wmc540
Pro Bowler
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Jaguars OC Nathaniel Hackett fired - plus the Battle of the Bortles
- Thread starter Prime Time
- Start date
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- Name
- Peter
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- #23
Not necessarily. Bortles isn't much better than Mannion and yet we would all collectively freak out if something happened to Goff. Otherwise it's just the system and not the QB running it.
sjm1582002
Wanted everywhere but welcome nowhere
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2014
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Bortles had his team leading the Pats in the 2017 AFC championship game midway through the 4th Qt.
His stats in that game were equal to Brady's.
What's Mannion ever done but look exceedlngly slow of foot and mind?
I'd cut Mannion yesterday if we could somehow replace him with Bortles.
- Joined
- May 8, 2014
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- 40,404
I don't think Hackett is a strong OC. But damn, talk about being set up to be scapegoated. OL injuries, inconsistent QB in Bortles, more injuries even to guys like Fournette. They didn't have a chance tbh.
Good thing for Jags fans is upgrading from Hackett won't be hard.
Good thing for Jags fans is upgrading from Hackett won't be hard.
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- Name
- Peter
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- #27
https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/11/26/n...-nathaniel-hackett-blake-bortles-jeff-driskel
By ALBERT BREER
There were three issues with the Jaguars offense to speak of coming out of the team’s 11th game. First, there was lack of consistency in execution—the playcalls going into the huddle simply weren’t being run as they were drawn up, which could be a result of communication or a revolving door at certain spots, and that manifested in small mistakes all over the place compounding.
Second, the team has been decimated by injuries, with seven linemen, four tight ends, the team’s top receiver and its top two running backs among the afflicted. And third, the quarterback hasn’t taken steps forward. So the team pulled the plug on Monday on both OC Nathaniel Hackett and QB Blake Bortles.
I spoke to Hackett in the aftermath, and he was respectful of the call that Doug Marrone (who he’s worked with for the last nine years) made. “I’m grateful to them for giving me the opportunity just to have a chance to call plays,” Hackett said. “We had a great run last year, being in that AFC Championship, getting there and being so close.
I mean, we were supposed to win four or five games, we lose [Allen Robinson] in the first game, it was awesome. … Looking back at it, there were things that hurt us with the injuries, but you have to find a way to overcome it. Unfortunately we couldn’t finish games the way we’d have liked. The truth is, my head’s still kind of spinning here.”
Last season Bortles survived an August benching to get Jacksonville to the AFC title game and score a big extension, so you never say never. But it sure seems this would be it for the Jaguars quarterback, with the team staring down a very tenuous cap situation in 2019. So the logistics of releasing Bortles? The team still has about $6.5 million in guarantees to account for, which can be offset by whatever another team might be willing to pay him.
There’s also $10 million in dead money, on top of that guarantee, to bring the total to be accounted for, if he’s released, to $16.5 million, which is only $4.5 million less than the $21 million cap number he’s scheduled to carry next year if he is on the team. As for the new starter, going to Cody Kessler is likely as much about being able to sell the locker room on its quarterback and giving the team a spark as anything.
By ALBERT BREER
There were three issues with the Jaguars offense to speak of coming out of the team’s 11th game. First, there was lack of consistency in execution—the playcalls going into the huddle simply weren’t being run as they were drawn up, which could be a result of communication or a revolving door at certain spots, and that manifested in small mistakes all over the place compounding.
Second, the team has been decimated by injuries, with seven linemen, four tight ends, the team’s top receiver and its top two running backs among the afflicted. And third, the quarterback hasn’t taken steps forward. So the team pulled the plug on Monday on both OC Nathaniel Hackett and QB Blake Bortles.
I spoke to Hackett in the aftermath, and he was respectful of the call that Doug Marrone (who he’s worked with for the last nine years) made. “I’m grateful to them for giving me the opportunity just to have a chance to call plays,” Hackett said. “We had a great run last year, being in that AFC Championship, getting there and being so close.
I mean, we were supposed to win four or five games, we lose [Allen Robinson] in the first game, it was awesome. … Looking back at it, there were things that hurt us with the injuries, but you have to find a way to overcome it. Unfortunately we couldn’t finish games the way we’d have liked. The truth is, my head’s still kind of spinning here.”
