Could Jaguars' Shad Khan Repeat 2020 With Doug Pederson and Trent Baalke?

Could Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Shad Khan force Trent Baalke and Doug Pederson to clean up their mess in 2025?

Jacksonville Jaguars General Manager Trent Baalke looks on as Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Doug Pederson is wired for a microphone during filing by NFL Films at Monday morning's training camp. The Jacksonville Jaguars held training camp Monday, August 1, 2022, at the Episcopal School of Jacksonville Knight Campus practice fields on Atlantic Blvd. Jki 080122 Jaguarsmondaytrainingcamp 05 / Bob Self/Florida Times-Union / USA TODAY NETWORK

With just three weeks left in a nightmarish season, the Jacksonville Jaguars have one question that looms over the franchise more than anything else.

What does the future hold for head coach Doug Pederson and general manager Trent Baalke?

There is no questioning the disappointment that has enveloped the 2024 season. The season has been a non-stop disaster since the first week of the season when the Jaguars fumbled the ball at the Miami Dolphins' one-yard line.

Since then, the Jaguars have been hit with loss after loss. Injury after injury. Setback after setback.

But the Jaguars have been through seasons like this before under owner Shad Khan. Seasons that seem so impossibly downtrodden that conventional thinking would imply that change simply has to be made.

When faced with that change, Khan sometimes goes with half-measures instead of going all the way. One such occurrence happened after a 2019 season that saw the end of the Tom Coughlin era.

That Jaguars team was torn at the seams, perhaps worse than this one is. There was a serious clash between management and the locker room that isn't seen with this year's Jaguars team.

Khan's answer to that let-down season was to move on from Coughlin, but retain head coach Doug Marrone and general manager Dave Caldwell separate from him.

Khan shifted the arraignment of the team, and made it clear what Marrone and Caldwell had to do in 2020: clean up their mess. Fix the locker room. Get rid of the bad contracts and fix the cap space. Be accountable to the mistakes that they made along the way, and attempt to build a better outcome.

"We came out of our AFC Championship Game season of 2017 by making a four-year commitment to the collective leadership of our football operations. Only two seasons have passed and one change from that leadership team has already been made. I want to see what we produce under a new organizational structure in 2020. Goals have been established. Accountability will be paramount," Khan said in 2020 when he announced he would be retaining Marrone and Caldwell.

"As part of our new framework, the position of Executive Vice President of Football Operations will not be filled in 2020. Dave and Doug will each continue to report directly to me, as they have since mid-December. Our work begins immediately. We have a lot of draft capital in our favor to help us achieve our goals for 2020, and beyond."

The question to ask is, could Khan do the same with Pederson and Baalke? It seems unlikely considering expectations were even higher in 2024 than they were in 2019. The 2024 Jaguars have had a worse season than the 2019 Jaguars did, too.

But the Jaguars have another mess to clean up. Khan could opt for a new head coach, a new general manager, or both, and ask them to clean up the mess this time. Once again, the Jaguars have issues in regard to talent in key spots. There are zero locker room issues, but constant injuries and an inability to close games have been a thorn in the Jaguars' side for the entire Pederson//Baalke regime.

And the Jaguars certainly have some serious cap questions that have arose as a result of free agency contracts that have failed to age gracefully. The Jaguars aren't in serious cap trouble, but would Khan want a new regime to come in and have to eat bad contracts like the ones the Jaguars handed out in 2024?

It is a legitimate question to ask considering Khan has given his football staff a year to tidy the house for their replacements. Still, it doesn't seem feasible this time around considering the Jaguars now have the prime of Trevor Lawrence to consider.

The Jaguars could afford to, for a lack of a better phrase, waste everyone's time in 2020 so they could prepare themselves for the future. They don't have that oppurtunity this time around.

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