Nearly three years ago, it felt like a perfect fit. The Jacksonville Jaguars had a near-mutiny under head coach Urban Meyer, quarterback Trevor Lawrence looked like a mess, and the franchise was spiraling toward another double-digit loss season. In the expanse of Shad Khan’s ownership of the team, it felt like a rarefied opportunity with a generational quarterback was in jeopardy.
In response, Khan hired Doug Pederson, and then explained the decision to the world.
“Why Doug Pederson? He’s a man who’s accomplished a lot,” Khan said in February of 2022, sitting beside Pederson during his introductory news conference. “Top offensive coordinator, experienced head coach, won three division titles in five years — a man who just four years ago won the Super Bowl. And he did it for the Philadelphia Eagles, a city very much like Jacksonville, that was looking for their first championship. So in the end, we have someone who’s been there. A head coach, developer of quarterbacks. A man who creates a culture for players and coaches alike. A culture they’ll thrive in, and a leader who commands respect and inspires those around him. And a man who wins.”
Imagine Khan’s dismay Sunday, after watching his Jaguars lose a 24-20 agony game to a Houston Texans team that is following the precise trajectory that was charted by the Jaguars when Pederson got his hands onto the team. By Year 3 of his tenure? Jacksonville was supposed to be battling for AFC supremacy and Lawrence should have taken lengthy strides toward the league’s elite tier of quarterbacks. Instead, time in Jacksonville is a flat circle and the Jaguars are mired in Friedrich Nietzsche’s trench of eternal recurrence.
This is another way of saying the Jaguars are what they were … and may inevitably become what they have already been.
That’s what this 0-4 start feels like. Just the latest seasonal marathon of promised horizons playing out on a treadmill. When Sunday offered a familiar mile marker to nowhere, Pederson was asked if he was concerned about his job status following the loss to the Texans.
“My status? No,” Pederson said, before adding: “That’s kind of a weird question, but OK.”
That Pederson thinks it’s a weird question betrays his own message from that 2022 news conference, when he took a moment during his introduction to send a message to his new team.
“To our players — and I think this is so important — to our players, my sole focus, starting from the minute that I was hired, is to really help them to be their best, help our team win football games,” Pederson said. “And it’s our jobs as coaches to put our players in position to be successful, to develop their talent one player at a time, one unit at a time, and that’s how you win games in the National Football League.”
On Sunday, Pederson seemed to be sending a new message, following a question about whether he’d consider taking over play-calling from offensive coordinator Press Taylor.
“For what? I thought he called a great game,” Pederson said of Taylor. “As coaches, we can’t go out there and make the plays, right? It’s a two-way street. So, you guys can sit here and point the finger all you want and that’s fine. Point it right at me. I can take it.”
In reality, nobody has to point a finger at Pederson right now. The results are doing it for him. He’s 1-9 in his past 10 games, with that win coming against the league-worst Carolina Panthers in 2023. His offense has one of the worst third-down conversion rates in the league. And despite finally being healthy again, his franchise quarterback is completing a career-low 53.2 percent of his passes through four games, showcasing an inability to be consistent or efficient on intermediate passes and having some familiar ineffectiveness in the red zone, which harkens all the way back to his rookie season.
As of Monday, Lawrence will have gone an inexplicable 309 days since winning a football game, which is an alarming stat for a presumed generational quarterback who recently signed a five-year $275 million extension. Particularly when you focus it through some of the throws he’s missing. Such as the third quarter deep shot to a streaking Christian Kirk, who had enough separation to have a clear path for a touchdown, but not enough speed to catch up to the ball that Lawrence sailed 4 yards over his head.
If the two most important factors in Pederson’s hiring were consistently winning and developing his franchise quarterback, the results are not great. Taylor’s scoring offense is among the worst in the league. It’s in the bottom third in total yards and passing yards. Lawrence is in the middle of that offense. That means if Pederson believes Taylor is calling good games, someone else is not meeting the standard. And the first person in line to turn the key on an offense is the quarterback. And if the quarterback isn’t the problem, then it’s the surrounding pieces of an offense that his general manager, Trent Baalke, built from the ground up. And if it’s not Taylor … not Lawrence … not Baalke’s roster … then who is the issue in the middle of this operation?
As Pederson directed, point the finger at him. He’s the one who took the responsibility for getting this thing on the rails, so the responsibility ultimately falls on him until he wants to clarify where the breakdown is occurring. And not for nothing, but sources with the Philadelphia Eagles leaked out the issues that team owner Jeffrey Lurie had with Taylor when he was part of Pederson’s staff in Philadelphia. The butting of heads over Taylor eventually became part of the mutual parting of company between the Eagles and Pederson in 2021.
This isn’t to suggest that Pederson shouldn’t be able to operate his coaching staff as he sees fit. But it definitely shows you how far he’ll go to defend Taylor’s standing or performance as one of his assistant coaches. Which at the very least should raise the question of whether Pederson can honestly assess the job Taylor is doing, or take back the play-calling duties that Pederson himself stated were a point of personal pride when he landed the job with the Jaguars.
Regardless, the results are what they are. The Jaguars are in an 0-4 hole that is essentially impossible to recover from in the NFL, with only the 1992 San Diego Chargers managing to make the postseason after dropping their first four games. Now compare that against the expectations of Khan, who not only hired Pederson to bring along Lawrence and win games, but who also declared before the season that the expectations were winning now with what he believed was the best Jaguars roster he’d ever seen.
Maybe the one thing the Jaguars have going for them is that Houston is a quality team in the AFC — perhaps even one of the best in the conference. And the Jaguars took them to the final minute of regulation. If that’s a representation that Jacksonville is on the cusp of breaking through, then the schedule may be offering an opportunity. The Indianapolis Colts come to town next week in the midst of their own problems. Star running back Jonathan Taylor is nursing a high ankle sprain, and quarterback Anthony Richardson went down on Sunday with a hip injury, getting replaced by the 39-year-old (but very effective) Joe Flacco.
While that’s not exactly a “get-right” opportunity, it’s the kind of game that the Jaguars should be able to win at home. If they don’t, that 0-5 hole is going to start to look like the place where Pederson’s employment is getting buried.