Last season Bortles survived an August benching to get Jacksonville to the AFC title game and score a big extension, so you never say never. But it sure seems this would be it for the Jaguars quarterback, with the team staring down a very tenuous cap situation in 2019. So the logistics of releasing Bortles? The team still has about $6.5 million in guarantees to account for, which can be offset by whatever another team might be willing to pay him.
There’s also $10 million in dead money, on top of that guarantee, to bring the total to be accounted for, if he’s released, to $16.5 million, which is only $4.5 million less than the $21 million cap number he’s scheduled to carry next year if he is on the team. As for the new starter, going to Cody Kessler is likely as much about being able to sell the locker room on its quarterback and giving the team a spark as anything.
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- Peter
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- #28
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/...ville-jaguars-blake-bortles-nathaniel-hackett
Blake Bortles’s Benching Is Too Little, Too Late
Hours after firing its offensive coordinator, Jacksonville announced it will start Cody Kessler on Sunday, seemingly admitting that the Bortles experiment is over
By Danny Heifetz
The Jaguars announced on Monday that they are benching Blake Bortles, ending Jacksonville’s bizarre, years-long run of propping up the league’s worst starting quarterback rather than admitting that Bortles was three children in a trench coat the whole time.
Cody Kessler will replace Bortles for the second time this season and start against the Colts on Sunday, according to the team. Bortles was removed from the Jags’ Week 5 game against the Chiefs after fumbling twice but was reinstalled as the starter the following week.
This latest move, which comes just hours after the team fired offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett and replaced him with quarterbacks coach Scott Milanovich, has a better chance of becoming permanent. But it’s likely too little and too late for the 3-8 Jaguars, who have missed the boat on their 2018 season, and maybe their title window too.
Had anyone running Jacksonville looked themselves in the mirror, there were plenty of moments in the past five years when the Jaguars could have admitted to themselves that Bortles would never reach the promise he brought as the third overall pick in 2014. He threw 69 touchdowns and 51 interceptions in his first three years, but the team was so uncompetitive that only five of those 69 touchdowns came while the Jaguars were ahead in a game.
Bortles was so bad during this stretch that an NBC comedy decided it would be funny to make one of the dumbest characters in television history Bortles’s biggest fan. The QB’s mechanics were so bad that he changed his throwing motion entering 2017. Let me say that again: At 25 years old and with three NFL seasons under his belt, Bortles needed to change the way he threw a football. Despite that glaring, neon warning sign, the Jags decided after the 2016 season to pick up Bortles’s fifth-year option for the 2018 season for $20 million.
The new mechanics didn’t help. Before last season, Bortles almost lost the quarterback competition to Chad Henne, cornerback Jalen Ramsey was liking Instagram posts about replacing Bortles with a better QB, and his receivers wanted him to “get this shit in bounds, bro.”
View: https://twitter.com/PewterReport/status/897473291950186496?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E897473291950186496&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theringer.com%2Fnfl%2F2018%2F11%2F26%2F18113329%2Fjacksonville-jaguars-blake-bortles-nathaniel-hackett
In 2017, the Jaguars went 10-6 and made the AFC championship game despite Bortles, not because of him. Their game plan was best described as trying to play quarterbackless football, and Hackett needed every trick in the book to get the Jags within one ticky-tacky pass interference call on A.J. Bouye of a berth in the Super Bowl.
A wrist injury after the 2017 season meant Bortles’s 2018 money would’ve become fully guaranteed if he couldn’t pass a physical before the new league year, so to maintain flexibility and save some cap space in 2018, the team extended Bortles for three years and $54 million ($26.5 million guaranteed) in February.
Nearly nine months to the day later, Bortles was benched, and Hackett, who was an imperfect coordinator but worked near-miracles with Bortles last year, was fired, as this year’s squad ranks 28th in points scored after coming in fifth in 2017.
“I guess the football gods had it out for me,” Hackett told NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport on Monday morning.
Jacksonville’s elite 2017 defense has been exposed this year as simply elite at protecting leads rather than playing wire-to-wire defense, but it’s still one of the most talented defensive groups in football. The Jaguars also have a strong offensive line; three quality running backs in Leonard Fournette, Carlos Hyde, and T.J. Yeldon; and solid young receivers in Keelan Cole, Donte Moncrief, and Dede Westbrook.
But the team is all but eliminated from the 2018 postseason, and things will be even harder for Kessler after the team announced All-Pro guard Andrew Norwell will land on injured reserve. A lot of their core players are set for free agency or significant raises soon, but neither Bortles nor Kessler is likely to be the answer in 2019 or beyond. This puts Jacksonville in a fresh purgatory: Every aspect of the team is built to compete now, except for the quarterback position, which isn’t competitive at all.
