As the ball bounced off the midsection of Cowboys receiver Noah Brown and back into the waiting arms of Rayshawn Jenkins, the Jaguars’ safety covered the remaining 52 yards of grass in front of him for a game-winning pick-six. His first-year coach, Doug Pederson, really didn’t have to think twice.
As Pederson’s Jaguars players spilled onto the field, he went with them. As they piled on each other, he threw his headset in the air. And as they left the field, he gestured to the TIAA Bank Field crowd to get louder, waving his arms up and down energetically. The 54-year-old wasn’t just letting loose. He was making a point of letting loose.
His Jaguars had just come back from a 17-point deficit to vanquish the mighty Cowboys, 40–34, in overtime. His young quarterback had a banner day. Jenkins made the biggest play of all the big plays. The offense came together in the second half. The defense tightened up when it needed to most. But this runaway train of emotion from Pederson was about way more than that.
“You know, Albert, the year off made me think about a lot of things,” Pederson said a couple of hours later on his drive home. “And one of them was to enjoy the moment, to enjoy it with your team, and really let your personality show and express your excitement and joy. [Today was] a great way to do it. Our team has battled a lot of adversity this year, and for us to beat Dallas? They’re a great football team, don't get me wrong. Well-coached team.
“But for us to do that, and the way we did it, the way we came back in that football game, my hat’s off to our players, the staff. So yeah, I’m gonna let loose just a little bit.”
John Raoux/AP
Go nuts, Doug. On Halloween, the Jaguars were 2–6. The players who’d been around since the start of 2020 were 6–35 over that two-and-a-half-season stretch and on their third coach (the fourth one, if you count Darrell Bevell’s interim run last year), having endured the surreal nightmare of the single-season Urban Meyer era. They had scars, for sure. But they also were following Pederson, after all they’d been through, and even when the wins weren’t coming.
It has paid off with four wins in six games, a 6–8 record and control of their own destiny in the AFC South—if the Jags win out, they win the division.
Oh, and they’ve got a quarterback with the potential to get them in the conversation with any of the others in the AFC, who’s blossoming in his second year with a promising young core around him. So, yeah, there’s a lot to be excited about in Duval.
And you can excuse the coach if he’s gonna let his excitement show.
We’re officially in the home stretch; it’s Christmas week, and there’s plenty for us to dig into coming out of a wild weekend in the NFL. In this week’s column, you’ll find …
• The New Bengals, the New Lions, and the powerhouse Eagles in Three Deep.
• More on the Raiders’ miracle and the clutch Chargers in Ten Takeaways.
• The two high-profile draft prospects who’ll buck the trend and play in their bowl games in Six From Saturday.
But we’re starting with Pederson’s story, and the story of how his Jaguars came to life (again) Sunday.
The record, of course, didn’t look good on Halloween—and Pederson will admit now that it wasn’t exactly what he expected. But he also knew how young his team, and its leaders, were, and that he’d have time.
Those six losses? All came by a single possession. Some were more encouraging than others. Hanging with the Eagles, for example, was a lot better than losing to the Texans or the Colts. But the players kept playing hard, and listening, and that didn’t guarantee anything except a shot at the sort of result they’d eventually get.
“I saw glimpses of it from time to time with the team,” Pederson says. “But I don’t know, you just don’t know what you’re capable of. We’re a young football team and we’re learning. We’re going through experiences that this team hasn’t been through in a while and we’re kinda figuring it out each week. We keep improving each week, but back in training camp, I mean, you think you’re gonna win eight, nine, 10 games maybe.
“But the season doesn't always go the way you would like it, or at least start the way you would like it.”
Against the Giants in Week 7, down 23–17, Trevor Lawrence drove the Jags from their own 25 into the red zone in less than a minute and fell short on three throws into the end zone from the Giants’ 17 in the game’s final 12 seconds. Against Denver, the week after, the Jags yielded a seven-play, 80-yard drive that the Broncos went ahead on, 21–17, in the final two minutes, before Lawrence threw a pick to seal Jacksonville’s fate.
Moments like that, of course, weren’t exactly rare for guys who’d been around the team a while. And it was Pederson’s job to break them of the habits that harvested those results. The dam broke in Week 9, with a roaring comeback from a 17–0 deficit against the Raiders, including a 17–0 second half that gave the Jags a 27–20 win. And as that happened, Pederson started feeling the sort of growth he knew was possible—the kind of growth he envisioned when he took the job.
So would that team that lost to the Giants and Broncos two months earlier be able to pull off what the Jaguars did Sunday?
“You know what? Probably not, honestly,” Pederson says. “If I’m speaking the truth, I don’t think we were there yet. I think we had some growing up to do as a team. Obviously, a young football team, we learn every single week. I just think now we’re in a much better position to handle games like this.”
And Sunday certainly proved it.
