Another NFL staffer is moving to the college GM level. After Ron Rivera, Andrew Luck and Michael Lombardi landed on this tier in the ever-changing college game, the Eagles will lose one of their execs to such a post.
Dave Caldwell is leaving Philadelphia for Florida, with ESPN.com’s Jeff Darlington reporting the former Jaguars GM will head back toward that region to become the Gators’ GM. Florida has since announced the hire.
Best known for his time in Jacksonville, Caldwell has been with the Eagles since 2021. Howie Roseman appointed his former GM peer as a senior personnel director. Roseman, who is a Florida alum, named him to that post in June 2022. The Eagles lost four staffers to NFL assistant GM jobs that offseason, and Caldwell helped fill the void. This earned him a Super Bowl ring.
The Jags fired Caldwell before the 2020 season ended, canning HC Doug Marrone soon after. While Jacksonville’s next move proved to be a misstep — the disastrous Urban Meyer hire — Caldwell’s operation had bottomed out by 2020, when the Jags went 1-15. Caldwell helped build the 2017 Jags roster — one that went 10-6 and nearly qualified for Super Bowl LII — but the team could not find steady success in his tenure.
Brought over from Atlanta in 2013, Caldwell hired Gus Bradley as HC and watched the Jags finish 15-49 in his first four GM seasons. The franchise’s 2014 Blake Bortles pick at No. 3 overall in 2014 came to define this period. Rather than can Caldwell, Shad Khan brought in Tom Coughlin to oversee him as executive VP. After a grievance-filled tenure, Coughlin was out by December 2019. Caldwell remained GM during the Coughlin tenure, but he reassumed his place atop the front office hierarchy in 2020.
The Gators finished 4-8 this season and have changed coaches. Linked to now-LSU leader Lane Kiffin, the SEC program hired Tulane’s Jon Sumrall as its new HC. Like Rivera (Cal), Luck (Stanford) and Lombardi (North Carolina), Caldwell will play a lead role in allocating money to players — as the Gators look to both retain talent and pay for replacements via traditional recruiting and through the transfer portal — in this complex era for the sport.
Why show him in a Jags shirt ???
Caldwell, despite that record, honestly wasn’t that bad a GM. He was tasked with getting the Jaguars picks, and he did-of course he got fired just in time for Baalke and Meyer to be the ones who got to spend them. Caldwell built an uber talented defense and a decently talented offense for a short period of time that his successors couldn’t replicate, so for that he does deserve credit. At the end of his tenure, it felt inevitable that he was going to be fired (especially after Baalke slid into that front office to be the presumptive successor) but he still set up the next regime right with a ton of draft capitol at his own expense.
I felt that Caldwell would have done a better job with those picks than the successive regime, despite his win-loss record’s glaring deficiencies (Marrone, while not awful, also wasn’t a coach that really elevated your team, either). This is an interesting hire to make on an administrative level, though. It’ll be interesting to see how many more managers follow in Caldwell’s footsteps.
He whiffed badly on the offensive skill positions. His receiver pick, Blackmon, drank himself out of the league, and he drafted him after he had already had multiple DUIs. The Bortles pick is self-explanatory, and then the Fournette pick, which was probably more on Coughlin who was stuck in a 1990s mentality of the NFL. He also didn’t do well with their offensive line. He nailed most of the defensive picks though, starting with Jalen Ramsey.
Fair points. I’ll give him credit for Fournette, though, because he was good for a short time and was at least serviceable afterward. Not saying that that pick couldn’t have gone in a more beneficial direction, but hey. Bortles had his moments, but he also unfortunately went to the Winston school of turnovers for touchdowns that ultimately ended his chance to build on his 2017 season.
I think that there was plenty of reason to fire Caldwell. I also think that what they did after him was much, much worse than what they did under him. I’d be intrigued enough to give him a shot, from a fan’s perspective.