Blake Bortles’s Benching Is Too Little, Too Late
Hours after firing its offensive coordinator, Jacksonville announced it will start Cody Kessler on Sunday, seemingly admitting that the Bortles experiment is over
By Danny Heifetz
The Jaguars announced on Monday that they are benching Blake Bortles, ending Jacksonville’s bizarre, years-long run of propping up the league’s worst starting quarterback rather than admitting that Bortles was three children in a trench coat the whole time.
Cody Kessler will replace Bortles for the second time this season and start against the Colts on Sunday, according to the team. Bortles was removed from the Jags’ Week 5 game against the Chiefs after fumbling twice but was reinstalled as the starter the following week.
This latest move, which comes just hours after the team fired offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett and replaced him with quarterbacks coach Scott Milanovich, has a better chance of becoming permanent. But it’s likely too little and too late for the 3-8 Jaguars, who have missed the boat on their 2018 season, and maybe their title window too.
Had anyone running Jacksonville looked themselves in the mirror, there were plenty of moments in the past five years when the Jaguars could have admitted to themselves that Bortles would never reach the promise he brought as the third overall pick in 2014. He threw 69 touchdowns and 51 interceptions in his first three years, but the team was so uncompetitive that only five of those 69 touchdowns came while the Jaguars were ahead in a game.
Bortles was so bad during this stretch that an NBC comedy decided it would be funny to make one of the dumbest characters in television history Bortles’s biggest fan. The QB’s mechanics were so bad that he changed his throwing motion entering 2017. Let me say that again: At 25 years old and with three NFL seasons under his belt, Bortles needed to change the way he threw a football. Despite that glaring, neon warning sign, the Jags decided after the 2016 season to pick up Bortles’s fifth-year option for the 2018 season for $20 million.
The new mechanics didn’t help. Before last season, Bortles almost lost the quarterback competition to Chad Henne, cornerback Jalen Ramsey was liking Instagram posts about replacing Bortles with a better QB, and his receivers wanted him to “get this shit in bounds, bro.”
View: https://twitter.com/PewterReport/status/897473291950186496?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E897473291950186496&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theringer.com%2Fnfl%2F2018%2F11%2F26%2F18113329%2Fjacksonville-jaguars-blake-bortles-nathaniel-hackett
In 2017, the Jaguars went 10-6 and made the AFC championship game despite Bortles, not because of him. Their game plan was best described as trying to play quarterbackless football, and Hackett needed every trick in the book to get the Jags within one ticky-tacky pass interference call on A.J. Bouye of a berth in the Super Bowl.
A wrist injury after the 2017 season meant Bortles’s 2018 money would’ve become fully guaranteed if he couldn’t pass a physical before the new league year, so to maintain flexibility and save some cap space in 2018, the team extended Bortles for three years and $54 million ($26.5 million guaranteed) in February.
Nearly nine months to the day later, Bortles was benched, and Hackett, who was an imperfect coordinator but worked near-miracles with Bortles last year, was fired, as this year’s squad ranks 28th in points scored after coming in fifth in 2017.
“I guess the football gods had it out for me,” Hackett told NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport on Monday morning.
Jacksonville’s elite 2017 defense has been exposed this year as simply elite at protecting leads rather than playing wire-to-wire defense, but it’s still one of the most talented defensive groups in football. The Jaguars also have a strong offensive line; three quality running backs in Leonard Fournette, Carlos Hyde, and T.J. Yeldon; and solid young receivers in Keelan Cole, Donte Moncrief, and Dede Westbrook.
But the team is all but eliminated from the 2018 postseason, and things will be even harder for Kessler after the team announced All-Pro guard Andrew Norwell will land on injured reserve. A lot of their core players are set for free agency or significant raises soon, but neither Bortles nor Kessler is likely to be the answer in 2019 or beyond. This puts Jacksonville in a fresh purgatory: Every aspect of the team is built to compete now, except for the quarterback position, which isn’t competitive at all.
sjm1582002
Wanted everywhere but welcome nowhere
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2014
- Messages
- 965
Somebody is going to get themselves a very capable backup QB next year.
"The success has carried over into the 2018 season: The Jags have started out 3-1, and have already exacted revenge on the Patriots, winning 31-20 on the back of a 376-yard, four-touchdown performance from Bortles."
