Jaguars give Mularkey the boot after just one season

JACKSONVILLE, Florida — The more Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan watched his team play, the more he realized one thing:

"We needed a rebuild from the ground up," Khan said.

So the Jaguars fired coach Mike Mularkey on Thursday after just one season, the worst in franchise history. The move came 10 days after Khan fired general manager Gene Smith.

Khan also introduced new GM David Caldwell on Thursday, and by parting ways with Mularkey, gave him a clean slate heading into 2013.

"I've always been a part of a winner," said Caldwell, who signed a five-year deal. "I've never been a part of a losing team."

But maybe the biggest news of the day came when Caldwell said New York Jets quarterback Tim Tebow, a Jacksonville native who starred at nearly Florida, is not in the team's plans.

"I can't imagine a scenario in which he'll be a Jacksonville Jaguar — even if he's released," Caldwell said.

Caldwell took slightly more time to decide on Mularkey.

Mularkey, who went 2-14 this season, became the eighth head coach fired since the end of the regular season. He looked like he would be one and done when Khan parted ways with Smith last week and gave Mularkey's assistants permission to seek other jobs.

Even though Khan ultimately hired Mularkey, Smith directed the coaching search last January that started and ended with the former Atlanta Falcons offensive coordinator.

"I felt like we needed a fresh start here," Caldwell said. "Coming in here as a first-time general manager, I'm looking for a co-builder of our team. When I talked to Shad in terms of a culture change along the football side, I felt like it was more of that. I felt like it was an atmosphere of change. I felt like that to do that, you've got to have a fresh start across the board."

Mularkey's brief tenure — he didn't even last a year — was filled with mistakes. His biggest one may have been his loyalty to Smith, who assembled a roster that lacked talent on both sides of the ball.

Mularkey probably stuck with Smith's franchise quarterback, Blaine Gabbert, longer than he should have. And the coach's insistence that the team was closer than outsiders thought and his strong stance that he had the roster to turn things around became comical as the losses mounted. The Jaguars lost eight games by at least 16 points, a staggering number of lopsided losses in a parity-filled league.

CLEVELAND — Rob Chudzinski's first head coaching job will be with the team he loved as a kid.

Chudzinski, who spent the past two seasons as Carolina's offensive coordinator, has been hired by the Cleveland Browns as their sixth full-time coach since 1999.

The Browns are hoping the first-time head coach can end years of despair and constant losing and maybe resurrect a franchise that has made just one trip to the playoffs in the past 14 years.

A Browns spokesman confirmed Chudzinski's hiring Thursday night and said he will be introduced at a news conference on Friday.

Chudzinski will be the Browns' 14th coach in team history. For the past two years, the 44-year-old has worked with talented Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.

Chudzinski has had two previous stints with the Browns as an assistant coach. He coached tight ends for Butch Davis in 2004, and then came back to the Browns in 2007 and was Cleveland's offensive coordinator for two seasons under Romeo Crennel.

Chudzinski grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where he pulled for the Browns. Chudzinski interviewed with the team on Wednesday, and was viewed by many to be a long shot for the job.

NEW YORK — When he ended his life last year by shooting himself in the chest, Junior Seau had a degenerative brain disease often linked with repeated blows to the head.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health said on Thursday the former NFL star's abnormalities are consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

The hard-hitting linebacker played for 20 NFL seasons with San Diego, Miami and New England before retiring in 2009. He died at age 43 of a self-inflicted gunshot in May, and his family requested the analysis of his brain.

"We saw changes in his behavior and things that didn't add up with him," his ex-wife, Gina, said. "But (CTE) was not something we considered or even were aware of. But pretty immediately (after the suicide) doctors were trying to get their hands on Junior's brain to examine it."

The NIH, based in Bethesda, Maryland, studied three unidentified brains, one of which was Seau's, and said the findings on Seau were similar to autopsies of people "with exposure to repetitive head injuries."

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