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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- It was the day before his first draft as an NFL head coach, and Urban Meyer was standing on the deck of a Navy destroyer talking about misery.

"You have to embrace the misery of greatness," he told the dozens of young sailors arrayed before him on the USS Delbert D. Black. "It hurts. It's staring at a ceiling fan all night. Greatness is miserable. It's hard. Most of the time, people turn back. They grab their bag and go home."

This section of what would seem to be a standard motivational spiel has particular resonance in Jacksonville, where the football team and its fans know plenty about misery, but not much about greatness. Meyer, one of college football's most successful coaches but an NFL newbie, was hired by the Jaguars, heretofore one of the NFL's most anonymous, if inoffensive teams, to change that – to change everything, really.

Even before the biggest possible change was made when the Jaguars selected quarterback Trevor Lawrence with the first overall pick Thursday night, Meyer's work had begun and was noticeable in ways big and small. His challenge is straightforward, but not simple. Change a culture that had allowed the Jaguars to settle into mediocrity and irrelevance months before the team can even take the field, indeed before Meyer can even talk to most players face to face.

Shad Khan has owned the Jaguars for nearly a decade, and in that span the team is 41-106. Its one playoff appearance, in 2017, led to a stunning run to the AFC Championship Game, where the Jaguars led the Patriots with just 10 minutes to play before a catastrophic collapse cost them a trip to the Super Bowl and a whole lot of public respect. Every other season under Khan has ended with double-digit losses and has featured a conga line of quarterbacks – remember Jake Luton? – who have failed to seize the mantle of the franchise signal-caller.

Receiver D.J. Chark, one of the current players who gave t-shirts to fans at the draft-night party on Thursday, has played with six quarterbacks in three seasons in Jacksonville. He and Laviska Shenault said that last year, when the Jaguars shuffled between three starting quarterbacks, there were some game weeks when they didn't know who would be throwing them the ball as late as 24 hours before kickoff.

Lawrence, of course, is expected to change all that, which is why Jaguars fans were rooting for their own team's demise late last season, when they were in a neck-and-neck race with the New York Jets for the bottom of the barrel and the golden ticket to Lawrence. His imminent arrival, and Meyer's hiring, has juiced local interest in the team, and has focused some national attention on a franchise that has all too often been an afterthought.

According to the Jaguars, they saw a spike in new season ticket deposits in December, when they secured the first overall pick and then again when Meyer was hired in mid-January. The sales office has received eight times the number of new deposits compared to the last few seasons. Perhaps most important to the business side of the franchise, more than 50 percent of those deposit holders are completely new – they weren't even in the team's database for having purchased a ticket of any kind. And they are, on average, about 10 years younger than the existing season ticket base, indicating that the Meyer-Lawrence tandem is attracting a new generation of fans.

When Khan handed Meyer the keys to the Jaguars, the head coach who won three national titles at Florida and Ohio State went to work on virtually every part of the franchise. Meyer said he studied the Jaguars' culture for a month, talking to players about exactly how things were done in Jacksonville.

"Just saying there's bad players, that's not fair," Meyer said. "I don't agree with that at all. Certain organizations draft before others every year and they just don't win, so you can't blame the players. And I don't believe it's just bad coaching. I'm a big believer in culture and leadership and I found some things I felt we can make better."

Most prominently among them is sports performance, which Meyer said is the biggest change he has made in Jacksonville so far. He first became interested in it when he was a receivers coach at Colorado State in the early 1990s. He made his receivers run track, rationalizing that while he didn't know anything about coaching speed, the track coaches did.

Meyer emphasized sports performance throughout his college career, particularly at Ohio State, but it takes tremendous resources to hire the myriad of specialists used by top-level talent. NFL teams have the resources and Meyer intends to use them in Jacksonville. If players want dry needling and acupuncture, why shouldn't they have those practitioners available to them where they work, Meyer wonders. Why not offer the best possible setting and facilities, so players will want to stay in Jacksonville? Which is why players now have control of the music in the weight room, and why the shades in the room, which had been permanently down during past regimes, are now up.

"We have windows!" Chark said.