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/10/4/17934536/good-place-jaguars-blake-bortles-michael-schur
"The success has carried over into the 2018 season: The Jags have started out 3-1, and have already exacted revenge on the Patriots, winning 31-20 on the back of a 376-yard, four-touchdown performance from Bortles."
https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/10/4/17934536/good-place-jaguars-blake-bortles-michael-schur
TexasRam
Legend
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- 7,991
Here in Dallas, Jerry Jones is about to repeat the Blake Bortles mistake with Prescott.
Hey, we know you generally sucked as a QB the last two years but you had some really solid games toward the end of the year, so here is a load of cash we want to give you since we now know you are a great QB.
Hey, we know you generally sucked as a QB the last two years but you had some really solid games toward the end of the year, so here is a load of cash we want to give you since we now know you are a great QB.
Ramlock
Here we f’n go, baby!
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2014
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- 5,075
- Name
- Ramlock
Someone give me a call when “quality running back” Leonard Fournette plays 4 quality quarters per game.
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- Jan 14, 2013
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A strong OL? Their OL is pretty terrible due to injuries. I think they're missing three of their five starters and two of their backups.
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- Peter
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- #33
https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/...rtles-benched-jacksonville-jaguars-ineptitude
The Jaguars’ Blake Bortles Bet Failed Spectacularly
Bortles has become an easy punchline, but save some laughter for the franchise that bet its future on him. The Jags believed they could build an NFL contender around a bad QB. It didn’t take long to prove the folly of that plan.
By Kevin Clark
There was, briefly, a case for Blake Bortles. You had to squint and you couldn’t think about it for long, but it was there. It was 2017, a season that feels like it happened 100 years ago. It was the year that produced a Buffalo Bills’ playoff berth months before they became a national punchline. FiveThirtyEight declared the passing boom over despite the biggest boom ever coming just around the corner.
The Jaguars won with a hole at quarterback, the last season in which that was possible. Nick Foles won the Super Bowl. We’ll explain the events of 2017 in the same way we explain how Crash won best picture in 2006: You just had to be there. With the right defense, the right salary cap number, flawless execution from everyone around him, sure, Bortles could suffice. What is beyond doubt is that the moment is passed and the Jaguars are left with Bortles on a big salary and no plan at quarterback.
The decision to bring him back as starter this season on a new contract was dated almost immediately. The NFL changed seemingly overnight and was no longer a league in which Bortles could take a team to within a half-quarter from the Super Bowl. In 2018, the Jaguars look like they showed up to a Formula 1 race with a Ford Explorer.
Bortles was benched on Monday in favor of Cody Kessler. Coach Doug Marrone said “I’m making this change to give us an opportunity to win a football game,” which is notable since Kessler probably doesn’t do that any more than Bortles, making this a statement move instead of a functional football move. It’s saying: Kessler is not good, but he’s not Bortles.
This is probably the end of short, unhappy era, one that started nine months ago when Bortles signed a three-year deal that signaled the Jaguars’ commitment. Couple this with their total lack of interest in bringing in competition for Bortles—no Teddy Bridgewater, not even A.J. McCarron—and you start to realize where this all went wrong.
In a season of teams going all in, where the Rams and Saints and Vikings pushed their chips in the middle of the table by stacking stars, the Jaguars went all in on the guy with the 59 percent completion percentage. In a year dominated by Jared Goff, Patrick Mahomes II, and Drew Brees, the Jaguars are a team out of step with modern football and it shows.
It’s hard to imagine the Jaguars looking at this season—they are now 3-8 after a worst-case-scenario loss to Josh Allen and the Bills—and thinking Bortles should come back in 2019. He’d have $16.5 million in dead money next year if he was cut. Bortles’s offensive coordinator, Nathaniel Hackett, was fired on Monday, the third such coordinator Bortles has seen fired since his arrival in 2014.
There are other problems in Jacksonville—the defense is tied for eighth in scoring defense after finishing second last year. Jalen Ramsey, one of the best cornerbacks in football in 2017, looks mortal in 2018. They are riddled with injuries. The Bortles plan only worked if everything was as perfect in 2018 as it was in 2017, a ludicrously flawed plan in a league where nothing lasts long.
It is not Hackett or Bortles’s fault that the defense isn’t as good; it’s the Jaguars’ fault that they designed a team where the offense was doomed if the defense regressed even a little bit. Bortles was bitcoin, a bright trend at the end of 2017 that looked, against all odds, like something viable. Check either’s value now.
