It’s been 12 years since the Jacksonville Jaguars were last on Monday Night Football. For much of the team’s history, there’s been little national spotlight shed on the Jaguars and that’s been especially true in the last decade or so.
So when fans tune into ESPN on Monday, there’s a good chance some of those viewers will hear the crowd at EverBank Stadium yelling “DUUUVAL!” and have no idea what it means. Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence kind of likes it that way.
“When I first got here, I had no idea,” Lawrence said of the chant Thursday. “Obviously, it’s the county that we live in. It’s something that players and fans, not the only thing we have in common, but it’s something that brings everyone together that everyone does. It’s part of the city, part of the culture, just part of our fan base, this city, and who we are.
“I think that’s something that no matter who you are, if you see someone in the street and someone yells it, you yell it back and all those things. People do it in the stadium and postgame. I think it just connects the players, the coaches, everyone, the fans, everyone in the city together.
“It’s something we can all rally around, obviously our team is that as well, but just having something like that everyone knows, everyone is a part of, everyone that’s not in this community doesn’t really understand it. I think makes it kind of cool too, people are like, ‘Why are they doing that?’ People that are here know and understand that it means a lot and it means a lot to this city.”
When it became the Jaguars’ rallying cry is hard to pin down to an exact date. Back in 2006, linebacker Mike Peterson introduced the Jacksonville defense on ESPN by first prefacing it with “Welcome to Duval, prepare to be hit.” Most give the credit to DJ Easy E of V101.5 and 93.3 The Beat for popularizing it on the radio in the late 1990s.
More recently, Lawrence and the Jaguars have embraced it with a “DUUUVAL” chant led by coach Doug Pederson in the locker room after games.
