The Blake Bortles bet of the Jaguars has failed dramatically



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There was briefly a case for Blake Bortles. You had to squint and you could not think about it for a long time, but it was there. It was in 2017, a season that seems to have occurred 100 years ago. It was that year that the Buffalo Bills qualified for the playoffs a few months before they became a national success. fivethirtyeight said the boom was going on, despite the biggest boom ever seen. The Jaguars won with a quarter-hole, the last season in which this was possible. Nick Foles won the Super Bowl. We will explain the events of 2017 in the same way that we explain how crash won the best picture in 2006: it was enough to be there. With the right defense, the right salary cap number, a flawless execution of everyone around him, sureBortles might be enough. What is beyond doubt is that the time has passed and the Jaguars are finding themselves with Bortles with a big salary and no quarter plan. The decision to bring him back this season on a new contract was dated almost immediately. The NFL apparently changed overnight and was no longer a league in which Bortles could take a team to less than a quarter of the Super Bowl quarter. In 2018, the Jaguars appeared to be racing a Formula 1 race with a Ford Explorer.

Bortles was elected Monday for the benefit of Cody Kessler. Coach Doug Marrone said, "I'm making this change to give us the opportunity to win a football game," which is remarkable since Kessler probably does not do it any more than Bortles, making it a remarkable gesture instead of a functional soccer shot. . Let's stop it: Kessler is not good, but it's not Bortles.

It's probably the end of a brief and unfortunate period, which began nine months ago when Bortles signed a three-year contract that marked the Jaguars' commitment. Add to that their total lack of interest in competing with Bortles: no Teddy Bridgewater, not even A.J. McCarron – and you begin to understand where it all went wrong. In a season of rugby teams, where the Rams, Saints and Vikings pushed their chips in the middle of the table by stacking the stars, the Jaguars went down with a 59% success rate. 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 this season – they are now 3 to 8 after the loss to Josh Allen and the Bills in the worst case scenario – and thought Bortles should return in 2019. He would have $ 16.5 million in dead money next year if it was cut. Bortles offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett was fired on Monday. Bortles is the third such coordinator since arriving in 2014. There are other problems in Jacksonville – the defense is tied for eighth after finishing second last year. Jalen Ramsey, one of the best half-defenders of football in 2017, looks deadly in 2018. They are riddled with injuries. The Bortles plan only worked if everything was as perfect in 2018 as in 2017, a ridiculously flawed plan in a league where nothing lasts long. It is not the fault of Hackett or Bortles that the defense is not so good; it's the fault of the Jaguars to have designed a team where the attack was doomed if the defense regressed a little. Bortles was in bitcoin, a brilliant trend at the end of 2017 that looked like something viable. Check the value of either now.

If you are not familiar with Bortles, as impossible as it may seem, he is the former third choice of the 2014 draw. He has become the target of jokes from various sources, ranging from Ted Cruz at the popular NBC sitcom The right place. He has never been a good quarterback. His career numbers put it all together with David Carr, Joey Harrington, Trent Dilfer and Mark Sanchez. What he has been, in the spots, is a guy who could do just enough to mount a historically good defense to win. Looking back, it seems like a bad decision to commit to the quarterback that was proof that you could win with a bad quarterback. He was throwing the balloon as little as possible and it was job. The Jaguars not only fled with AFC South, but Bortles started throwing the ball more often without flipping it back. It's too loud to say that it looked good, but it looked extremely good for weeks. The Jaguars won two playoff games and should have defeated the Patriots in Foxborough in the World Cup title game with a 20-10 lead in the fourth quarter.

If you're looking for evidence of the importance of quarter-time play, feel free to check out all the games in NFL history. The most recent example is that of the 2018 Jaguars, which wasted the considerable talent of their team by experimenting with the idea that the position can be eliminated from the game. In doing so, they probably closed the door on one of the the most promising championship windows of the NFL. They spent $ 50 million for just their defensive line this season, nearly $ 1.5 million more than any other NFL team. They have registered more free agent signatures than any other team recently, but they have spent so much that they probably have a limited championship window. Soon, they will have to start losing talent for cape space, which has again been constrained by their shift plan. Talent without alignment is not a strategy.

There were worse quarterbacks than Bortles; he did not invent the fact of being bad, but he could be the most frustrating of recent times. The Jaguars did not fetch Patrick Mahomes or Deshaun Watson because they wanted to create a game around Bortles. They spent on Khalil Mack, Mike Evans, Odell Beckham Jr. and Aaron Donald, among others, to iron it. There are dozens of hypothetical scenarios with Jaguars and, basically, they all include being better than they are right now.

The Jacksonville defense was probably the most fun unit of 2017. Calais Campbell, A.J. Bouye and Jalen Ramsey were among the best at their post all year. The Jaguars have always been good during the last year of defense maybe really counted. The last four playoff teams of last year were in the top five rating defenseThis is the first time since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. Of the four most dominant teams of the season – the Rams, Saints, Chiefs and Patriots – none are ranked in the top 10 in defense.

There are 22 quarterbacks with a smuggler rating over 90 in 2018, double the number of five years ago, the season leading up to Bortles' entry into the league. There were three in 1993. This was the year the Jaguars drove with Bortles. Even in the low season, Bortles was ahead for more yards than Terry Bradshaw never thrown forso there are periods in the history of the NFL in which Bortles would be passable as a starting quarterback. This is not one of them. If you want to wear Bortles on a list, you must consider the possibility that it will not succeed. It's obvious when you see his misplaced passes and despite his success at UCF and his high draft status, he just does not have that talent. The Jaguars signed up for the extension, in part because they were already paying him $ 19 million as part of his fifth-year option, which helped reduce the number of caps reached this year . But they could have made a better backup. They could have written a quarterback. They could have signed a larger receiver better than Donte Moncrief for $ 7 million. Bortles failed and people around him failed. This is how you reach 3-8 10 months after you have almost done the Super Bowl.

Prior to last season's playoffs, I had spoken to Bortles' family, friends, teammates, and now sacked Hackett, and I felt that Bortles did not care about all from the criticism thrown at him. Everyone saw the jokes, and everyone cared except Bort. His father told me that he "would like" to visit some of his son's critics, and Blake did not know and told him not to go. Criticism will not falter now. Bortles is going to get scammed because he did not play well and it's certainly fair, but it's worth asking what Tom Coughlin was. Make with Bortles in the first place. The Bortles plan was still flawed. The Jaguars have drawn lessons from last season, one of the strangest in memory Blake Bortles is still a joke, and it deserves, but avoid laughing for those who put him in this position.

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