2012 Team Previews: Jacksonville Jaguars

Jacksonville Jaguars

• 2011 Record: 5-11 (3rd in AFC South)
• 2011 Point Differential: -86 (26th out of 32)
• 2011 Strength of Schedule (per PFR’s SRS system): -0.3 (t-21st)
• 2011 Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt (offense): 3.4 (32nd)
• 2011 Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt (defense): 5.5 (9th)
• 2011 Adjusted Pythagorean Record (accounting for Strength of Schedule): 5.1-10.9 (28th)
• 2010 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: 6.2-9.8 (25th)

And now a very special preview of the 2012 Jaguars from Super Bowl-winning coach and current ESPN announcer Jon Gruden. Take it away, Coach Gruden!

I’ll be the first guy to admit that I’m not all I can be in the COMPUTER LITERACY department; heck, back when I was still coaching in Tampa, I’d have my son Michael join me in the office and type out all my e-mails for me because I’ve never really figured out how to SUFFICIENTLY ATTACK the keyboard. But I gotta tell ya, when I do use the computer and hop on that internet they’ve got set up on that webby wide world there and search for the latest INSIGHT into the Jacksonville Jaguars season, I feel like I’m getting repeatedly hit over the head with a SLEDGEHAMMER OF NEGATIVITY for reasons that I don’t quite understand. I’m aware it’s easy these days to hide out in your parents’ basement, eat those tasty homemade pizza rolls they’ve got there in the kitchen and be a NEGATIVE NANCY or a SARCASTIC SALLY on the internet and maintain your anonymity and all those fun things. But let me make my thoughts clear here: I think those people are SHAMEFUL COWARDS who have never run a six-yard slant route in their entire lives and they should be handed over to the police and forced to clean out prison toilets WITH ONLY THEIR BARE HANDS AND TEETH. These Jacksonville Jaguars are headed in the right direction and I’d be very surprised if THESE GUYS didn’t have a very strong season this year.

Now most of the negativity I’m seeing in regards to this team revolves around their starting quarterback, MY GUY Blaine Gabbert. APPARENTLY these JOKERS out there on those computers aren’t sufficiently impressed with the progress MY GUY showed out there last year. I gotta tell ya, I think these criticisms are PATENTLY RIDICULOUS. Of course he struggled! He was a rookie quarterback! You ever wonder why I only started one rookie quarterback in all my years of coaching? Because the moment you stick these kids out on the field, they ABANDON ALL FORMS OF REASON and just leave deposits of little fudgies all over the field and their pants. Heck, the only reason I started Bruce Gradkowski back in 2006 was because I had reached a point of TOTAL DESPERATION and was praying for an act of DIVINE INTERVENTION. Didn’t exactly happen, did it? *chuckles, shakes head* I tell ya, you gotta have the PATIENCE OF A SAINT to deal with these WET-BEHIND-THE-EARS youngsters. That’s why I brought in Jeff Garcia to run my offense in 2007 and was rewarded handsomely with a NINE-WIN season and a TEN-POINT first-round playoff loss. *smirks, raises right hand* What can I say? Sometimes you just need A VETERAN’S TOUCH.

But getting back to MY GUY, Blaine Gabbert. I’ll be the first to admit he didn’t look so hot back there last season. You know who else had their fair share of troubles as a young quarterback? I’ll give you a little hint. I used to hang around with THIS GUY all day back when I was the DOE-EYED YOUNG WIDE RECEIVERS COACH for the Green Bay Packers back in the early ’90s. A little guy you may have heard of by the name of BRETT FAVRE. *chuckles, unconsciously shifts right hand near crotch* I tell ya, Brett and I were just a couple of GOOD ‘OL COUNTRY BOYS out there — he, coming from the rural countryside of Kiln, Mississippi; and myself, a proud resident of the DIRTY SOUTH side of South Bend, Indiana. And when you put a couple of LIVE WIRES like ourselves together, the resulting ELECTRICAL CHARGES could be potent. I remember one time Brett and I visited one of those dive bars they’ve got up there in northeast Wisconsin and were enjoying ourselves immensely when we got CHALLENGED to a drinking contest by what we believed at the time to be a TALKING BEAR who hailed from OCONOMOWOC. We would later learn that the talking bear was simply a FIGMENT OF OUR IMAGINATION as a result of our SEVERE ALCOHOL POISONING, but that didn’t keep us from kicking that no-good bear’s keester and sending him back to Oconomowoc DISILLUSIONED AND DISSATISFIED. Brett wound up throwing five interceptions, I think, in the game we had later that day but ended up throwing the winning touchdown to a receiver who was lodged between five defensive backs. *chuckles heartily* Oh, what I wouldn’t give to go back to THOSE BLISSFUL TIMES.

