What are the Jacksonville Jaguars sneaky good at on offense?

We’ve been a little down on the Jacksonville Jaguars offense as of late. Blake Bortles is an inconsistent quarterback, the wide receivers are fine (but not great), and the run game is effective but it’s too one-dimensional a philosophy if the passing game can’t get some of those defenders out of the box.

There are actually some things this offense does well. Like, really well. Aaron Schatz over at Football Outsiders has compiled one thing all 32 NFL offenses do well and the Jaguars do not disappoint — absolutely killing it in the first quarter of games last year.

Jacksonville Jaguars

Offense: First-quarter offense

The Jaguars ranked first in offensive DVOA in the first quarter of games but just 21st the rest of the time. The bad news is that there’s no evidence of any year-to-year consistency in teams being better on offense early or late in games.

Aside from Bortles’ ability in the red zone, this is an incredibly important piece of the puzzle for the Jaguars this season. If you’re going to rely on Leonard Fournette and the offensive line to carry you, you’ll need to rack up those points early in the game.

But like Schatz says, the correlation year to year, so we’ll have to treat this trend with a grain of salt and see if the Jaguars can duplicate their early-game success in 2018.