Jaguars Fan’s Perspective From Outside Jacksonville

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I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and are preparing for a blow-out New Years Eve. The beauty of the holidays is getting together with family, some from out of town. I was talking with my brother, who lives near Atlanta, and we eventually got on the subject of the Jaguars. My brother moved to Georgia fifteen years ago but was a Jags season ticket holder for their first six years. He kept them even after moving to guarantee his seat whenever he was able to come down for a game. He was that big of a Jag fan. He is constantly surrounded by Atlanta Falcons signs, media, and merchandise, but remains loyal to his Jags.

During our conversation, he expressed that this was a particularly difficult year to follow the Jags. Of course, I was ready to rip into him about being a fair weathered fan and how you don’t turn your back just because of a few off years. What he then talked about was something that I can’t believe I overlooked and is the main reason the Jags are absent from the national radar.

First of all, aside from the Thursday night nationally televised game against the Texans, the Jags were completely absent from my brother’s television the entire football season. Makes it pretty hard to keep up your teams progress. But that is something I would have suspected.

What I didn’t think about was that even though my brother paid to have the “NFL REDZONE” channel, he saw very little of the Jags still. That is because the Redzone pretty much only shows scoring. Many times they won’t go to a game unless a team is in the proverbial red zone. As Jag fans can attest, we saw very little scoring, let alone offense, in the first half of the season. For most of the season, the only time the nation saw the Jags was when the opposition was scoring.

My brother and I are also rabid fantasy football players. Another thing that warrants keeping up with a team is owning players from that team on your fantasy squad. Unfortunately, if you owned  Jag players this year, your fantasy season wasn’t very satisfying. What’s worse, I bet fantasy players from out of Jacksonville took Jag players even less. That means even less national focus on the Jags.

Long story short. I love Gus Bradley. Great guy. Appears to be a good coach. Definitely appears to be a wonderful motivator. What I need, along with the Jags team management, is for him to be more than a defensive guru. I agree that a good defense can win you a lot of games. But a good offense gets national coverage. I feel with 100 percent confidence that our defense is playing well enough that a better offense would have given us at least an 8-8 record this year. I hope offense is a high priority going into 2014. It needs to be.

I hope everyone has a wonderful new year and thank you Jimmy for a great article subject.