization during this offseason--even if they are lacking experience.
"I am the last person to believe that tenure in the league guarantees competency or predicts improvement," Solak wrote. "If the Jaguars went through a thoughtful search and landed on these guys as coaching talents, then kudos to them.
"But from the outside looking in, it's hard to find a staff with a lower floor than the Jaguars', simply because of the inexperience. Coaching is about solving problems on the fly, and it's many years at the mast that make steady hands at the helm. The start might be rocky in Jacksonville."