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Does Urban Meyer picking the Jaguars mean Jacksonville is a better job than Texas?

Meyer could have had the Texas job had he wanted it. The Longhorns would have granted him anything to make it happen.

Urban Meyer is busy building a coaching staff. The University of Texas is doing likewise. Why those two are not the same thing makes for an interesting debate on the relative value of the best coaching jobs in the country.

Meyer, of course, could have had the Texas job had he wanted it. The Longhorns would have granted him anything to make it happen. Instead, he chose Door No. 2 — the Jacksonville Jaguars. And while Texas fans are happy in the early days of the Steve Sarkisian Era, it has to sting just a bit, doesn’t it?

You turned our money down? For the Jaguars?

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While Texas has had its own issues of late, Jacksonville has never reached the Super Bowl in its quarter century of football. It’s so wildly popular in Florida that it farms a home game out to London basically every year. It has none of the stadium revenue and extra trappings that give bigger-market teams — which is nearly everyone — advantages when it comes to manipulating the league’s salary cap and revenue sharing.

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The Jaguars do have some short-term advantages in terms of lots of money to spend this offseason and the ability to draft Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence with the first pick. He seems about as much a slam dunk as any quarterback coming into the league since, well, Andrew Luck. Maybe even a better dunk, now that we ponder Luck’s career. Lawrence had better be good, competing in the conference that has Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson, Baker Mayfield, Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert and Tua Tagovailoa all 25 or under.

The problem with debating whether Jacksonville is really a better job than UT is that Meyer is not an “everyman” type of coach. Having succeeded at Utah and won national titles at Florida and Ohio State, his college résumé was as complete as one can get. And his Ohio State background may have prompted him to view the Buckeyes as his ultimate coaching stop along that route.

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The NFL represents a new challenge. Boy, does it represent a new challenge. Just ask Nick Saban or Steve Spurrier or Chip Kelly or Bobby Petrino or Lou Holtz. You have the success stories, too — Jimmy Johnson and Jim Harbaugh are at the top of that chart — but the best college coaches are not accustomed to dealing with equal talent levels. Their recruiting skills allow them to play (depending on the school) six, seven, maybe eight college games a year where they just are not going to lose.

The draft, the salary cap and the NFL’s relatively small number of teams —32 compared with 65 “power five” schools this season — may not create the parity that Commissioner Pete Rozelle envisioned, but it’s much closer to a level playing field than Alabama and Vanderbilt will ever inhabit.

So Meyer has reasons to try the NFL as his final coaching experience, maybe even to succeed at the one thing that Saban pulled the plug on after two seasons in Miami.

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But does that make Jacksonville a better job than one of the top college gigs in the land? Many of you say yes. I would say hell no.

Put it this way. Saban wouldn’t leave Alabama for it. Brian Kelly wouldn’t leave Notre Dame for it. Lincoln Riley wouldn’t leave Oklahoma for it. Heck, Riley wouldn’t leave the Sooners for the Cowboys.

When you get one of the elite college jobs and you have mastered it to the degree that you’re winning league titles on a semi-regular basis, your salary is already close to the top of the NFL scale. Why leave those jobs for a roll of the dice simply because some see it as “the highest level?”

Of the seven NFL jobs that were open this offseason, four of the deposed head coaches lasted four years or fewer. Doug Pederson lasted five, and that was while winning a Super Bowl in Year 2.

That’s not to say Meyer has to worry about an early firing. Jacksonville will be thrilled to have him ... at least for a while. It’s the false perception that any NFL job is better than a top college job that I find to be silly. It’s not better in terms of job security, it’s not better financially and it’s not necessarily great for your brand, either.

Quick, name the three Jacksonville coaches who preceded Meyer. I’ll supply the answer in a moment.

But the other argument to be considered is how long Texas automatically remains an elite job. We think of it as such here while recognizing one national championship in 50 years is not exactly special. A 7-3 record in a pandemic-shortened season marked the first time Texas hasn’t lost four games since 2009. And the feeling that boosters have too much control may have even had Meyer looking away from Austin as any kind of answer.

For the next couple of years, it’s up to Sarkisian to bring a little of that Alabama magic to the Forty Acres and show Meyer all that he missed.

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That’s while Meyer is making people forget Doug Marrone, Gus Bradley and Mike Mularkey were ever there.

Find more Texas coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.