If you are unfamiliar with Bortles—impossible as that may seem—he’s the former third overall pick of the 2014 draft. He’s become the butt of jokes from a variety of sources, ranging from Ted Cruz to the popular NBC sitcom The Good Place. He has never been a good quarterback. His career numbers lump him in with David Carr, Joey Harrington, Trent Dilfer, and Mark Sanchez. What he has been, in spots, is a guy who could do just enough to ride a historically good defense to wins.
In hindsight it seems like a bad decision to commit to the quarterback who was proof that you could win with a bad quarterback. He was throwing the ball as little as possible and it was working. The Jaguars not only ran away with the AFC South, but Bortles started throwing the ball more without turning it over. It is too strong to say he looked good, but he looked extremely not bad for weeks at a time. The Jaguars won two playoff games and should have beaten the Patriots in Foxborough in the AFC title game, blowing a 20-10 fourth-quarter lead.
If you’re looking for evidence that quarterback play matters, feel free to consult basically any game in the history of the NFL. The most recent example is the 2018 Jaguars, who have wasted their franchise’s considerable roster talent by experimenting with the idea that the position can be smoothed out of the game. In the process, they’ve probably shut the door on one of the most promising championship windows in the NFL.
They spent $50 million on just their defensive line this season, almost $1.5 million more than any team in the NFL. They hit on more free agent signings than just about any team in recent memory, but they spent so much that they probably have a limited championship window. Soon they will have to start shedding talent for cap space, which has been constrained further by their quarterback plan. Roster talent without a quarterback isn’t a strategy.
There have been quarterbacks worse than Bortles; he did not invent being bad, but he might be the most frustrating in recent times. The Jaguars didn’t draft Patrick Mahomes or Deshaun Watson because they wanted to build a running game around Bortles. They passed on Khalil Mack, Mike Evans, Odell Beckham Jr., and Aaron Donald, among others, in order to draft him. There are dozens of what-if scenarios with the Jaguars and basically all of them include being better than they currently are.
Jacksonville’s defense was probably the most fun unit of 2017. Calais Campbell, A.J. Bouye, and Jalen Ramsey were among the best at their position all year. The Jaguars were historically good in perhaps the last year defense truly mattered. The final four teams in last year’s playoffs were in the top five in scoring defense, the first time that’s occurred since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. Of the four most dominant teams of this season—the Rams, Saints, Chiefs, and Patriots—none rank in the top 10 in scoring defense.
There are 22 quarterbacks with a passer rating over 90 in 2018, double the number from five years ago, the season before Bortles entered the league. There were three in 1993. This was the year the Jaguars were rolling with Bortles. Even in a down season, Bortles was on pace for more yards than Terry Bradshaw ever threw for, so there are periods in NFL history in which Bortles would be passable as a starting quarterback. This is not one of them.
If you are going to carry Bortles on a roster, you have to entertain the possibility he won’t work out. This is obvious when you see some of his errant passes and—despite his success at UCF and his high draft status—that he’s simply not that talented. The Jaguars signed him to the extension in part because they were already paying him $19 million as part of his fifth-year option and it helped lower his cap hit this year.
But they could have brought in a better backup. They could have drafted a quarterback. They could have signed a wide receiver better than Donte Moncrief for $7 million. Bortles failed and the people around him failed. That is how you get to 3-8 10 months after almost making the Super Bowl.
Before last season’s playoffs, I spoke with Bortles’s family, his friends, his teammates, and the now-fired Hackett and came away with the impression that Bortles did not care about any of the criticism levied at him. Everyone saw the jokes, and everyone cared except Bortles. His father told me he’d “love” to visit some of his son’s critics and Blake would shrug it off and tell him not to go.
The criticism is not going to let up now. Bortles is going to get ripped because he didn’t play well, and that’s certainly fair, but it’s worth asking what Tom Coughlin was doing with Bortles in the first place. The Bortles plan was always flawed. The Jaguars learned the wrong lessons from last season, which was one of the weirdest in memory. Blake Bortles is a joke again, and that’s deserved, but save some laughter for the people who put him in this position.
The Jaguars’ Blake Bortles Bet Failed Spectacularly
Bortles has become an easy punchline, but save some laughter for the franchise that bet its future on him. The Jags believed they could build an NFL contender around a bad QB. It didn’t take long to prove the folly of that plan.