Statistically, there wasn’t a whole lot for the Jaguars to hang their hat on in the first half against the Cowboys. Dak Prescott was 15-of-16 for 137 yards and two touchdowns, which amounted to a 141.9 passer rating. As a team, they’d rushed for 91 yards. And while Jacksonville’s numbers weren’t terrible, a Travis Etienne fumble and a couple of three-and-outs conspired to keep Dallas in control into the break and—after a Lawrence pick that led to the field goal that made it 27–10—pretty deep into the third quarter, too.
What flipped things around? When I asked Pederson, he wasn’t really sure that it was one tangible thing or another, so much as Jacksonville now having three wins in five weeks to draw back on. That has a way of making players believe something good, rather than bad, is about to happen.
Sure enough, when the good things started happening Sunday, largely on the strong right arm of Lawrence, they happened in waves.
• The lid-lifter was, without question, Lawrence’s 59-yard dime to Zay Jones, thrown off balance and on the run. The three-play touchdown drive cut the deficit to 27–17.
“It was a deep double-move, a double-move on the corner,” Pederson says. “It was a play we’ve had in our playbook for a while. It was a play that I called earlier in the season. Zay did an outstanding job of obviously setting the corner up and double-moving him. I thought maybe for a second there we were going to get defensive holding, but just a really good play by Zay and by Trevor.”
• Two plays later, Jenkins grabbed his first pick of the game, setting the Jaguars up at the Dallas 39. Jamal Agnew ripped off a 30-yard run on an end around on the play after that, which set up another Lawrence touchdown pass—on this one, he threw to Marvin Jones, open on a third-and-goal from the Dallas 10.
“Marvin did an outstanding job there of just going one on one with the corner,” Pederson says. “And then Trevor saw the leverage that Marvin had and just put a nice little ball out there, nice little touch pass to the front half of the end zone. Just a great effort both ways.”
And just like that, Dallas’s lead was down to three.
• A Dallas three-and-out put the Jags’ offense back out there again at the start of the fourth quarter, which led to a scalding Jacksonville drive that covered 75 yards in eight plays and required only one third-down conversion—the third-and-goal on which Lawrence would throw a fastball between defenders to Zay Jones for another touchdown.
“Now, that one was all Zay and Trevor being on the same page,” Pederson says. “Zay wasn’t supposed to turn back inside, but they just felt the leverage of the defense, and Zay turned back in the back half of the end zone and Trevor zipped it to him there.”
• Some jockeying back-and-forth in the fourth quarter, with a monster, 13-play, 75-yard drive from the Cowboys mixed in, left the Jags down again 34–31 with 1:01 left and the ball at their own 29. Lawrence responded with strikes to Christian Kirk, JaMycal Hasty, Evan Engram and, finally, a 19-yarder to Zay Jones to set up Riley Patterson’s 48-yard game-tying field goal to force overtime.
“I'll tell you this, Albert: Those are plays and situations that we work every Saturday,” Pederson says. “We cover a bunch of end-of-game, end-of-half scenarios. And it’s about the fifth or sixth game that we’ve been in those situations to either tie the game or win the game. And our guys are obviously prepared for those situations, but, as you know, it comes down to them making plays and putting themselves in position to win.”
In other words, all the experience in close games helped. As Pederson figured it would.
Corey Perrine/Florida Times-Union/USA TODAY Sports
The interesting thing about Jenkins’s game-winning pick is it came after the offense went three-and-out for the first time since the start of the third quarter. So just as the offense stalled, the defense was there to pick it up, as the offense had done for the defense through the entirety of the second half.
And along those lines, when Pederson described what he saw on the pick, he made it about a lot more than just one guy.
“It was great to see him do that, and Roy Robertson-Harris had pressure on Dak, and Tre Herndon was right there,” Pederson says. “And just a great effort by Jenkins to, number one, catch the ball, which ended up being kind of low and sort of a shoe-string catch. Gosh, I mean, I was looking for flags. I was looking for incomplete pass. But just a great way not only to end the game, but for him, personally.
“He's been through a lot there with the organization obviously, and it was great for him to finish off a win like that.”
The truth is, a lot of people have been through a lot in Jacksonville over the last few years, and that was actually one of the things about the job that appealed to Pederson a year ago as he considered his options—he almost saw the position as a depressed asset, one with great potential if someone just took a few of the right steps. And a few months in, as his sideline demeanor would attest, he’s pretty jacked that he gets to be the one taking those steps for the organization.
“I mean, I’m enjoying the football,” he says. “I’m enjoying the ownership, enjoying Jacksonville. This was one of the teams that I really was hoping that, given an opportunity, I would love to coach, obviously with the quarterback and the youth of the team. The year off really made me appreciate the fact that if given an opportunity again, I just want to enjoy every moment. There’s only 32 [NFL head-coaching jobs], and I've always said too that if we’re gonna win or we’re gonna lose, I want to do it my way, right? I want to do it the Jacksonville way.
“And that’s enjoying every moment. I want the players to enjoy every moment. And it’s really made an impact on me, on how I coach and how I lead this team.”
That much was pretty obvious, as Pederson left the field Sunday, with a team that’s looking more like a real contender with each passing week.
