The Manning Cast alternate broadcast of Monday Night Football generally produces great football-adjacent stories. So too did the 13-game tenure of Urban Meyer as Jacksonville Jaguars head coach.
In Week 12, those two forces met in a tremendous, slightly baffling and yet completely believable story from longtime NFL mainstay Mike Vrabel.
Vrabel spent 14 seasons in the league as a linebacker and six as head coach of the Tennessee Titans. He spent another two as defensive line coach for Meyer’s Ohio State Buckeyes. But when the two met in 2021, Meyer took one look at the former All-Pro, NFL coach of the year and, importantly, his former employee and asked “do I know you?”
when Urban Meyer was coaching the Jaguars he ran into Mike Vrabel
Urban: “do I know you?”
Vrabel: “yea, I’m the Head Coach for the Titans and I worked for you for two years” pic.twitter.com/29nmwGDjVw
— Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) November 26, 2024
“Yeah, I’m the head coach for the Titans,” Vrabel told a chuckling Peyton and Eli Manning. “And I worked for you for two years.”
For any other head coach, most of whom have encyclopedic knowledge of the game and the main characters in it, this would be unbelievable. But given Meyer’s myriad ways to screw up just about anything related to his NFL tenure, this was pretty standard.
Meyer was bad enough to get fired two-thirds of the way through a season with the Jaguars, a franchise that gave Gus Bradley three-plus years at the helm. He was such a disaster we were able to publish an article here titled “12 times we told you Urban Meyer is the worst” and it still missed some of Meyer’s doofus-brained behavior.
Including, apparently, recognizing a division rival’s head coach who also happened to be one of his assistant coaches less than a decade earlier. Urban Meyer, man.
