Doug Marrone Folds'm: Takes Assistant Gig With Jacksonville Jaguars

Life is one big gamble. You're constantly making bets about yourself as well as others and trying your best to at least break even. Doug Marrone thought he had a pretty good hand when he opted out of that Buffalo Bills contract. Despite walking away mid-rebuild, his resume looked good to NFL executives and his reputation appeared to be rock-solid in those same circles. Anyone with a brain who actually looked at where he took Syracuse Orange football and what he was in the midst of doing with the Bills, instead of just saying "durrrr, he went 25-25, durrrr," could see that he knows how to get a football team moving in the right direction.

With a host of NFL head coaching vacancies coming, including one with the New York Jets, I thought it was a solid bet at the time, especially considering Doug makes $4M in 2015 no matter what.

What Marrone didn't count on, or didn't see coming, was the trail of bad blood, jilted exes and broken promises in his past that all came back to haunt him at once (not to mention a spectacular, seemingly-personal witch hunt by one New York reporter). Marrone's public perception was scorched and his reputation in NFL circles appeared to dry up as well.

The Jets gig went away. The Broncos opportunity got weird. No one else seemed interested, though it sounded like at worst Marrone could parlay his friendship with Bill O'Brien into a consultant gig with the Texans while he rode out the bad press.

So it's a bit of a surprise to find out that he's taking a job as the assistant head coach on offense and offensive line coach with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Not only that, it appears that earlier reports he interviewed to be the team's next offensive coordinator were wrong. He had, in fact, interviewed to be the OL coach only. That means there was a brief chance that, had the Jags hired Nate Hackett, Marrone would have suddenly worked for the guy who worked for him the past five years.

Marrone went all-in on finding a better head coaching opportunity with a full house and apparently life blinded him with a straight flush.

I mean, that's how bad everything broke for Marrone. He could have done NOTHING this year, collected $4M and tried again next season. Instead, he probably figured it would be better to eat a ton of crow, take a gig that's lower on the totem pole than when he was with the Saints, and basically re-make his entire reputation from scratch.

Talk about a bad bet.