Okay, I am going to be perfectly honest with you. On Saturday night, when Jeanne told me I would be writing for the awesome black and teal blog, I had kind of already started drafting a piece in my head that defended David Garrard’s performance. You know, no quarterback can perform under that kind of pressure, It’s takes a startling amount of accuracy to beam your receiver in the head, in the end zone, from thirty yards away, even if he can not, in fact catch swine flu at a bacon farm in Mexico. It didn’t occur to me that he would actually come out and have a fantastic game, and that the Jags would score their first win of the season in heroic fashion.

Garrard looked really sharp out there. There were a few balls batted down at the line of scrimmage that gave me cause for concern, but that was the only negative I could find. Now, on the long list of positives, we can go into his accuracy, his protection of the ball, his startling consistency, which is something that has been missing from the career of David Garrard from the get go, but has anyone else noticed this guy’s pocket presence has improved by leaps and bounds since he became a starting quarterback? I can still see in my head Garrard trying to take off as the pocket collapses only to fall right into James Harrison or Keith Bulluck. There were times over the past couple years where it never looked like he had any idea where the pressure was coming from, and although he was mobile, the blind-running usually resulted in a sack, or just having to give up and throw the ball away. I started to notice in the second half of the Arizona game last week that David has gotten much better at extending the play and finding ways to deliver the ball on the run.

However, being able to deliver the ball doesn’t really help you if you keep insisting on throwing the ball five yards shy of the first down marker on third down. Watching that gave me fits over the last couple of games, it seemed a pretty rote formula. Third and long, short completion, stuffed, punt. Thankfully, I didn’t see any of that against Houston today, and save for a couple hiccups in the first half, the Jags were actually real efficient on third down.

The ball was also spread around well, with a lot of success. It was nice to see a receiver not named Torry coming down with catches over the middle and at the sidelines. The artist formerly known as Mike Walker had a big game, (apologize all of you who wanted to cut him during pre-season! You know who you are!) as did newly-activated rookie Mike Thomas, who could be the next Steve Smith. (Yeah, you just read that.)

It was nice to see this Jaguar youth movement show some real progress. Although Eben Britton was mysteriously absent, Eugene Monroe was a big part of keeping the Texans sack-less, Terrance Knighton may be emerging as our best run-stuffer, and Derek Cox is near the ball on literally every play. In Gene we trust, and maybe, just maybe, we can hold off on some of those ‘Draft Tebow’ bumper stickers, huh? What do you say?