I’m being told now that I’m running out of space, so I’ll keep my remaining thoughts erudite and concise. Don’t give up on Blaine Gabbert, Jaguars fans. Keep in mind my good buddy, Mr. Brett Favre. You never know when the light will go on with these young quarterbacks and they’ll start throwing thirty touchdowns a year and developing a strong desire to abuse Vicodin. I’ve got a lot of faith in this new head coach of yours, MIKE MULARKEY, and I’m confident that he’ll run an EXTREMELY TIGHT SHIP up there in northern Florida. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that THESE JAGUARS have everything I look for in an NFL franchise: a stud young quarterback, an intelligent new coach, an ethnic new owner whose name I’m not sure I can pronounce, and a wonderful climate REMINISCENT OF PARADISE ITSELF. *raises right hand* I like ’em. *wakes up to find that he’s binge-eaten a whole pack of Oreos in his sleep again, sighs, trudges back to bed*…

   Random thoughts

The Jaguars traded up in the first round of the draft to pick the consensus best receiver available, Justin Blackmon, in hopes of increasing the number of NFL-caliber receivers on their roster to one. His first few months with the team were rocky, however. Blackmon was arrested on DUI charges in June and held out of training camp until August 6th. It may be unreasonable to expect a fast start at this point, but the Jaguars need any help they can get for Blaine Gabbert…Speaking of Gabbert, here’s a list of the eight quarterbacks who had the most similar rookie seasons to Gabbert — and, frankly, it paints a pretty dire picture. When your best-case scenario is turning into Kyle Orton 2.0, that’s not a great sign. In fairness, Terry Bradshaw threw 24 interceptions in his rookie season and Troy Aikman and Donovan McNabb also had massive struggles in their first season as well, so maybe all is not lost…Like the Texans, the Jaguars had a tremondous improvement defensively in 2011, going from one of the three worst defenses in the league to a legitimate top-ten defense before their secondary was massacred by injuries late in the year. Also like the Texans, however, the Jaguars defense seems prone for a Plexiglass Principle bounce downward this year…

Outlook

Let’s all briefly send kind thoughts off Maurice Jones-Drew’s way. Had the Jaguars actually wanted to trade for Tim Tebow this offseason, MJD would likely have enjoyed the considerable uptick in yards per carry that a running quarterback normally provides. And considering he ran for 1606 yards last season on 4.7 yards per attempt when EVERYONE IN THE STADIUM knew he was the Jaguars’ only offensive hope, it’s reasonable to think that Jones-Drew would have had a real shot at 2000 yards this year. Instead, he’s on his own again and likely to get battered 350-400 times for a hopeless cause. Gabbert can’t possibly be worse than he was last year, but there’s no indication whatsoever that he will ever become a good quarterback or even a below-average one. In addition, the defense’s regression to the mean will likely counteract any improvement Gabbert and Co. enjoy offensively this year. In short: I don’t blame you for holding out, Maurice.