By Kevin Clark
There was, briefly, a case for Blake Bortles. You had to squint and you couldn’t think about it for long, but it was there. It was 2017, a season that feels like it happened 100 years ago. It was the year that produced a Buffalo Bills’ playoff berth months before they became a national punchline. FiveThirtyEight declared the passing boom over despite the biggest boom ever coming just around the corner.
The Jaguars won with a hole at quarterback, the last season in which that was possible. Nick Foles won the Super Bowl. We’ll explain the events of 2017 in the same way we explain how Crash won best picture in 2006: You just had to be there. With the right defense, the right salary cap number, flawless execution from everyone around him, sure, Bortles could suffice. What is beyond doubt is that the moment is passed and the Jaguars are left with Bortles on a big salary and no plan at quarterback.
The decision to bring him back as starter this season on a new contract was dated almost immediately. The NFL changed seemingly overnight and was no longer a league in which Bortles could take a team to within a half-quarter from the Super Bowl. In 2018, the Jaguars look like they showed up to a Formula 1 race with a Ford Explorer.
Bortles was benched on Monday in favor of Cody Kessler. Coach Doug Marrone said “I’m making this change to give us an opportunity to win a football game,” which is notable since Kessler probably doesn’t do that any more than Bortles, making this a statement move instead of a functional football move. It’s saying: Kessler is not good, but he’s not Bortles.
This is probably the end of short, unhappy era, one that started nine months ago when Bortles signed a three-year deal that signaled the Jaguars’ commitment. Couple this with their total lack of interest in bringing in competition for Bortles—no Teddy Bridgewater, not even A.J. McCarron—and you start to realize where this all went wrong.
In a season of teams going all in, where the Rams and Saints and Vikings pushed their chips in the middle of the table by stacking stars, the Jaguars went all in on the guy with the 59 percent completion percentage. In a year dominated by Jared Goff, Patrick Mahomes II, and Drew Brees, the Jaguars are a team out of step with modern football and it shows.
It’s hard to imagine the Jaguars looking at this season—they are now 3-8 after a worst-case-scenario loss to Josh Allen and the Bills—and thinking Bortles should come back in 2019. He’d have $16.5 million in dead money next year if he was cut. Bortles’s offensive coordinator, Nathaniel Hackett, was fired on Monday, the third such coordinator Bortles has seen fired since his arrival in 2014.
There are other problems in Jacksonville—the defense is tied for eighth in scoring defense after finishing second last year. Jalen Ramsey, one of the best cornerbacks in football in 2017, looks mortal in 2018. They are riddled with injuries. The Bortles plan only worked if everything was as perfect in 2018 as it was in 2017, a ludicrously flawed plan in a league where nothing lasts long.
It is not Hackett or Bortles’s fault that the defense isn’t as good; it’s the Jaguars’ fault that they designed a team where the offense was doomed if the defense regressed even a little bit. Bortles was bitcoin, a bright trend at the end of 2017 that looked, against all odds, like something viable. Check either’s value now.
If you are unfamiliar with Bortles—impossible as that may seem—he’s the former third overall pick of the 2014 draft. He’s become the butt of jokes from a variety of sources, ranging from Ted Cruz to the popular NBC sitcom The Good Place. He has never been a good quarterback. His career numbers lump him in with David Carr, Joey Harrington, Trent Dilfer, and Mark Sanchez. What he has been, in spots, is a guy who could do just enough to ride a historically good defense to wins.
In hindsight it seems like a bad decision to commit to the quarterback who was proof that you could win with a bad quarterback. He was throwing the ball as little as possible and it was working. The Jaguars not only ran away with the AFC South, but Bortles started throwing the ball more without turning it over. It is too strong to say he looked good, but he looked extremely not bad for weeks at a time. The Jaguars won two playoff games and should have beaten the Patriots in Foxborough in the AFC title game, blowing a 20-10 fourth-quarter lead.
If you’re looking for evidence that quarterback play matters, feel free to consult basically any game in the history of the NFL. The most recent example is the 2018 Jaguars, who have wasted their franchise’s considerable roster talent by experimenting with the idea that the position can be smoothed out of the game. In the process, they’ve probably shut the door on one of the most promising championship windows in the NFL.
