Jaguars owner Shahid Khan won't rule out firing GM with Trent Baalke right beside him

I feel like I am taking crazy pills. Why is it that so many NFL owners fail to hire and fire head coaches and general managers in unison? This is not professional business world where everyone can win if enough people do a good job; this is the NFL. It is a league driven by parity with a scarce resource called wins. There are only 272 available to be had in a regular season, and a team can only obtain 17.

So when the Jacksonville Jaguars fired a Super Bowl-winning head coach in Doug Pederson, but failed to move on from the much bigger problem at hand in much-maligned general manager Trent Baalke, everyone down in Duval County was speechless. Baalke has a bad reputation for being difficult to work with. This job in Jacksonville would be far more attractive with him out of the building.

During Monday's postmorten press conference, Jaguars owner Shahid Khan spoke quite candidly about the possibility of still moving on from Baalke this offseason. He was asked if the incoming head coach wanted other changes to the organization on the condition he took the job, such as improving the medical staff and the front office. Khan responded by saying that this theoretical point is credible.

The funniest part in all this is he said this in the same Zoom call with Baalke sitting right beside him.

Of the five NFL head-coaching vacancies, Jacksonville would be the most attractive without Baalke.

Shahid Khan puts Trent Baalke back on hot seat after press conference

Of the five teams with head-coaching vacancies, only one seems to be going about this in the right manner. That would be the New York Jets, the team with the longest active playoff drought streak by a country mile. Ownership is still a massive issue there, but firing former head coach Robert Saleh mid-season before eventually parting ways with general manager Joe Douglas was the right call.

For whatever reason, NFL owners are more inclined to give a general manager a second shot of collaborating with another head coach than the other way around. One is in charge of building the team, while the other is in charge of executing on Sunday. Well, what if the ingredients are less than stellar or hopelessly stale? A bad coach sets a team back a year or so, while a bad GM does worse...

If Khan were to come to his senses and realize he might have the best head-coaching job available by simply moving on from Baalke, that would be huge for Jacksonville. While the Houston Texans seem to have their stuff together, the Tennessee Titans are far more chaotic than even Jacksonville. And do not get me started on the Indianapolis Colts who still decide to employ Chris Ballard for some reason.

At the end of the day, the Jaguars have enough talent on the football field to be competitive as soon as next year. They were thought to be a playoff contender this past season, but failed massively because of Trevor Lawrence's stunted growth as a quarterback, as well as an increasingly porous defense. Baalke has made a few great picks, but as soon as Pederson was gone, he had to go, too.

There is still time for Khan to correct this, but out of pride, I am not sure that he is going to do so.