The Jacksonville Jaguars fired their top executive, Tom Coughlin, on Wednesday, parting ways with him a little more than a day after the N.F.L. players union won a fight to overturn millions of dollars in fines he had imposed.
Coughlin — who spent most of his career as a coach, winning two Super Bowls at the helm of the Giants — had been the Jaguars’ executive vice president of football operations since 2017. It was his second stint with Jacksonville, the expansion franchise he helped build from the ground up in the mid-1990s.
Coughlin, 73, had been in trouble for weeks because of the team’s sagging record (now 5-9) and several questionable roster moves. The union apparently forced the hand of the team owner, Shad Khan, after an arbitrator’s decision to undo the fines imposed by Coughlin.
The union said on Monday that more than 25 percent of player grievances filed in the last two years had been against the Jaguars.
“I determined earlier this fall that making this move at the conclusion of the 2019 season would be in everyone’s best interests,” Khan said in a statement. “But, in recent days, I reconsidered and decided to make this change immediately.”
Khan said General Manager David Caldwell and head coach Doug Marrone would each report directly to him on an interim basis.
Among the fines overturned was a penalty of more than $700,000 against defensive end Dante Fowler in 2018 for missing what Coughlin defined as mandatory appointments at the team’s practice facility during the off-season. Problem was, the appointments weren’t really mandatory — a reality cooked into the rule book after some hard-fought wins by the union in collective bargaining about how much time players were obliged to spend at team headquarters in the off-season.
Source: Football - nytimes.com
