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Courtesy NBC/Universal

Critically acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place returns for its third season Thursday. The show follows a quartet of misfits, including Blake Bortles-obsessed Jaguars mega-fan Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto, above with co-star Jameela Jamil) through a twisted afterlife in which neither "the Good Place" nor "the Bad Place" are quite what they seem.

The bumbling Jason's infatuation with the Jaguars—he shouts "Bortles!" the way a paratrooper might shout "Geronimo!"—has become one of the show's funniest gags. But will the success of Bortles and the Jaguars impact either Jason or the universe of The Good Place in Season 3?

Writer Joe Mande spent a few minutes with Digest dishing the dirt.

Digest: How big a part of The Good Place will Jason's Jaguars fandom be this season?

Mande: I've been told not to reveal any spoilers. But I can say that they are back on earth—that's common knowledge from the Season 2 finale. So we're going to see his fandom in real time. It does play a role. It becomes an issue for him, personally: trying to juggle his life and trying to catch the Jaguars game.

Digest: Bringing the characters back to life at the end of Season 2 must have rebooted earth's timeline. That's not what made our real-world Jaguars suddenly good, is it?

Mande: All I will say is that we had to figure out, time-wise, if after he got rebooted the Jaguars were bad or good. One of the hardest things was trying to place the reboot into the real life of the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Way too much time was spent in the writer's room trying to figure that exact problem out. It gave everyone a headache. It came down to: for that to happen, it had to take place on a Sunday, but they played Monday night that week. It got really intense. That's when we had to pull back and say, "It's just a show."

Digest: What was your contingency plan if the Jaguars won the Super Bowl last year? It would have been hard to have a running Bortles gag if Bortles was the Super Bowl MVP.

Mande: The Jaguars were very cool. They let me and Manny Jacinto come to their home playoff game. NBC gave me an HD camera, and I was madly trying to get footage. We took a water taxi to the stadium. We had Manny eat a blue cheeseburger. I had him propose to a cheerleader on the field before the game started. It was really funny stuff. I can't say whether or not we'll use it.

After they won that game, it's all me and Manny were talking about: What if we get to go to the Super Bowl with the Jaguars? I would have been Kevin Hart trying to talk my way on to the podium.

Digest: How early in the creation of Jason did he become a Jacksonville native and a Jaguars fan?

Mande: Developing Season 1, all that we knew was that he was an imposter pretending to be a Buddhist monk. So we discussed what would be the opposite of a Buddhist monk. Obviously, the opposite would be someone from Florida. So we pitched a wannabe Steve Aoki from Florida. I had just done stand-up in Jacksonville and was fascinated by how weird Jacksonville is, so I said, "This guy has to be from Jacksonville."

I'm a huge Minnesota Timberwolves fan, so I know what it's like to be super-optimistic about a doomed franchise. I'm still a huge Ricky Rubio head, so my Ricky Rubio fandom is the precursor to Jason's Bortles obsession.

Digest: But you can't make a rallying cry out of "Rubio!" the way you can with "Bortles!"

Mande: Bortles is a perfect comedy word: the combination of clunky consonants and long O's. There's something about the B's and R's and T's. It's just a ridiculous word.

Digest: Series creator Michael Schur said in Rolling Stone that Jason's fandom is a commentary on human nature: how we become fiercely loyal to whoever is wearing the right jersey.

Mande: I think if you look closely at the chart [used to score moral points on the show], being a Browns fan lost points. [Correction: Loyalty to the Browns is worth +53.83 points.] We talk a lot about tribalism on the show. Being a fan of any sports team is just overt tribalism. There's no real sense to it.

Digest: That doesn't mean that all diehard football fans are headed to the Bad Place, does it?

Mande: There is something about sports that makes you hopeful but is almost never rewarded unless you're a Patriots fan. Being a devoted sports fan is like a version of the Bad Place.