Trent Baalke: Jaguars Are ‘Not a Team That Needs To Be a Total Overhaul’
Don't expect an overhaul for the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2024.
2023 was certainly a disappointing season, with the 9-8 Jaguars wasting an 8-3 start and missing the playoffs with a disastrous Week 18 loss to the Tennessee Titans.
But despite that, the Jaguars are looking to reload, not rebuild.
“We’ve got a lot of needs. It’s not going to do me any good to sit up and here and tell the world what we view as our key needs. At the same time, we know what we need to do," Jaguars general manager Trent Baalke said on Thursday.
"Again, this isn’t a team that finished 2-15. We finished 9-8, one game out and it’s not good enough. I get that. It’s not a team that needs to be a total overhaul. There’s good players in that locker room. There’s good coaches in this building. There’s good personnel people. We have what we need in this building, we just got to add some more to it.”
The Jaguars have seemingly made most of the changes they were already going to make when they cleaned out the entire defensive coaching staff outside of three coaches. Jacksonville has since hired a new defensive coordinator in Ryan Nielsen and a number of defensive assistants.
In short, it appears as if the Jaguars are confident they diagnosed the issues that kept them out of the 2023 playoffs.
"You try to be as critical as you can be when you're looking at film, trying to identify exactly what you have, what went wrong, sometimes it's not just player related," Baalke said. "I'm not saying it's coach related, sometimes there are things going on outside the building that nobody's aware of that factors into a player's performance. There are so many things that go into success and failure, it's hard to sit up here and point to one thing.”
