Why the Milwaukee defense is always going to be BS for Jags fans

While the excuse making from Jaguars "fans" has known no bounds, there has been one in particular that has always irked me a bit. The Jaguars play in the league's 2nd smallest market, while the Green Bay Packers play in the league's smallest. I'm sure that someone will immediately hit the reply button after reading that sentence and explain why that isn't really true. The reasoning goes that the city of Milwaukee should be added to the Packers market size since they played several games a year there for almost six decades.

This line of thinking has formed the basis of what I call the "Milwaukee defense." In short, it revolves around adding as many markets to other small team's market size in order to make it seem as if all the odds are stacked against the Jaguars. They also usually conveniently leave out the fact that the Jaguars have Savannah and Orlando as secondary markets, usually with the claim that it's futile to do so since teams like the Dolphins and Falcons already lay claim to those cities.

What this line of thinking doesn't take into account are multiple other factors for the Packers fan devotion, chief among them being the lone pro football team in Wisconsin for much of their eight decades of existence. Even then, during the dark ages of Green Bay football in between Lombardi and Favre, it wasn't as if things were all rosy in Green Bay. They had similar problems to what the Jaguars are going through now, but that has since become a thing of the past.

Another reason this line of thinking is going to quickly become bogus is the 2010 Census. It is expected that Jacksonville will overtake both New Orleans and Buffalo in market size. In fact, by 2020 Jacksonville will most likely have overtaken all of the markets in the Rust Belt. What happens then?

Will Jaguars fans then begin to say that the Saints are actually the entire Gulf Coasts' teams? That they're market size isn't just Louisiana but Mississippi and Alabama as well? What about Buffalo? Will their relationship with Toronto just be turned into another convenient scape goat?

As is the case with any pseudo-intellectual argument, the basics can always be discarded and added to so long as they fit the case that person is trying to make. In short, when the general bowl get's sold out this year, and every year, all of this whining will go away or get swept under the rug.

With all of that being said, could the Jaguars try to strengthen their market presence? Sure. I've been a big supporter of moving a preseason game to the Citrus Bowl as a way of further making the Jaguar brand well known. However, that's a moot point when discussing the "Milwaukee Defense."