Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ loss in Week 1 was the way they seemed to beat themselves in crunch time. With a comfortable lead late in the fourth quarter, the Jaguars had all the momentum a team could ask for just as the game started winding to a close.
But then, seemingly as just soon as what they were doing started to work, their success vanished. Carson Wentz went back to slicing and dicing their defense as he had in the first half, and Jacksonville made crucial mistakes that killed any chance they had of making a comeback.
Part of the issue was the overwhelming volume of penalties that the Jaguars accumulated throughout the matchup. A whopping 13 infractions were called against the team for a total of 90 yards lost due to their undisciplined play.
Head coach Doug Pederson addressed the obvious mistakes in the team’s media availability session on Monday, telling reporters as plainly as possible how untenable the team’s execution was to him.
“Gosh, we had a couple like, illegal shift, illegal formation on offense, which should never happen,” Pederson explained. “Those, to me, are unacceptable. Those are critical errors that we made. Again, I kind of put that back on the staff, too, the coaching staff, and myself, and we’ve just got to make sure that we’ve got the guys in the right spots and we’re doing the things in the week that eliminate that.
“Then some of the defensive offsides, especially in critical moments, we just can’t do that. The team, they know it. They’ve been around, a lot of these guys have played a lot of ball, they understand that stuff, but I was surprised. I think we had seven on offense and six on defense. We’ve just got to eliminate those.”
Expectations for Pederson’s first season in Jacksonville have been centered around his ability to turn the Jaguars into a competent and respectable team that opponents don’t look forward to competing against. Their loss to the lowly Commanders on Sunday was a step backward in Jacksonville’s effort to shrug the mediocrity that has hung over the organization for the better part of the last half-decade.
Expect the Jaguars’ coaching staff to emphasize the basics this week in practice, and for the team to have a renewed drive to play a clean game against the Colts in Week 2.
