Big Cat Country
The bye week comes with mixed feelings.
On one hand, Jacksonville is 4-3 with the toughest part of its schedule out of the way. On the other hand, there’s been a lot of uninspiring football over the past two games. The Jaguars got bullied in consecutive weeks.
“We cannot, absolutely not, go back and try to reinvent the wheel here,” head coach Liam Coen said Monday.
“There’s times where you’ve got to go and dig deep and go reinvent the wheel because you’ve got a bunch of holes. Well, I don’t think that’s the case. We have not played our best the last two weeks going into the bye, which does kind of suck. It does. It’s not a great feeling, but everything’s ahead of us and my thing to this team is going to be, ‘Man guys, we have done so many good things. We are a really good football team, but not when we hurt ourselves.’”
As Week 8 approaches, we rounded up the latest NFL power rankings to get a sense of how the Jaguars are viewed nationally.
The win over the Chiefs was supposed to be a turning point.
Now we’re gonna force-feed rookie WR/CB Travis Hunter 14 targets, twice as many as Brian Thomas Jr. got Sunday? What’s going on here?
Since beating the Chiefs and moving to 4-1 and turning their fans into believers, the Jaguars have lost two straight to the Seahawks and Rams. Most concerning: Jacksonville has scored a combined 19 points in those two games.
Liam Coen went up against his former master and came up short — way short . This isn’t meant to be a personal shot at Coen, but his team looked unprepared against Sean McVay’s Rams in London, and things just haven’t looked right since the dramatic victory over the Chiefs, which suddenly feels like it occurred ages ago. Travis Hunter had his breakout game, which is nice, but Jacksonville seems to have a Brian Thomas Jr. problem. Really, the overall product was replete with self-inflicted errors. Now the Jaguars have the bye to diagnose what has gone wrong and how to fix things ahead of a stretch with four of five games on the road. There are some winnable ones, but given the way the Jags have looked over the last two weeks, nothing’s guaranteed.
From Josh Kendall and Chad Graff:
A blowout loss in London revealed a hard truth about the Jags. They’re just not one of the league’s better teams, which seemed possible after four straight wins earlier this season. They’ve undoubtedly come a long way in Liam Coen’s first season, but the passing game is still lacking.
Unsung nonstarter/role player: S...
