Jacksonville Jaguars A Much More Complete Team Now

The Jacksonville Jaguars are 1-6 and deservedly so. While the team has played much better the past two weeks, it spent the first three weeks of the season finding itself and getting blown out again and again.

But the Jacksonville Jaguars are a different team today than they were at the start of the season.

The change didn’t take place immediately, but it coincides nicely with the rise of rookie quarterback Blake Bortles as the starter. The past three weeks have seen major improvement across all aspects of the team, especially on defense. While Blake Bortles doesn’t contribute on defense, it does seem that he has helped raise all boats and the entire attitude of the team has shifted since his arrival as the starter.

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With the improved play from the defense, the Jaguars have suddenly found themselves in contests that would have seemed far more difficult at the start of the season. The team hung with the Pittsburgh Steelers, should have won against the Tennessee Titans (but obviously didn’t), and beat a winning record team for the first time in over a season by knocking out the Cleveland Browns this past week. None of their past three opponents have gotten above 17 points.

Which leads me to a very telling statistic. Since Blake Bortles took up starting quarterback duties, the Jacksonville Jaguars have a point differential of just -5. Compared to the overall season point differential of -86 points, that is an amazing turnaround.

This team is playing better on offense, defense, and special teams. When analyzing the Jaguars going forward, we need to look at the “new” Jaguars since week four, compared to the “old” Jaguars led by then-starter Chad Henne.

While it’s painful to look back at those first few games and it is obvious the coaching was out of hand, we do need to give credit where credit is due and a lot of that belongs to head coach Gus Bradley. The coaching has not been perfect (particularly challenges and clock management) but being able to keep a team together and fighting and improving on all levels is an impressive feat, especially with such a terrible beginning.

There’s still a lot of work to be done and the Jaguars need to keep improving, but this team is becoming more complete each week and the “new” Jaguars are far more complete now than they were just a few weeks ago.