Jaguars GM James Gladstone on Jacksonville’s Big Leap Last Season

James Gladstone is not running from the rough patches of the Jaguars' 2024 season. He is using them.

The Jacksonville general manager joined the Rich Eisen Show and walked through what he saw on the field that told him the Liam Coen era was, in fact, taking hold programmatically. The honest answer started with the bumps.

"I think there was a lot of positive steps in totality. I think at the same time we definitely felt versions of adversity."

Gladstone walked through the sequence. Back-to-back losses. The London game against the Rams, where Coen and Gladstone both came up. A bye week reset where the staff strategized how to level up the back half of the season. Then more adversity. Travis Hunter injured during prep for Las Vegas. Brian Thomas Jr. injured in the Raiders game itself. A win that took every available body to grind out. The very next week, Jacksonville built a lead on Houston and surrendered it.

This is where the article writes itself, except Gladstone gave it a different name. "Anti-fragility."

Rich, mid-interview, started writing the phrase down. "Did you say anti-fragility? What does that mean?" Gladstone, pressed for a definition, kept it simple. "The opposite of fragile."

The data point that backs the buzzword is this. After that loss to Houston, the Jaguars won every regular season game the rest of the way. Rich made the contrast plain on the broadcast side. He had been in the pre-broadcast meetings in London where Coen warned about not shooting themselves in the foot, about not racking up so many penalties. The Rams game was one of the worst penalty games of the year for Jacksonville. Flying back from London, Rich admitted, he was unsure where this team went next.

Where they went was forward.

Gladstone credited the response, not the absence of pressure. "The fact that we were able to find our footing despite some of those adverse windows and bounce back in a real way and show some version of anti-fragility as a part of that as a collective group as a team. It was inspiring." Belief, he said, in what was being coached. Belief in what was being preached. Momentum that has carried into the early part of the offseason.

The Liam Coen layer matters here. Gladstone gave him direct credit, along with the coaching staff and the players, for the response. The lesson Gladstone keeps returning to is that those windows in a season are common. They show up in some shape every year. The question is whether the building can absorb the hit and produce a real bounce-back, not a polite one.

Jacksonville, in his view, did. And the carryover into 2026 is the part he is most interested in protecting.

The phrase will stick around for a while. So will the bar Gladstone just set. Versions of adversity will arrive again. The expectation now is that the response is the same.