Big Cat Country
The Jacksonville Jaguars find themselves in somewhat familiar, yet entirely uncharted territory. Fresh off a nine-win improvement from the 2024 to 2025 season, the Liam Coen era has already delivered the kind of rapid cultural transformation that Jaguar fans have seen only once before in recent memory.
When Doug Pederson replaced the disastrous Urban Meyer regime in 2022, Jacksonville vaulted six wins in a single year, and the energy surrounding the Jacksonville Jaguars shifted almost overnight. Coen’s arrival has produced a similarly dramatic swing, not just in the win column, but in the feel of the entire organization, from the locker room to the front office.
The results speak for themselves. An immediate division championship and playoff berth. A true team identity. A roster that appears to actually believe in itself. Yet, a first-round, wildcard, playoff exit has a way of sharpening questions that winning can only temporarily soften. And the most pressing of those questions isn’t about this past season, it’s about what comes next, following that initially spark.
That question was put directly to Coen following Day 7 of OTAs, and how the Jaguars answer it over the coming months may define the true scope of this rebuild. The Jaguars’ head coach agreed that the initial culture buildout was probably easier than sustaining one.
I think establishing is definitely a little easier, because look, they’re very ready to hear something different. When you’ve lost or are coming off a tough year, they’re eager, their eyes are bright, they want to hear what you’ve got to say because like, ‘Hey man, this is, this is what we got, this is where we have to go.’ And I think that was probably a little easier than sustaining it.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about building a winning culture in the NFL: the first year is actually the easy part, to Coen’s point. When a new coaching staff takes over, they carry with them the full weight of novelty. They can handpick free agents who already align with their system, identify and elevate players who embrace the new philosophy from day one, and quickly move on from those who don’t. The speeches are fresh, the energy is genuine, and even a modest improvement in results can feel like a revolution. Players buy in because everything is new, and new is exciting.
Year two and three is where franchises find out who they really are. The speeches don’t always land the same way the second time around. The culture Coen installed is no longer a novelty, it’s an expectation. And expectations carry weight that novelty never does. When a three-game losing streak hits in November, the locker room won’t always be rallied by the same messages that fired them up in training camp a year ago. When the offense stalls and the defense gives up a fourth-quarter lead, the answers that once felt revelatory will need to actually hold...
