Press Taylor Sheds Light on Jaguars’ Recent Running Game Struggles

Despite a less than ideal recent performance, the first year offensive coordinator has a bright outlook for the group.

The rushing attack for the Jacksonville Jaguars has not looked pretty as of late. 

The unit struggled at times in their preseason bout with the Browns, but it was during Monday night’s practice that they really got exposed badly. As my colleague John Shipley put it, the Jaguars offense was bullied by its defense in the running game on Monday, leading to the question if it was good defense or bad offense.

Looking at this performance as an overall evaluation rather than an isolated event immediately brings into question the effectiveness the rushing attack will have against the defense of other teams. Offensive coordinator Press Taylor has made clear that hitting the panic button because of recency bias is a bit premature and with more practice and coaching, better results will follow.

“No. Again, that kind of comes down to scheming your opponent and being able to hit that,” Taylor said. “It’s not easy to get the run game going. There’s a lot of guys, there’s really 11 guys that have to be in sync with it. Different than the pass game. Pass game, maybe one or two guys gets open, the ball gets thrown and everything looks good, where in the run game you’ve really got to be a coordinated unit. 

"You really want to sync that up and talk about, all right, we’re putting this motion with this run; to have the defense respond this way, you’re going to be able to do this. Where maybe in the preseason you don’t quite as much time getting to do that and scheming your opponent, but I feel like we’ve had good success in practices of being able to run between the tackles whenever we’ve had some of those dialed-up runs.”

The peak effectiveness of this unit is predicated on the health of top backs James Robinson and Travis Etienne. Etienne has made it back to the field after a Lisfranc injury deprived him of his rookie season. After a long period of time on the shelf getting used to the speed of the game is an important factor to shake off the rust.

“Yeah, I don’t think it hurts definitely to get used to the speed of the game, get used to taking hits like that,” Taylor said. “Now, coach has done a great job of introducing these live periods, which they feel pretty close to games, so I think that has kind of introduced those guys to that speed and that physicality a little bit, and these games haven’t been as drastic of a change from practice.”

As for James Robinson, he is still working his way back from a season ending Achilles injury suffered in December of 2021. Though the running back is ahead of the curve in his recovery, and should be ready to go by week one, the Jags are still operating under an abundance of caution.

“Yeah, we just continue to work with whatever they tell us,” Taylor said. “So however much he’s able to do today. He’s limited; he’s not allowed in contact periods but he can do everything else, or he can be in this period, he’s going to wear the orange jersey. Each day we continue to work day by day with him and whenever he’s ready to go we’ll use him the best we can.”

All eyes will be on the Jaguars running back group as they head to Atlanta next week for joint practices. Getting continued exposure to opposing defenses is critical to telling whether these struggles are a fluke or a warning sign of things to come.

“Yeah those are huge,” Taylor said. “We really get a lot out of the joint practices of being able to control the environment, control the situation, but then see your guys really compete. It gets amped up a little bit when they’re going to go against a different opponent than they have regularly, so guys get fired up to do that, and just work through the whole process."

"It’s a good experience getting a chance to work with those, and a lot of it falls on the head coaches. If you go and have - - if you’re working with a team that they have a good culture in their building then you’re going to get a lot out of those practices.”