Jacksonville, Fla. — Football is back! At least on the practice field, anyhow. The Jaguars are coming off of their best season in nearly 30 years, posting the franchise’s first 13-plus win season since their heralded 1999 season.
But, as everyone inside the building knows, 2026 is a new year, full of new opportunities and new challenges. It’s one full of excitement too. As Liam Coen said in an interview with Brent Martineau and Austen Lane, the team finally gets to scratch that itch they’ve had all offseason.
On an episode of “The Hunt,” Coen stated just how important year two is to him as a coach and to this team. It’s about proving that last year’s success wasn’t a fluke and more this is who we are.
“I believe that consistency is the truest measure of performance. And so, we want respect,” said Coen.
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It’s been something the Jacksonville franchise has long sought after. The last time the Jaguars had back-to-back playoff seasons was in 1999. This team has the opportunity and challenge ahead of changing that and earning respect across the league.
“You want respect. You want to earn and take respect. Because, the money, the fame, the wins, all that stuff, it is all, somehow, going to go away. But respect, I believe, when you think about people in life that you respect, you are always going to remember that,” added Coen.
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“So the consistency of doing it and doing it, that’s just who we are. This is a part of our fiber. It’s a part of our being. We wake up, brush our teeth, and go to work every single day and we are respected. And that’s what consistency does. So, year two is about consistency,” Coen continued.
Finding motivation has never been a problem for Liam Coen. He used anything and everything available last season to fire up the Jaguars staff and roster. He seems to be forever in search of motivational material, whether it be remarks made by an opposing head coach or position rankings in the media.
But for training camp, the motivation is a little closer to home. It’s how they ended last season.
“We know we left some meat on the bone at the end of the year. You are playing good football, to go out not playing your best football and that’s the last time we competed, so that taste is absolutely still in your mouth. It is,” Coen acknowledged.
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It’s finding this edge that has become almost synonymous with Liam Coen in Jacksonville and so quickly too. Per Noah Schlicksup of Action Sports Jax’s request, Martineau asked Coen what it was that gave him an edge as an NFL head coach. His answer, finding that edge for his team.
“You have to be intentional and deliberate about finding edges and creating them. That is something that I’ve always strived to do, whether it was as a player, early years of coaching, tirelessly working to find edges. That’s within your fundamentals and technique, scheme, your leadership, the building, the personnel, in the athletic training room,” stated Coen.
“To me, as a coach, that’s something I pursue on a day-to-day basis. Whether you are a winner or a loser, it doesn’t matter. We are freaking competitors and you are competing to find an edge every single day. If anything, I think it’s that,” Coen continued.
Liam Coen and his staff’s humility and willingness or eagerness to get better themselves really sets them apart in an NFL world that can certainly be rather stubborn at times. The pivot away from the screen game is just one example, cutting the use of screens in half over the second
half of the season.
But this training camp, cleaning up areas of deficiency last season is a priority. One of those happens to be the penalties that plagued the Jaguars all season long, though they did improve as the season went on. Even so, the Jags still ranked 30th in the NFL in both total penalties and penalty yards last season.
The 67 offensive penalties, in particular, created so many scenarios where the Jaguars were playing from behind the sticks, making things infinitely harder for the offense to operate effectively.
“That is a huge point of emphasis for us, actually. We have our style of play, which was fundamentally sound, attacking, situational masters, and tough. We have tweaked that to fundamentally sharp, attacking, situational masters, and tough. There’s always an evolution,” said Coen.
It’s that willingness to adapt, to change, to evolve that has really immediately grabbed the attention of so many, whether it be personnel, media, or fans.
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