They spent $50 million on just their defensive line this season, almost $1.5 million more than any team in the NFL. They hit on more free agent signings than just about any team in recent memory, but they spent so much that they probably have a limited championship window. Soon they will have to start shedding talent for cap space, which has been constrained further by their quarterback plan. Roster talent without a quarterback isn’t a strategy.
There have been quarterbacks worse than Bortles; he did not invent being bad, but he might be the most frustrating in recent times. The Jaguars didn’t draft Patrick Mahomes or Deshaun Watson because they wanted to build a running game around Bortles. They passed on Khalil Mack, Mike Evans, Odell Beckham Jr., and Aaron Donald, among others, in order to draft him. There are dozens of what-if scenarios with the Jaguars and basically all of them include being better than they currently are.
Jacksonville’s defense was probably the most fun unit of 2017. Calais Campbell, A.J. Bouye, and Jalen Ramsey were among the best at their position all year. The Jaguars were historically good in perhaps the last year defense truly mattered. The final four teams in last year’s playoffs were in the top five in scoring defense, the first time that’s occurred since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. Of the four most dominant teams of this season—the Rams, Saints, Chiefs, and Patriots—none rank in the top 10 in scoring defense.
There are 22 quarterbacks with a passer rating over 90 in 2018, double the number from five years ago, the season before Bortles entered the league. There were three in 1993. This was the year the Jaguars were rolling with Bortles. Even in a down season, Bortles was on pace for more yards than Terry Bradshaw ever threw for, so there are periods in NFL history in which Bortles would be passable as a starting quarterback. This is not one of them.
If you are going to carry Bortles on a roster, you have to entertain the possibility he won’t work out. This is obvious when you see some of his errant passes and—despite his success at UCF and his high draft status—that he’s simply not that talented. The Jaguars signed him to the extension in part because they were already paying him $19 million as part of his fifth-year option and it helped lower his cap hit this year.
But they could have brought in a better backup. They could have drafted a quarterback. They could have signed a wide receiver better than Donte Moncrief for $7 million. Bortles failed and the people around him failed. That is how you get to 3-8 10 months after almost making the Super Bowl.
Before last season’s playoffs, I spoke with Bortles’s family, his friends, his teammates, and the now-fired Hackett and came away with the impression that Bortles did not care about any of the criticism levied at him. Everyone saw the jokes, and everyone cared except Bortles. His father told me he’d “love” to visit some of his son’s critics and Blake would shrug it off and tell him not to go.
The criticism is not going to let up now. Bortles is going to get ripped because he didn’t play well, and that’s certainly fair, but it’s worth asking what Tom Coughlin was doing with Bortles in the first place. The Bortles plan was always flawed. The Jaguars learned the wrong lessons from last season, which was one of the weirdest in memory. Blake Bortles is a joke again, and that’s deserved, but save some laughter for the people who put him in this position.
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sjm1582002
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Trash Bortles all you want.
He'd be a massive upgrade as a backup QB for most any team and few more so than the Rams.
Mannion has been in the league for three years now and has earned so little playing time he has yet to throw a td pass.
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hahaha How many backups earn playing time to throw touchdowns? Those that play behind bad or injured QB's. I am by no means saying Mannion is good. But to depend on Bortles from what he's shown us? Yeah that's a sure fire way to lose games hence why he's getting benched for the ultra talented Cody Kessler!
OntarioRam
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I agree with this. The problem is he isn't being paid like a backup, nor was he drafted to be one. He's always been viewed through the lens of a starter, and not unfairly so.
sjm1582002
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Unlike the Ram's backup qb, the Jax's backup qb actually has earned playing time over his three year career and thrown 7 td's passes.
Imagine that.
Trashing Bortles is not going to make the Rams dire backup qb situation any better.
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And trashing Mannion isn't going to make Bortles any better! Fun game that isn't it.
And lets see how did Kessler get playing time? Oh right because he was backup to Bortles and Josh McCown. Hey there's something to hang your hat on. You might have mistaken why I'm even discussing anything in this thread. Because Bortles sucks. He sucks as bad as Mannion. Bortles just had the fortune to be massively over drafted and under coached. Doesn't make him any better or worse than Mannion you can spin it however you want but Blake is a bust and not very good. Sorry that think think I like Mannion for some reason but neither one deserves to start in the NFL with what we've seen from them.
sjm1582002
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No better huh?
Bortles = 17,500 yards passing @59% ----- 103 TD's ---- 74 ints
Mannion = 235 yards passing @62% ---------0 TD's -------- 1ints
Comical to even compare the two.