2012 Projected Point Differential: 263.8-369.0

2012 Average Projection: 5.0-11.0 (4^th in AFC South)

2012 Team Previews: Indianapolis Colts

Indianapolis Colts (previously known as the Baltimore Colts)

• 2011 Record: 2-14 (4th in AFC South)
• 2011 Point Differential: -187 (30th out of 32)
• 2011 Strength of Schedule (per PFR’s SRS system): +0.4 (t-10th)
• 2011 Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt (offense): 4.6 (t-28th)
• 2011 Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt (defense): 7.2 (29th)
• 2011 Adjusted Pythagorean Record (accounting for Strength of Schedule): 3.6-12.4 (32nd)
• 2010 Adjusted Pythagorean Record: 9.1-6.9 (10th)

And now a story I call…I Feel My Luck Could Change

(Note: this article appears in the August 2012 issue of Quarterback Magazine)

Even before Quarterback readers voted him the greatest college quarterback of all time in February 2012, it was apparent that Andrew Luck had made an extraordinary impact on the college football landscape. Aside from being a tremendously talented and proficient passer, he was an encapsulation of what it’s like to feel terrified by the times. In the last decade of American college football, it has tended to be the cheerful players that have defined the age (it’s no coincidence that Luck first started in 2009, the last year of Tim Tebow), yet Luck, a player of infinite intellect, put the emphasis on hard-hitting pessimism and had the chillingly plausible flourish of Peyton Manning’s control of the line of scrimmage, John Elway’s athleticism, Kyle Orton’s neckbeard and all the apocalyptic long bombs in the Daryle Lamonica pantheon. The remarkable thing is not that Quarterback readers endorsed a just-graduated 22-year-old as the most gripping quarterback in 100 years of college football history. The remarkable thing is that they may have been right.

Since being drafted first overall by the Colts in April, Luck has been described as the Next Great NFL Quarterback so often that it has come to represent for him little more than a familiar configuration of words. Indeed, when Quarterback Magazine initially greets Luck with that moniker, it’s dismissed by Luck with fantastic peremptoriness as “just a load of wank.” Luck walks into our interview at a pub in a rather foul mood and orders a pint of bitter; with Blue Note jazz and Django Reinhardt playing in the background, he slowly unwinds over the course of three or four ales and ends up staying till closing time. By then the pub has filled with young drinkers, but none give Luck so much as a glance. “No, they’re all much too cool,” he says, adding icily, “Right now everyone’s off my back – and I’d like it to stay that way.”

Luck breezed through his three college years (seasons he has strangely titled “Pablo Harbaugh,” “The Bend-But-Don’t-Break Defense” and “OK Wide Receiver”) with such ease that expectations were sky high among his new employers. Colts Offensive Coordinator Bruce Arians says, “”You look at Andrew – he’s always moving, he’s very fast. He’s got incredible physique and brain.” When the Colts started mini-camp at their practice facility in May, however, it was clear that Luck had virtually nothing prepared. He had, in fact, been hit by a grave attack of passers’ block.

“Easter 2012 was one of the the lowest points of my life,” he recalls. “I felt like I was going f—ing crazy. Every time I picked up a football I just got the horrors. I would start throwing a pass, stop after five or six, hide it away in a drawer, look at it again, scratch it up, deflate it… I was sinking down and down.”

Among the things eating into Luck’s confidence was his worry that he was not the pioneering quarterback he was cracked up to be. As a student at Stratford High School in the mid ’00s, he loved the risk-taking Wildcat formations of the Arkansas Razorbacks. Trying to find his bearings on returning home from the 2012 Orange Bowl, Luck read back to the Wildcat leaders Gus Malzahn and David Lee, and grew convinced that they had pushed football forward while he had only nudged it sideways.

“I thought I had missed the point,” he says sadly. “The first thing I did after the Orange Bowl was buy the whole Single Wing instructional series. I started reading Pop Warner and ordering playbooks off the Net. It was refreshing because the formation was all running and had no play action in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I’d ever felt about passing plays.”

