JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Jaguars spent all offseason trying to fix the mistakes, change the culture and clean things up. They wanted to make sure the issues that plagued them during a miserable finish wouldn’t carry over into a new year.
Jacksonville couldn’t have been more wrong. The Jaguars are teetering on the brink of yet another forgettable season. They’re 1-5 following Sunday’s 35-16 blowout loss to the Bears. The Patriots and another rookie quarterback in Drake Maye are up next in London at Wembley Stadium. With how poorly the team has performed, not even that game against a 1-5 New England team feels like a guarantee.
Recommended Videos
Head coach Doug Pederson is answering weekly questions on his job security. Veteran receivers can’t hang on to the football. The defense is arguably the league’s worst.
Things aren’t getting better.
Safety Andre Cisco told Action Sports Jax in the locker room following the game that he felt there was “a lot of quit” on the field during the loss to Chicago.
A veteran player saying that he noticed players not giving their all in the midst of a ruinous start isn’t what embattled head coach Pederson needed to hear. Pederson has preached trying to change the culture from a losing one to a winning one. That’s what he and general manager Trent Baalke stressed after last season’s collapse from 8-3 to 9-8 and a playoff miss.
For whatever reason, that lingering losing has carried on into 2024 and threatened to turn this into a lost season before even the halfway point. Cisco’s “quit” remark made the headlines, but the issues go deeper than just one game. Jacksonville should be preparing to celebrate the entry to a new era as NFL owners prepare to vote on the team’s Stadium of the Future on Tuesday in Atlanta. Instead, Cisco publicly expressed a very private matter, that players on the Jaguars have essentially given up on a season that already feels lost.
“I would like just to get some clarification from his side,” Pederson said. “Obviously it’s his observation, but I don’t think it was necessarily meant to harm anything or point a finger at anybody or anything like that. I think sometimes when you get in a game like yesterday, that sometimes is the feeling. We’ve been on the other side of that too, where we’ve had games where we felt like we’ve had that type of success, and you feel that way with your opponent. But again, I don’t think it was necessarily a finger-pointing.”
The season has gone from bad — losing to Miami on a walk-off field goal in Week 1 — to worse, the latest example being taken apart by rookie quarterback Caleb Williams and the Bears in Week 6.
Coordinator Ryan Nielsen’s man-heavy defense was expected to utilize liberal substitutions and rotations to keep players fresh. Instead, it has been a disaster. The defensive line, which was supposed to get a boost from second-round draft pick Maason Smith, fourth-rounder Jordan Jefferson and free agent signee Arik Armstead, hasn’t been good enough at pressuring quarterbacks.
Nielsen’s defense has been atrocious.
Jacksonville ranks last in passing yards per game allowed (276.7) and next to last in total yardage allowed (2,340), turnovers (3), average yards per game (390), points allowed (178) and points per game average (29.7).
Injuries haven’t helped. The team has lost starting cornerback Tyson Campbell to a hamstring injury and starting linebacker Foye Oluokun to a foot injury, but those losses shouldn’t cause the complete implosion of an entire unit.
Chicago and Buffalo have both run through Jacksonville’s defense like it wasn’t even there. Williams was a knee at the goal line away from throwing five touchdown passes in the fifth game of his NFL career. Josh Allen and the Bills put up 47 points on “Monday Night Football” against the Jaguars in a game that felt over before halftime.
That’s left Pederson to try and figure out why things in practice don’t translate to the field. In the first three weeks of the season, Jacksonville’s defense played well enough to win in losses to the Dolphins, Browns and Texans. It hasn’t since then.
“I wish I had a crystal ball to answer that question. … Then sometimes, too, in a game – I don’t know – I mean, listen, I’m not going to sit here and make excuses,” he said. “That’s the wrong thing to do, but that’s something we’ve got to figure out. We’ve got to figure that out together, honestly. Why that doesn’t always translate – it’s not all the time, but it is some of the time. And right now, the times that it doesn’t, the opponent has an explosive play, run or pass, and those are the moments that we’ve got to eliminate.”