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It’s time to boot the kicker, Jason Myers falls to 0-2

By Sandlin

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Jason Myers is in just his first season with the Jacksonville Jaguars and has earned a lot of attention, but a lot of it has come from negative play.

When the Jacksonville Jaguars kicker, Jason Myers, receives the boot this week nobody should be surprised.

A kicker has now cost the Jaguars two wins on the season, after two more missed extra points in the 42-39  loss to the Tennessee Titans yesterday.

Myers missed his first P.A.T. on the afternoon and Coach Gus Bradley’s reaction was to go for two on the next touchdown drive and attempt to tie the game at 14. The conversion failed and that put the Jaguars in a 12-14 hole.

On the Jaguars’ first score in the fourth quarter, Myers missed again. This left the Jaguars down 25-28.

Mathematicians everywhere will tell you that the three missed extra point opportunities (the two misses by Myers and the unsuccessful two-point conversion) add up to the amount of points that the Jaguars lost by.

I blame Myers for this loss and while I’ll share the counter-arguments to this loss being all on Myers’ shoulders (or foot, rather), I wanted to remind you humans out there that this is not the first loss caused by Myers this year.

In the Jaguars’ 13-16 loss on October 4 to the Indianapolis Colts, Myers lost the game twice. Myers missed a game-winning field goal opportunity at the end of the game and another game-winning attempt in overtime on that day.

Opponents of the Cut Jason Myers Campaign will make the following valid arguments, but I’m not convinced:

  • The Jaguars would’ve been tied at the end of regulation, at best, with the Titans had it not been for the Myers misses. The win was not guaranteed.
  • We should really be blaming Blake Bortles, he took a sack on a pivotal fourth down play in the final minutes.
  • We should really be blaming the center who sent the ball sailing over Bortles head for a Titans touchdown and completely changed the fourth quarter momentum.
  • We should really be blaming the atrocious defense. They gave up 42 points to the 26th ranked scoring offense.
  • We should really be blaming Coach Bradley. He decided to go for the two-point conversion too early in the game.

At the end of the day, Myers is a kicker. His job is to kick the ball through the goalpost.

The Jacksonville Jaguars are a football team. Their collective job is to win football games.

Myers has now prevented his team from doing their job twice this year. In any other workplace, when one individual doesn’t perform at their job to a degree that it prevents the rest of the organization from succeeding, that individual is sent packing. In a profession where players are signed and released on a weekly basis, that should be no different here.

Quarterback Blake Bortles did his job on Sunday. He threw for five touchdowns and broke a franchise single-season touchdown pass record.

"“You don’t want to go down and put an unbelievable drive together and get six and then miss an extra point and feel the momentum and kind of the energy drop out of the sidelines,” said Bortles in his post game comments."

It was a bold decision to go with Myers as the kicker at the beginning of the season over long-time Jaguar kicker Josh Scobee.

It will be a far-less-bold move to go in a different direction again.

More from Black and Teal

Anything short of bringing in a new kicker will be Gus Bradley sending a message that he is okay with mediocrity.

If the Jaguars want to continue to change the culture, Myers must go.

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