Meyer wants specialized workout and treatment and nutrition programs for each player. He talks a lot about maximizing each player, and he said that is how he will measure success early on, not in wins and losses. His inspiration is simple: He followed the careers of his best college players who went on to the NFL, and whose careers ended prematurely. He would ask them: What the heck happened?

"Coach, they don't take care of you," Meyer said his former players told him about the NFL. "An elite athlete needs to be treated like an elite athlete. It's like a sports car. You better take care of the sports car or it's going to break down. I always wondered why you see a 340-pound guard and they have the same weight coach working on him and the 174-pound corner. They can't be more different, their body structure, their mindset, the issues they deal with physically. If it's all the same, why doesn't the offensive line coach coach the corners? You can't do that."

An enormous part of Meyer's appeal to Khan is that he is something of a specialist in football reclamation projects. From Bowling Green to Utah, from the University of Florida to Ohio State, Meyer took over struggling programs and quickly turned them around. He has told his players that he finally understood greatness and what it takes to win a championship when he saw it up close at Florida.

Meyer was in his second season there when his friend Billy Donovan took the Gators basketball team to the NCAA Championship. It was a team with plenty of stars, but no selfishness. They had different scorers and were among the league leaders in assists. Meyer thought to himself that if he could get his football team to see what it takes – how the selfishness and laziness go away – to create a great team, they could win it all, too. He told his players to give him six months of the best they had, to commit themselves to greatness. The players were good enough, they just had to commit to it. Six months later, the Gators were football national champions.

Meyer remains close to Donovan, who is now the coach of the Chicago Bulls. Because he has had success in college and the pros, he has unique insight into what Meyer is about to attempt and he gave him some advice about a month ago.

"In college, you're getting very young players that anything you say, they're going to listen to you because they are young players," Meyer said Donovan told him. "These guys are pros. Don't undervalue the intelligence of a professional athlete. You don't get to become a pro unless you're very gifted, but it's much more than that. They're going to measure everything you say, they'll measure everything you do. So just make sure you and your staff are on point, because if you lose trust, it's over."

Meyer is one of three coaches, along with Pop Warner and Nick Saban, to win a major college football national championship at two universities. Winning a title in Jacksonville would make him part of an even more exalted fraternity – coaches who have won championships in college and the NFL, an exclusive list that includes Jimmy Johnson, Pete Carroll, Barry Switzer and the legendary Paul Brown, who, like Meyer, won at Ohio State before his Cleveland Browns dominated the pro football landscape.

That is a notably short list and NFL history is littered with the careers of college coaches who were much less successful in making the leap to the NFL. Even Saban, perhaps the greatest college coach in history, struggled in his time with the Miami Dolphins, before he left to create the Alabama dynasty.

The glaring difference: Saban searched unsuccessfully for a franchise quarterback. Meyer thinks he already has one.

"There's a history of NFL coaches (who haven't come from the college game) that don't do very well in the NFL, too," he said. "It's about even. A lot of coaches fail. It's a tough league. I hear 'Welcome to big-boy football.' I get it. I'm not arguing with you."

Meyer is brimming with confidence because of his success at evaluating, recruiting and developing players in college. But there are plenty of people in the NFL who will hear about Meyer's commitment to sports performance and roll their eyes. Didn't we hear a lot about Chip Kelly's personalized post-workout shakes when he first got to the NFL, too?

When Meyer first settled in, he asked his staff to find a comparable example of a team in NFL history that had the first overall draft pick, 10 picks in one draft, the league-leading amount of salary-cap space, plus a good core of young players. They couldn't find one, Meyer said.

The Jaguars are, quite literally, in an historic position. It is up to Meyer to replicate the rebuilds he used to dominate college football, using more resources than he has ever had, and produce historic results where few before him have succeeded.

"If he was doing exactly the same thing and it wouldn't be Urban Meyer, it wouldn't be as effective," Khan said. "We are defined by our track record. That was the amazing thing to me about the NFL – I had a life before it and I still do, but all my failures were never on the sports pages. This is the kind of business where everybody is more competent than you are. People have an opinion. The simple fact is Urban Meyer has street cred."

If the Jaguars are really going to emerge from misery to greatness this time, he's going to need it.