The Jaguars have played two seasons’ worth of football since their surprise appearance in the 2017 AFC Championship Game, which was supposed to just the start for a team loaded with young talent on both sides of the ball.
Leonard Fournette, the last of those young stars that nearly brought the franchise to its first Super Bowl, was released on Monday morning, the team announced.
As it turns out, the 2017 run was the beginning of the end to the Jaguars’ brief time as NFL contenders. After starting the following season 3-1, the wheels fell off in a hurry. Blake Bortles, who had been seen as the weak link on the team was just one win away from the Super Bowl, imploded, throwing five interceptions in two blowout losses that dropped Jacksonville back to 3-3, including a comically ugly performance in Kansas City.
Blake Bortles' game against the Chiefs was basically a blooper reel. pic.twitter.com/gbSz9edD8o
— Steven Ruiz (@theStevenRuiz) October 8, 2018
The defense regressed — something NFL defenses tend to do — and was no longer able to carry a punchless offense. The Jaguars would win only two more games the rest of that 2018 season, finishing 5-11.
Bortles was eventually benched and then cut the following offseason. Naively thinking that they were just a quarterback away from getting back to the playoffs, the Jaguars (intentionally) overpaid Nick Foles before the 2019 season. The Super Bowl MVP was injured in the very first game and then played horribly upon his return, eventually losing his job to unheralded rookie Gardner Minshew.
At this point, it was clear: Those 2017 Jaguars were never coming back. The window had closed and the opportunity had been wasted as the team waited for Bortles to develop into a good quarterback.
It took less than a year for the most successful Jaguars team since the turn of the century to be stripped down. Jalen Ramsey was traded during the 2019 season. The team waited until the offseason to ship off A.J. Bouye and Calais Campbell for pennies on the dollar. Yannick Ngakoue’s time came over the weekend when he was traded to Minnesota and he was followed out the door by Fournette.
Fournette was the last big name from that 2017 team left on the roster, and now he’s gone. After his release, only 10 players remain from the team that made that playoff run three years ago, and you’ve probably never heard of any of them.
here's a list of the 2017 AFC South Division Champion Jaguars players still on the team pic.twitter.com/RwdWYw213j
— madebytim (@MadeByTim) August 31, 2020
The team’s confidence in Blake Bortles was the root cause of the team’s demise but Fournette was a constant reminder of that miscalculation. After Bortles had struggled in 2016, his third year as a pro, many pundits believed the Jaguars would be in the market for a quarterback during the ensuing offseason. Instead, GM Dave Caldwell doubled down on the quarterback he had drafted and decided to draft a running back over Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson.
Even if Forunette had lived up to the pre-draft hype and developed into a dominant running back, it would have been a mistake. A running back was never going to solve the team’s problems, while a franchise quarterback could have made up for a lot its flaws.
The 2017 run only strengthened the front office’s confidence in Bortles and led to another draft blunder. It was clear to everyone outside of Duval that he wasn’t good enough. That didn’t stop the front office from handing him a three-year extension that offseason, which gave the Jaguars an excuse to pass on Lamar Jackson late in the first round of the 2018 draft.
So instead of working on an extension for a young franchise quarterback this offseason, the Jaguars were left scrambling to find a team that would cough up a draft pick for the underachieving Fournette. They couldn’t find one and were forced to own up to the franchise-crippling mistake it had made three years ago.
[jwplayer T9dG2dyO-q2aasYxh]
