Jaguars offense toothless in loss to Titans

The Jacksonville Jaguars got their butts kicked against the Tennessee Titans on Sunday, dropping their first game of the season, 9-6. Nine to six. It’s unreal that your defense holds a team to sub-100 yards net passing, about 230ish total yards and nine points and you lose, without any turnovers. Simply put, the Jaguars lost on Sunday because their offense couldn’t do anything.

Many people seem to struggle to say it, but I’m not scared to. The Jaguars lost mainly because Blake Bortles was bad. He struggled to hit easy passes, held the ball and nearly fumbled in a critical time because he was careless with the football. Sure, he had some drops, but every quarterback in the NFL deals with drops.

D.J. Chark dropped an easy pass off his chest, Keelan Cole dropped a low ball that he should have caught and Tommy Bohanan dropped a pass but outside of that, the big issue was the quarterback was just off all day. Hell, he had three straight passes batted at the line of scrimmage. How does that even happen?

The drops hurt, but it hurts more when your quarterback struggles to hit easy throws on third down and sails passes over the guys who are open. The issue was exacerbated in the second half when the Titans realized Bortles was not even trying anything down the field and they began sending pressure constantly. They knew they had a quarterback who was off, only looking for the short safe throws and feeling the pressure.

Coupled with Blake’s poor play, the Jaguars quickly figured out why you can’t treat Corey Grant as a real running back, as he managed just 1.8 yards per carry and each down he got the ball felt like a wasted down, all the while TJ Yeldon was averaging over six yards per carry and picking up yards in the passing game.

The overall game plan for the Jaguars against the Titans wasn’t that much different than it was against the New England Patriots, where the offense seemed to be able to do no wrong. The biggest difference was simply that the quarterback didn’t hit the easy passes that were there to keep the chains moving.

There were other failures that made Bortles bad day even worse, but when you boil it down the biggest issue was Bortles was just off on the day and it sank the offense. I don’t think having Leonard Fournette would have helped all that much on Sunday, outside of taking ineffective carries away from Grant.