Former 49ers GM has to be on hot seat amid Jaguars' epic early failures

Remember Trent Baalke? The former 49ers general manager seems to have run the Jaguars into the ground early in 2024.

There probably aren't too many San Francisco 49ers fans out there who wish their team's former general manager, Trent Baalke, was back in town.

And that's not hyperbole. The number might be counted on one hand.

Now at the helm of the Jacksonville Jaguars roster, a position he's held since 2021, Baalke finds his team off to a disastrous 0-3 start, capped off by a 47-10 demolishing at the hand of the Buffalo Bills in Week 3.

The Jags' offensive line is a mess, quarterback Trevor Lawrence appears to be broken and awfully few of Baalke's roster moves have panned out as desired. Jacksonville has scored just 40 points on the season, third worst in the league, and the defense is a bottom-five unit as well.

All this, despite Baalke luring in former Niners defensive tackle Arik Armstead last offseason, a player the former originally drafted in Round 1 back in 2015.

Comically enough, Baalke's team now finds itself last in many an NFL power ranking, undercutting even the lowly Carolina Panthers.

Jaguars head coach Doug Pederson, who at least has a Super Bowl ring to his name, is already on the hot seat and could be the first coach dismissed this season despite (relatively) turning things around in the years since the disastrous Urban Meyer era.

But Baalke has to be feeling the heat, too.

Trent Baalke appears to have ruined Jaguars, not unlike how he ruined the 49ers

Hop on social media, and you won't find a shortage of complaints about Baalke's whiffs down in Duval County.

Like this one:

However, much like how he survived the tumultuous 2014 season out in San Francisco when the front office was at odds with then-head coach Jim Harbaugh, Baalke's new task might be to survive Pederson on the employment front.

That'd involve being in Jags owner Shad Khan's favor, of course.

Yet it's hard not to distinguish the problems in Jacksonville by simply pairing Baalke with Pederson's lack of success, which leads many to believe Khan will dismiss both head coach and general manager at some point between now and the end of the regular season.

It wouldn't be unlike what Baalke experienced in 2016 after surviving the Harbaugh saga, only to find himself dismissed when the 49ers fired one-and-done head coach Chip Kelly after what was a two-win season that year.

Two massive failures with two different teams in less than a 10-year span has to be disastrous for Baalke, and many probably wondered how he even got the Jaguars job after what went down in the Bay Area less than a full decade ago.

If anything, the Jags are learning what the Niners already knew.

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