How Liam Coen went from UMass record holder to Jaguars coach

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- If it's possible to determine when Liam Coen first started thinking like a coach, it might date back to the fall of 1989.

Coen was a regular at his father's practices when Tim Coen was the head coach at South Kingstown High School in Wakefield, Rhode Island. To keep his son occupied during after-practice meetings with the coaches, Tim let Liam doodle on the chalkboard.

"One of the coaches looked down and said, 'Look at that,'" Tim Coen said. "And we look, and at the time we were running the wishbone when I first started, [Liam] drew 11 guys in a wishbone formation exactly where they were supposed to be.

"It was great."

Liam Coen was just 3 years old at the time, and it was one of the first signs that he was highly interested in football.

Now the Jacksonville Jaguars' first-time head coach, Coen has always been a football junkie. As a kid, he watched his dad's game films instead of cartoons and diagrammed plays instead of building with Legos. Hide and seek? He'd rather work on diving catches with his dad.

"That would go on and on," Tim Coen said. "He was like that golden retriever that you throw the ball to that doesn't stop."

Those practice days translated into Liam being named Rhode Island's 2003 Gatorade Player of the Year at La Salle Academy, setting the career records for passing yards (11,031) and passing touchdowns (90) at UMass Amherst, and embarking on a 15-year coaching career that includes stops at UMass, the University of Kentucky, the Los Angeles Rams and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

While the 39-year-old has jumped from coaching job to coaching job -- never spending more than three consecutive seasons at any stop -- he has developed a reputation as one of the bright offensive minds to come from the Sean McVay coaching tree. Now he's ready to establish his own team playbook and culture with the Jaguars using what he has learned along the way.

"He's just one of those guys that gets it," Tim Coen said. "He was a leader and a smart quarterback. He knew why we were running plays. It wasn't like he just knew the play. He knew the purpose of it."

LIAM COEN'S FIRST foray into the NFL was unofficial, but it was enough to get him focused on an NFL head coaching job.

Mark Whipple had been UMass' coach from 1998 to 2003 and recruited Coen, but Whipple left UMass to become the quarterbacks coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers before Coen arrived.

Seven years later, Whipple was the quarterbacks coach for the Cleveland Browns, and Coen -- who had kept in touch -- asked if he could visit and see what it was like to coach in the NFL.

Whipple took Coen to the Browns facility over a three-day visit and let him sit in on meetings and see how the Browns ran their offseason program. Coen loved it, Whipple said.

"He was just a worker [and] wanted to learn about the NFL and things of that nature," Whipple said. "I let him come into meetings and everything else in spring that spring, and it kind of catapulted him."

Whipple had been following Coen's career -- quarterbacks coach at Brown in 2010, passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Rhode Island in 2011, and quarterbacks coach at Brown again in 2012-13. And when UMass rehired Whipple in 2004, he hired Coen to become the Minutemen's pass game coordinator and quarterbacks coach.

Coen's ability to teach the offense and work with the quarterbacks impressed Whipple.

"I coached [six seasons] in the NFL and so we used stuff that I learned from Mike Holmgren and Andy Reid in the pass game," Whipple said. "He [Coen] just handled the quarterback room really well. I didn't really go in there and coach. I called the plays, but he handled that situation and taught [QB Blake Frohnapfel] the offense and just did a really, really good job."

Whipple said the players responded well to Coen because of his understanding of different offenses, his background as a quarterback, his straightforward approach and his genuineness.

"He's honest, first of all," Whipple said. "And then players can feel that good handle of balance in between the run and the pass, and he believes in both. And I think he stays on an even keel. But I just think he's a listener. He listened to his dad. He's listened to all the people he's worked with and taken things from all of them."

WHEN RAMS COACH McVay was looking for an assistant receivers coach to add to his staff in 2018, Rams tight ends coach Shane Waldron urged him to call the energetic, bright young coach he worked with while he was the offensive line coach at UMass in 2014-15.

McVay listened, met with Coen and hired him to help out receivers coach Eric Yarber. It didn't take long before McVay was impressed, and he stopped by Coen's office one evening to tell him that.

"He walks by my office, comes in, and he's like, 'Hey, man, you're doing a great job. I appreciate you being here. I'm really happy you're here,'" Coen remembered. "Then he was out. I was like, 'Oh, OK. You can be told you're doing a good job in this sport.' Because all the other places I'd been and how I'd grown up, it's like, you just do what you're told when you're told, and you don't do it because somebody's saying good job. You do it because you're a coach, and you've got a little bit more of a soldier mentality.

"It was just a different feeling. You're like, oh, OK, it's OK to tell guys, 'Hey, man, I love you.' It's OK to open up and be actually a human being, too. And so that was always the culture where you felt like, all right, I have to be at a high level while I'm here, but I can be myself."

That stuck with Coen throughout his three-year tenure with the Rams, with the last season spent as the assistant quarterbacks coach working with Jared Goff. Coen said that experience was "like getting my Ph.D. in coaching" because he learned a new way of being a leader from McVay.

"When I walked into that building in 2018, I had never felt anything like that before," Coen said. "Just the continuity, the positivity ... like, 'Man, how are you?' It actually really meant something. I just felt like [McVay] stepped in that building, he was truly himself every single day.

"... If everybody does that, good things typically happen, and you build good relationships, and that's what he's always done."

McVay also reinforced what Coen learned from his father and Whipple about the importance of an offensive system that creates confusion.

