There aren’t many players who have been on the Jacksonville Jaguars’ roster longer than outside linebacker Josh Allen. But it didn’t take years in Duval for Allen to understand the stakes in the biannual matchup against the Tennessee Titans.
“This is the first game I was told about that, ‘We don’t like these guys and they don’t like us,'” Allen said. “The energy — no matter the record, no matter the situation; we could be undefeated, they could not win one game — the intensity of the game is gonna be high. We gotta be prepared for that.
“There’s just something about these games that just brings out a little bit out of each person. So we gotta be ready to play, first and foremost. We gotta stick to our keys, we gotta dominate out matchups, and we gotta fly around and have fun offensively, defensively, and special teams.”
Last season, the Jaguars beat the Titans, 36-22, in Nashville and then got a 20-16 victory in a winner-take-all regular season finale at EverBank Stadium. It was just the third time ever that Jacksonville got the season sweep over the division rival.
After the first of the two wins, then-Jaguars pass rusher Arden Key (who now plays for Tennessee) told reporters that Doug Pederson showed his team a reel of trash talk from previous Titans teams.
Couldn’t have said this any better myself. Doug found a way to fire up payers that probably couldn’t have cared less about the Titans six months ago.
The boys were playing for more than just staying alive in the division. Bet that. https://t.co/ZYVPzImdbO pic.twitter.com/F6kCtAqwJW
— Marcel Robinson (@MarcelASJax) December 12, 2022
“I saw a video yesterday that Doug showed and it informed me on the Jaguars playing against the Titans and stuff like that,” Key told Action Sports Jax. “It honestly pissed me off, just to see how Tennessee don’t respect us in the division and we changed that tonight.”
This season, the situation in the AFC South is much different. The first place Jaguars are looking to avoid allowing their 34-3 loss in Week 10 to snowball into a losing streak. The last place Titans are trying to get their offense back on track with rookie quarterback in Will Levis after back-to-back losses.
