Big Cat Country
In week 12, the Jacksonville Jaguars will again face one of their most fearsome opponents of the 2025 season: the savvy veteran, backup quarterback. Following a week five injury to starting quarterback Kyler Murray, which eventually landed him on IR, Arizona Cardinals quarterback Jacoby Brissett took over the starting role to the tune of a 66.7 percent completion rate, compiling 11 touchdowns and just three turnovers in a five-game stretch. Meanwhile, the Jaguars are coming off a dominant showing up front, sacking Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert three times while pressuring him on half of his 25 dropbacks.
With Herbert’s propensity to hold the ball for longer periods, in search of a downfield explosive play, the Jaguars’ front seven capitalized on those opportunities, with 14 of their 21 week 11 pressures coming more than 3 seconds from the snap.
Throughout the year, the defense has leaned into sending extra blitzers on a more frequent basis due to their recent struggles to get the quarterback down.
And the blitz has been fruitful to the Jaguars in getting pressuring opposing quarterbacks, as they are currently fourth in the NFL in average time to pressure when blitzing at 2.28 seconds. However, they’re 11th in the league (2.75 seconds) when rushing just the four players. When facing veteran quarterbacks who consistently get the ball out quickly (2.3 – 2.7 seconds), the team has regularly struggled, which Liam Coen touched on a week ago, before the team’s week 10 matchup.
“Yeah, the flat-out bottom line is we’ve got to go affect the quarterback better. And whether that’s with scheme or with people, we’ve got to affect. Now look, I’ll say this out of all the attempts the other day, I think there was like 88 percent—I don’t know what crazy percentage of the time the ball was coming out at about two point something [seconds]. They were running a ton of quick option routes, zone coverage, just kind of pick and dink, dink, dink, dink, dink. So, it does become hard to ultimately get to the quarterback when it’s like almost quick game, but it’s not. It’s that in-between of drop back pass that I think Vegas did a pretty good job of attacking us that way.
Jacksonville’s defensive average time to throw of 2.56 seconds (6th) feels dominant in comparison to Brissett’s average time to throw (which has slowly improved over the past two weeks):
In week 11, Brissett, notably, had his best average time to throw of the 2025 season, at 2.73 seconds. Despite a whopping 57 dropbacks, Arizona tied for season low four quarterback hits and no sacks surrendered in the matchup. They might think it wise to continue this trend of getting the ball out quickly when facing a Jacksonville defense that has shown significant struggles in defending the...
