JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Since the end of the 2019 season, the Jaguars have traded Calais Campbell, A.J. Bouye and Yannick Ngakoue. All three played in at least one Pro Bowl in a Jaguars uniform.
So on Monday, when they waived Leonard Fournette after trying all offseason to trade the running back, it left the team with just six starters remaining from the AFC championship game team of 2017. In less than three years, the Jaguars have gone from minutes away from the Super Bowl, to a team looking like a raft floating in a hurricane.
No rudder, no direction and no chance.
Fournette produced a solid season in 2019. He certainly bounced back from a sophomore slump in 2018. The fact that no team in the league was willing to part with a draft pick in exchange for Fournette tells you all you need to know about how highly valued the running back position is in the NFL. If you aren’t great, you’re just a guy. And you can draft a guy in the late rounds, or sign an undrafted rookie to run the ball in the pass-happy modern NFL.
Fournette was the first draft pick by Tom Coughlin after he rejoined the franchise as the executive vice president of football operations. Coughlin used the fourth overall pick on a workhouse to carry the load and score touchdowns. In 2019, Fournette scored three touchdowns.
But it’s not the departure of Fournette as an individual move that has so many observers shrugging their shoulders when asked to explain the plan. It’s everything the Jaguars have done in the past year.
Since the end of the season, the Jaguars have cleared more than $76 million in salary cap space. According to OverTheCap.com, the Jaguars will spend the least money on the active roster this season and have the second-most salary cap space in the league.
Here’s what general manager Dave Caldwell said earlier this preseason about the plan for this year:
Fine. To Caldwell’s credit, he has amassed draft picks, 12 of them used this past April and 10 more to be utilized next year. But he has to choose the right players.
“I don’t think it’s fair to the guys in the locker room. I don’t think it’s fair to the Jaguars’ fans,” News4Jax sports analyst Mark Brunell said. “I just wish we had some clarity as to what the plan is. Because it’s so bad that ... do you really expect that in three years it’s going to be that much better. I do not. Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but things do not look good right now.”
Maybe the plan is that knowing there can only be 25% of capacity in the stands this year due to COVID-19 restrictions, that the Jaguars’ revenues will suffer anyway. So what if you have a team that isn’t competitive. With fewer than 17,000 fans allowed in the stadium for games, it doesn’t matter if you are 16-0 or 0-16, ticket revenue is going to be what it is.
So why not tank?
It’s a word that immediately forces players to bristle at the thought. No player is going to tank this season. Players must constantly prove that they belong in the NFL. Even star players.
But ownership? That’s another story. If Shad Khan gave Dave Caldwell the go-ahead to clean house and hit the reset button, then that’s putting a lot of faith in a guy who hasn’t delivered winning rosters on a consistent basis. In fact, there has been only one winning team since Khan purchased the club.
“Every team that I’ve ever been on in the NFL 19 years, every year it’s the same one goal at the beginning of the year. ’We are here to win a championship,’ and I just don’t understand how the Jacksonville Jaguars — if that’s the goal, which it absolutely should be reset, rebuild or not,” Brunell said. “Your job is to go win a championship. How did these players and the fans look around and say, ’Well, how are we going to do that? We’ve lost so many good young players.’”
Two of the top picks in next April’s draft are expected to be Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence and Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields. If the Jaguars wind up with a top-three pick, they’ll likely take a quarterback. Many mock drafts already had the Jaguars taking Lawrence with the first pick. And that was before the Ngakoue trade and waiving Fournette.
If the Jaguars brass is looking forward to the future, that doesn’t leave much hope for the present.
“It really rubs me wrong,” Brunell said. “I find it hard to understand how they can say that they want to win games and yet, you know a lot of these players are just not there anymore.”