Some people are fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. This 2016 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. And buy Drew’s new book here.




Your team: Jacksonville Jaguars.


God, I love that woman. Someone make HER the coach. She ain’t gonna be playin’ by the rules.

Your 2015 record: 5-11. The most promising 5-11 team in football!

By the way, the only reason this team didn’t go 4-12 is because the refs gifted them a win against Baltimore—a win that the NFL openly admits never should have happened. So here we have a four-win team that can’t play defense, turns the ball over with impunity, and only scores in garbage time. WHAT A BRIGHT FUTURE THEY HAVE. You can always get away with being terrible so long as you have a young roster. “Well, they’re a group of uncoordinated amputees, but they’re ALL under age 22!” The only good news here is that you’ll never have to watch these assholes play because the NFL is gonna stream all their games exclusively on Tidal.

Your coach: Gus Bradley, who has lost 11 or more games in all three seasons as head coach. This team gave up 30 or more points in half their games last season. What does this asshole even DO? Is he fishing all season long? WHAT IS THE POINT OF GUS BRADLEY? No wonder this team is better at blocking each other than the opposition:

Coming off last season’s miserable showing, Bradley saved his own ass by canning defensive coordinator Bob Babich, elevating assistant Todd Wash, and digging up Monte Kiffin from the tomb his son built for him using funneled booster money. He also got handed $42 million worth of Malik Jackson. It won’t help. They’re still gonna give up 860 rushing yards a game somehow. Bradley is a shit coach who can’t put together a good defense on his own, and the Jaguars won’t realize it until Year 11 of the rebuilding process.


Your quarterback: Blake Bortles. The good news is that Bortles broke the saddest team record in football last season. Not too shabby for a 46-year-old. The bad news is that Bortles led the league in both interceptions AND fumbles. You tend to rack up lots of passing yards when you’ve already put your team in a 35-0 hole. I’m not giving this man praise when, football-wise, he’s the pleasant version of Jay Cutler.

What’s new that sucks: Oh, look! They hurt another draft pick! Yes, cornerback Jalen Ramsey was a Jaguar for all of three seconds before God reached into his knee and shredded his meniscus by hand. If this team ever drafted me, I would go hide in a fallout shelter for two decades to avoid some kind of horrible garbage disposal accident. They are the Final Destination of football teams. Good thing Ramsey, who is back out on the field, knows about the role proper nutrition plays in the rehab process…


Jesus. That’s a real True Detective TV dinner right there. The Jaguars have become so adept at hurting their own players that they now draft players who are PRE-injured (Myles Jack), so that they don’t have to worry about them ever being healthy. As you can see, last year’s top overall pick, Dante Fowler, has already become quite good at watching things from the sidelines…



Atta boy, Dante! That’s being passive and doing nothing, the Gus Bradley Way!

In other news, the team brought in running back Chris Ivory and cornerback Prince Amukamara, who gets passed by more often than a narcoleptic security guard. Whatever.


What has always sucked: I know you think I’m gonna go into the usual spiel about the Jags being irrelevant and Jacksonville being a non-city… a podunk county that decided to call itself a city just so they could wear big boy pants. But no. Not this time. No, I have very specific insults for you trashy pieces of shit today. Here we have a Trump rally of a city… a town that consists mainly of stale beer and hot dirt, overloaded with bridges and highway overpasses to nowhere. The Koch brothers use it as their personal trash can. No one who grew up there is proud of it. Jacksonville is more than just a forgettable location. It is grotesque pockmark on the American landscape that reeks 24/7 of failing paper mills and Maxwell House coffee. I’m not exaggerating. It’s the worst of our potential. Look at the extraordinary dek from this article about the city’s wide-ranging stench:

Central Florida papers once described Jacksonville as an industrial city that sweats, and pretty much smells that way. This is a city that could use a shot of municipal-strength deodorant. On the other hand, local advocates countered that the city’s rotten egg stench was the “smell of money”.


OH YES. Can you smell it, baby? That whiff of burning pulp is the smell of VICTORY.

What might not suck: With Justin Blackmon out drinking and driving by your house as we speak, the Jags still have a decent passing game thanks to Allens Hurns and Robinson. They may sound like accountants, but they’re actually productive enough to score multiple touchdowns any time you elect to NOT pick them up in daily fantasy. Also, Robinson catches the ball better than he chooses tattoo artists:


Let’s remember some Jaguars:

R. Jay Soward



James “Little Man” Stewart



LaBrandon Toefield



Quinn Gray



Mike Sims-Walker



Hear it from Jaguars fans!

HamNo:



As soon as they draft guys now they just hit ‘em in the knee with a sledgehammer.


Todd:

I was looking for a new house this summer and my realtor pulled up in this:


Chris:

This is the third year I’m sending you one of these emails and the Jaguars are only SLIGHTLY better than they were the first time around. These jackasses have been so bad that last year’s five-win achievement was the most they’ve won since 2011. They can’t even break more than that. In 2010 they went 8-8 and it’s never been the same. I miss David Garrard. Oh, and the best part is we gave our coach a one-year extension which is the biggest hedge of an extension I’ve ever seen. We trust our coach enough to give him whatever the hell counts as job security in the NFL, but not enough to actually give him the years that goes with it. Let’s see. Have the fans changed at all? *checks local blogs* Nope. Still the same inferiority complex group of numb nuts that would rather spend time telling people how wrong they are about the Jaguars than talking about the Jaguars. Fuck our fan blogs. They’re run by dickheads. You know what? Fuck our fans too. Fuck me. I’m really excited to see our incredible offseason full of free agent signings, and hope, turn into a walking version of the poo emoji discolored to look like that AWFUL color game jersey they wore last year, because we’re the motherfucking Jaguars.