"I get to the Rams and I hear the exact word of the illusion of complexity: Same plays, but we're making them just look different [by using different formations, motions and misdirection]," Coen said.

He left the Rams in 2022 to take a playcalling job at the University of Kentucky. But he returned to Los Angeles one season later because McVay called again and asked him to replace Kevin O'Connell -- who was hired as the Minnesota Vikings' head coach -- as offensive coordinator. Coen has said that working with McVay again was an opportunity he couldn't pass up, even though McVay remained the playcaller.

The Rams went 5-12 that season in large part due to injuries to quarterback Matthew Stafford, receiver Cooper Kupp and defensive tackle Aaron Donald. Four quarterbacks started games for the Rams in 2022, including Baker Mayfield, who was claimed off waivers from the Carolina Panthers in December.

"Liam and I went through what was, I've talked about it before, the most challenging year that I've ever had in coaching," McVay said. "And at the time it was not fun, but I think we would both say so much growth occurred for us both having to go through some really hard stuff ... I know that was really hard on him, and I could have done a much better job of being the leader that our team but [also] he deserved as the offensive coordinator.

"We're a lot closer for having gone through it. It made us both stronger."

IN JANUARY 2024, Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles needed a replacement for offensive coordinator Dave Canales, whom Carolina had hired as its head coach. After interviewing seven candidates, he chose Coen, in part because of his previous relationship with Mayfield while they were with the Rams -- but also because of Coen's experience working with McVay.

Bowles was impressed with how thorough Coen was in explaining the offense he wanted to run and how he would adapt if it wasn't working.

"It's not just [scheme]," Bowles said at Coen's introductory news conference. "Everybody's going to have a scheme coming in. It's not the scheme that attracts you to him. It's understanding your scheme, and then if someone stops it, then what do you do? Can you think after that?

"And can you fit in as well with the players and the coaches and the culture we have on our team? And that takes a while to do. Unless you go through quite a few guys, you're not going to really know. You can guess, but once you go through all that, and once I went through that with Liam, I knew he was the right fit, so it was very easy to hire him."

Coen helped Mayfield put together the best season of his career -- 71.4% completions and 41 TD passes -- and improved the Bucs' ground game from the worst in the NFL to one of the best with help from a pair of rookies in center Graham Barton and running back Bucky Irving. Tampa finished fourth in the NFL in rushing (149.2 yards per game) one season after finishing last (88.8).

Before the 2024 season even began, Mayfield was praising Coen's scheme, particularly the freedom and options it provides the quarterback at the line of scrimmage. Mayfield said during training camp he never felt handcuffed at the line of scrimmage and always had an answer to what the defense was showing.

"Liam taught the game of football to all of our offensive guys and he helped me out tremendously with pre-snap adjustments and being able to eliminate and process information quickly," Mayfield said. "And so Trevor [Lawrence is] going to have a guy that's really going to grow into him and lean into that and help him out. And not just on the field but off the field."

Lawrence said the same thing after the Jaguars' first organized team activity on May 19.

"I really like [that the offense] has a lot of answers," he said. "It's great. I mean, it puts a lot on the players. You have to know your stuff, but it gives you all the answers. You don't feel like you're stuck in a play that's not set up for success.

"It's definitely unlike any system that I've learned before."

Jaguars center Robert Hainsey, who was a backup in Tampa Bay last season, liked the way Coen was willing to adapt to what the Bucs did well.

"One thing he does really well is he focuses on our strengths as players," Hainsey said.

"I think that's a huge characteristic for a football coach to have. You want to be able to listen to your players and put them in the best position to win."

NOW IN HIS first opportunity as a head coach, Coen knows how important establishing a culture is -- especially on a team that was lacking it previously. It's why he's using a 2010 University of California-Berkeley research study to help him do it.

A pair of scientists studied every team in the NBA over the course of the 2008-09 season and determined that the teams that had players who touched each other the most -- high-fives, pats on the back, hugs, etc. -- won the most.

Coen called it the power of touch and says it is a vital part of team chemistry.

"You just look at connection, and nowadays connection is so hard to actually create because so much of our lives are on a phone," Coen said. "Just having interpersonal conversations and also, just the old fist bump, the high-five, the chest bump -- that helps bring people together.

"Like as a kid when you were taught to celebrate. What did that look like? That's what we're ultimately trying to get to, is bringing the team together, bringing the coaching staff together to do something that ultimately, we've never done before."

Since making the postseason in four consecutive seasons from 1996 to 1999, the Jaguars have had pockets of success -- playoff appearances in 2005, 2007, 2017 and 2022 and back-to-back winning seasons twice (2004-05 and 2022-23) -- but nothing sustained. Only the Cleveland Browns (17) have had more seasons with double-digit losses than the Jaguars (15) since the 2000 season began.

Ahead of the 2025 season, Coen's priorities on the field are implementing his offense, improving the run game and getting Lawrence to play at a consistently high level. If the new head coach uses what he has learned since he was 3 years old, there's no reason the Jaguars can't return to competing for the playoffs.

"[Coen is a] really smart guy, knows how to communicate, has a great way about himself with the players," O'Connell said. "And I think that's just going to transition to him in this role. And as I've told him, it doesn't really matter how anybody else has done it, guys he's been around, whether it's Sean, myself, Todd [Bowles].

"He's got to go be himself and do it his way, and he'll have a lot of success if he does that."