During mini-camp in the middle of 2012, Bruce Arians had had a brainwave about the new Colts offense. He felt it should be full of concise, Air Coryell-influenced pass plays, each one skillfully arranged and packed with wonderful routes. “I was fed up with all the Peyton Manning analogies,” he comments, “particularly because I hate that guy’s guts anyway. I thought the only way that we could do the antithesis to what was being expected of Andrew was to get rid of all the audibles, have really nice-looking route combinations and do something really exciting.”

It says something about the internal workings of the Colts that not only did Luck not share Arians’ vision of the offense, he didn’t even know about it until a few seconds ago.

“That explains a lot,” Luck laughs. “F—ing hell, there was no chance of the offense looking like that. I’d completely had it with passing. I just wanted run plays. All passes to me were pure embarrassment.”

And thus the new Colts offense, entitled by Luck “Wildkid A” in an homage to the school that inspired his love of the Wildcat, was born. The playbook for Wildkid A is 480 pages long, stunningly beautiful, frequently bizarre and wholly engrossing. It begins with a rarely-seen snap from the quarterback to the center, follows that with seventeen pages of slight variations of the Statue of Liberty play, veers off into a quintuple reverse that ends with a wide receiver performing a pooch punt, brings you back with the loveliest orchestrated sweep in years, wanders off with the placekicker lined up at wide receiver for some unexplained reason, returns with 200 hundred pages of zone read plays as if nothing ever happened, and eventually bids farewell in a halo of fullback dives and left tackles running the triple option. There has never been a playbook like it. And the only way this free-form masterpiece could have been created, Arians says, was for every member of the Colts to learn “how to be a participant on a play without having an assignment.”

How will this new offense help the Colts rebound in 2012? Luck finishes his last pint of bitter and shrugs. “Sometimes it’s not about winning games or scoring points. It’s about generating bits of work that may be incomplete and may not be going anywhere. And by the time you finish it, it may be unrecognisable. But it might be far more creative than what you started with. Sometimes,” he continues while inexplicably reaching for a guitar and getting a far-away look in his eyes, “I can see the dinosaurs stepping over the mountains when I run these plays. Monsters… out of control monsters roaming the earth. All-powerful, utterly invincible, wreaking destruction… Kalashnikovs… faceless, nameless…” And with that, we left Luck at the bar, not knowing specifically what it was he was babbling about but knowing that it sounded brilliant.

Random thoughts

So you might have heard that there have been a few changes in Indianapolis. New general manager, new coach, new quarterback, new defensive philosophy, new REO Speedwagon quotes on Jim Irsay’s Twitter every day. The times, they are a-changin’, everybody…New head coach Chuck Pagano came from the Baltimore Ravens and is switching the Colts’ defense from the basic Cover 2 look they showed for the past decade to the 3-4 style that he ran in Baltimore. There’s nothing wrong with the move at all — the Colts’ D completely fell off a cliff last year — but expect some growing pains this year in executing such a drastic shift. For example, it’s going to look pretty weird seeing Dwight Freeney and Robert Mathis as 3-4 outside linebackers, is it not?…New offensive coordinator Bruce Arians is planning on running a two tight end offense in Andrew Luck’s first year, buoyed by the draft picks of Luck’s Stanford teammate Coby Fleener and Dwayne Allen. We’ll have to see how much freedom Luck has in making audibles and changing assignments at the line here in his rookie season…

Outlook

As strange as it is going to be not seeing Peyton Manning in a Colts uniform this season, Jim Irsay made the right decision to part ways with the future Hall of Famer and completely reboot with the most heralded quarterback prospect since Manning starting from day one. Obviously, the Colts’ hopes for this season are modest at best. Luck will not be immune to the struggles all rookie quarterbacks face and the defense isn’t likely to get to improve too much in its first year under Chuck Pagano. Success this season for the Colts entails seeing progress from Luck every week and remaining competitive in games against strong opponents like the Patriots, Packers, and Texans. If those things happen, the Colts should rebound to six or seven wins and feel very optimistic about their chances in 2013 and beyond.

2012 Projected Point Differential: 335.2-376.0

2012 Average Projection: 6.9-9.1 (2^nd in AFC South)