Hunter:

The Jags suck and will continue to suck in 2016 because the front office still can’t bring itself to fire Gus Bradley—a coach with a 3 year record of 12-36—because he’s such a nice guy. Instead, they are more than willing to piss away a talented young offensive core so that they can keep Bradley on for an extra year to rebuild the defense. According to Pro Football Focus, the Jags were 31st in team defense in 2015. Nice fucking rebuild, Gus. That’s down 5 spots from the previous season. Jesus Christ, nobody is expecting the ‘85 Bears or 2000 Ravens, but this supposed guru can’t even produce a middle of the road defense to keep the offense from having to play from behind every week. Keep in mind the only reason this fucking guy got the job in the first place is because he was lucky enough to be standing next to Pete Carroll 4 years ago. Nevertheless, because these are the Jags and they refuse to learn, they’ll probably fire Gus after another 4-12 season and hire one of Belichick’s assistants.


Jordan:

I’ve been a Jaguars fan since the team’s inception in the mid 90s. I was seven years old and didn’t want to be a Vikings fan like everyone else around me. The first five years were magical. I picked the right team! 14-2 in year five! Mark Brunell! Jimmy Smith! Fred Taylor! Life as a Jags fan in the upper Midwest was as good as I could have asked for (nobody there knew what a Super Bowl tasted like so I didn’t expect to either). Fast forward a decade or two and things couldn’t be worse. In 2011 they drafted Blaine Gabbert exactly one pick ahead of JJ Watt. The very next year they picked up superstar NFL wide receiver Justin Blackmon in the first round. In round three they earned the steal of the draft when they swiped superstar NFL punter Bryan Anger. All while Russell Wilson awaited Pete Carroll’s courtship five picks later. The biggest stadium attraction isn’t the team, no, it’s a swimming pool. This actually makes sense, though. It gives fans a means to “accidentally” inhale a bunch of water after Bortles throws his third and fourth interceptions in a half-empty stadium. And the uniforms. God, those uniforms.

Jeffrey:

The key moments in franchise history: 1) The 1996 playoff win in Denver 2) The time the mascot lit his head on fire 3) The Steal The Show lady and her beach house in Miami 4) The 1999 playoff win over Miami 5) The 2007 playoff win over Pittsburgh 6) Getting swimming pools in the stadium 7) Drafting Jalen Ramsey and Myles Jack 8) The WTF fan during the Titans game gif That’s it. That’s the entire history of this franchise. 20 years, a few playoff wins, no AFC titles, no Super Bowls, and an undying dumpster fire.


Morgan:

We spent enough money in the off-season to give Jerry World an erection...on players who either poached half their stats from other, better players on that team or spent the majority of last season on IR. Or both. Blaine Gabbert was just added to the predictably long list of “Players Who Decided To Play Well After Leaving Jacksonville” last season. Blaine. Fucking. Gabbert. News of Jalen Ramsey’s injury didn’t sadden or shock me due to it casting a shadow on the future of a promising 1st Round talent, but because I bet a friend that it was going to happen to Myles Jack first. Every time I tell someone I’m a Jacksonville Jagaurs fan, I’m met with the question: “Is that a professional football team?”


Aaron:

The mustard uniforms with the dark mustard sweat boxes - horrible, should have used teal. Our coach is one of the nicest and most charismatic people you will ever listen to speak - and I’m pretty sure it is his personality that has caused the fan base to not turn on him yet for only winning 12 games in 3 seasons. Our last GM, Gene Smith, screwed us so hard that only 2 of his players are still on the Jaguars’ roster. Smith has not worked in the NFL since getting fired by the Jags. We were mathematically in the playoff hunt for several weeks last year, before helping to hand the Texans the division. All that being said, the team scored in the draft, gaining two of the best defensive prospects this year. There is excitement that the defense can look as good as the offense, and the Jaguars can have a winning record for the first time since 2007. However, we are Jaguars fans, and have talked ourselves into being excited about “good enough,” so I’m just sitting over here praying for 8-8. At least our coach isn’t Mike Mularkey.


Eric:

I’m a Jaguars fan who has lived in the Northeast the past 6 years. Every damn conversation I have about the NFL goes like this. Rando: Who’s your team? Me: [embarrassed] um, I’m from Jacksonville, so the Jaguars. Rando: lol, they have fans?! [laughs hysterically at unoriginal joke] The worst part of this isn’t that they think they’re so funny; it’s that they’re not even wrong. As if to make up for the fact that the team has so few fans, the existing Jaguars Twitter is a crew of angry neckbeards who literally have twitter columns set up with the words “Jags” and “blackout” and then incessantly attack people who try to make dumb jokes. Watching asshole fans bull rush uneducated randos is their idea of a good day. It’s a dang embarrassment.


Thomas:

The fact that Brandon Allen went from having his truck set on fire in college to being drafted by a team owned by a car parts magnate is proof that existence is a trick played on us all.


Steve:

Having once lived in Atlanta, and currently Jacksonville, I can honestly say that it’s more depressing seeing people walk around in ill-fitting current Jaguars’ players jerseys than it was seeing people walk around in Mike Vick jerseys 5 years after his departure.


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