Were Jaguars head coach candidates mandated to have Blake Bortles?

The Jacksonville Jaguars are in the middle of a hot mess at the quarterback position, with the team announcing Wednesday evening that veteran quarterback Chad Henne would be starting against the Carolina Panther’s in the team’s third preseason game on Thursday. The move, and Blake Bortles regression, has led a lot of people to question how the Jaguars even go to this point, as the mess seemed inevitable.

Well, it appears that perhaps Jaguars head coaching candidates were mandated to roll with Blake Bortles for one more year.

There was talk of this at the time, and honestly it shouldn’t have been too surprising since the team decided to retain incumbent general manager Dave Caldwell, who drafted Bortles with the third overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft.

I have no reason to doubt Ryan O’Halloran on this (though if I recall correctly, he was suggesting it was a possibility more-so than set in stone), other than thinking this was an actual mandate hurts my brain, but if that was the case the Jaguars set themselves up for failure and once again not going full measure when firing people, sets them back.

It’s probably why they hired internally, kept a chunk of the coaching staff and signed not a single other quarterback. Even with Tom Coughlin allegedly in charge, he’d have signed off on the moves the team made, or in this case didn’t make.

The Jaguars haven’t even played their third preseason game and we’re probably way overreacting, because that’s what fans do... but my word, it feels like the Jaguars are already punting the 2017 season.

If the team was going to hire Tom Coughlin to be in charge, they should have let him be in charge. There should have been no alleged mandate on the quarterback, the general manager should have been booted and Coughlin should have picked the coach and GM.

Update:

Jaguars PR man Tad Dickman tweeted this morning that there being a mandate for Bortles is not accurate.