The Jaguars Are Dangerous as They March Into the Playoffs

Jacksonville is young, fun and dangerous as it heads into wild-card weekend, and you shouldn’t assume this team will stop there.

All it took for the Jaguars to clinch a playoff spot Saturday was, essentially, the karmic reversal of the Myles Jack wasn’t down play from the 2017 AFC championship game. This time, Josh Allen’s scoop-and-score was the deciding play in a 20–16 win over the Titans to claim the AFC South in prime time. It was a game that lived up to its dour billing, with all the flare of a fireworks show for pets with sensitive hearing.

There were two offensive touchdowns. No quarterback had a rating over 100. Derrick Henry averaged fewer than four yards a carry, but still ran the ball 30 times anyway. Travis Etienne averaged 2.4 yards a carry and vanished like a political tweet someone made in college.

For these reasons, one might feel content in erasing this one from memory and choosing to mentally simulate wild-card weekend, which will see the Jaguars hosting a playoff game despite being 3–7 not terribly long ago.

Lawrence improved in his second season, along with the coaching and talent around him :: Bob Self/Florida Times-Union/USA TODAY Network

But we here at The MMQB choose to stand by our take from a few weeks ago. The Jaguars are dangerous. The Jaguars are disruptors. The Jaguars will be a factor in the tournament. If you were watching closely enough, Saturday proved as much. See you all in the divisional round.

This potential is not just because of the extraneous details; that they are a team on a mission from the football deities to punish and lampoon every aspect of the Urban Meyer era in Duval. No one forgets that Meyer had to defend himself from allegations ranging from kicking a player to not being quite so sure who Aaron Donald was. Certainly no one in the building takes this for granted, understanding that Meyer’s film, best practices and general life ethos all needed to be exterminated in the way one must eviscerate bed bugs.

This belief is not just because the team is extraordinarily young and fun. It is not just because, after every good play, we get to watch the team’s general manager, Trent Baalke, vigorously shake chief football strategy officer (and son of owner, Shad) Tony Khan in the press box. It is not just because their fan base is wild and free. It is not just because there is something heartwarming about Doug Pederson, the man who delivered Philadelphia its only Super Bowl before getting blindsided a few short years later with his pink slip, getting to be the one who fit all the pieces together.

Let’s start with the obvious: Saturday was not Trevor Lawrence’s best game, and the Jaguars beat one of the best-coached teams in football anyway. While we aren’t going to be as critical of Lawrence as Troy Aikman, who treated the second-year quarterback like a spelling bee parent in the booth, Lawrence clearly missed a touchdown throw, high-pitched a reverse and short-armed another potential touchdown pass thanks to some interior pressure by Jeffery Simmons.

From Thanksgiving until Saturday’s Titans game, Lawrence had completed nearly 70% of his passes for 1,567 yards, 11 touchdowns and two interceptions. Against the Titans, he still completed almost 2% of his passes above expectation, according to NFL’s NextGen Stats. His last month and a half isn’t necessarily a heater by modern quarterback standards, but it is a significant enough library of data to lead us to believe that he’d be better against a much softer Chargers defense a week from now.

The Jaguars managed to needle out enough offense to eliminate a 10-point deficit, which, against a team that deploys Henry and a mobile quarterback, can often feel like a death sentence. They also managed to stymie Henry, whom the Titans ran almost exclusively as a pace-setter on first downs throughout the second half to make life easier for Josh Dobbs. On only four of those first-down carries did Henry log five yards or more.

Defensively, they logged 13 quarterback hits, which gives them a total of 41 in their last four games, dating back to when they stunned the Cowboys to legitimize this run in the first place.

At the very least, all of this overlays well against a potential matchup with the Chargers, whom the Jaguars are most likely slated to face next weekend (though it could also be the Ravens). Los Angeles is another team that is dependent on run success and vulnerable when its quarterback gets knocked around. The last time Lawrence faced a Brandon Staley defense he went 28-of-39 for 262 yards and three touchdowns, in a 38–10 Week 3 win.

While so much of Jacksonville’s late-season run seems to have been a compilation of plays like that game-winning defensive touchdown, eventually one has to resign themselves to the fact that this can stop being coincidental when it has been so replicable. On a near endless loop on the broadcast Sunday, we were told that Pederson predicted this very moment inside a dejected locker room in Kansas City just nine short weeks ago. Evidently, he saw all of what we’re seeing now, both the extraneous and the tangible.