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Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles is following up his 2015 season, which set franchise records, with a year where he looks almost as bad as he did a rookie. At times, he looks completely lost and you can tell he’s struggling with his confidence. It’s not just poor reads for him either, as a lot of the time he’s making the right decision but the ball just isn’t getting there because his accuracy is so bad. Part of that is because his mechanics have completely fallen apart this season after being significantly improved in 2015. Prior to the 2015 season, Bortles spent a few weeks with quarterback guru Tom House, but this offseason for whatever reason he spent significantly less time and the end result is a significantly worse season, which has led to legitimate questions about his future.
Bortles knows mechanics are a big issue and has decided to bring in a personal quarterbacks coach to work with him in-season.
“I will definitely try to get that fixed up,” Bortles told the media on Monday when asked about working on his throwing motion. “I have [personal QB coach] Adam [Dedeaux] coming in this afternoon so I’ll throw with him today and tomorrow and hopefully we’ll try to tighten some things up and get back to the way I was throwing the ball the most efficient.”
A throwing motion is a tricky thing and it takes a lot of work to change how you learned to throw, as it’s mostly muscle memory. Even last year when Bortles motion was more compact, there were times under duress where he’d go back to his more elongated motion, but that’s to be expected. There’s not much Bortles can do to flip the switch in-season, but he did recognize there is an issue that needs to be addressed.
“We’ve been talking,” Bortles said when asked when he decided to have Dedeaux fly in. “When you get a chance to see how things are going, do a bye week, do a Thursday night week whenever. Let’s find time and it’s kind of like anything else when you struggle at doing what you’re supposed to do all the time; I think you try to fix it as quickly as possible rather than let it get worse. I try to take care of that.”
There’s only so much time in-season for Bortles to work on something like that between practice time, film work, and more... but every little bit helps.