Poorly constructed Jaguars roster gets more and more exposed, each week

The Jacksonville Jaguars were blown out again on Sunday, 45-10 at the hands of the Los Angeles Chargers in a game where they looked completely outmatched. To top it off, they looked out matched against a bad football team... again. The Jaguars have been boat raced in their last five games, three of which have come at the hands of teams with losing records, two of which have about the same record as the Jaguars.

It’s left many scratching their heads and wondering what happened? Most expected the offense to be shaky, but the defense has been downright atrocious and on Sunday it was so bad the offense would have had to have been nearly perfect to even keep the game competitive.

I wrote last week how this regime’s fatal flaw was their inability to admit mistakes in self-evaluation, and on Sunday all I could think about while watching Austin Ekler take a screen pass what seemed like infinity yards was how bad they misjudged the talent on their roster, as a whole.

For this you can just look at the Jaguars defense.

It was a good defense, great even, that started to show signs in the 2016 season. They had the amazing run in 2017 and in 2018, despite everything else, was still really good. For the start of the 2019 season they got off shaky but had some flashes of greatness and then the bottom just completely fell out.

For those asking what happened, a lot of it is defensive coordinator Todd Wash who should probably be fired by the time this is published, but the majority of it is Tom Coughlin and David Caldwell’s inability to properly gauge their roster.

If you look at the 2017 defense and what they’ve lost, really they have only upgraded two spots and down graded a lot of others. Josh Allen is an upgrade over Dante Fowler and Ronnie Harrison is an upgrade over Barry Church, but otherwise you’re currently without and have not replaced the likes of Paul Posluszny, Telvin Smith, Marcell Dareus, Malik Jackson and Jalen Ramsey.

That’s nearly half of the defensive starters, and while expecting to have even replacements for all of them is not realistic, they completely whiffed on their replacements. Taven Bryan is mediocre at best, a far cry from what even an on-the-decline Jackson was giving them inside. Abry Jones plays hard, but he just doesn’t seem like a full-time starting defensive tackle. Myles Jack has been an absolute disaster at middle linebacker and A.J. Bouye has been getting exposed as the No. 1 corner.

The team was overly reliant on the defense bogging down games and keeping it in striking distance for the past two seasons and once again thought that would be the case in 2019, thinking adding someone like Foles who probably won’t lose you games, would help push them back over the hunt.

As we all know that blew up in their face, but the bigger blow up was how much they didn’t expect there to be a drop off on the defense. They coasted on a loaded, talent-wise, defense to keep them in games and now that they don’t have that their roster is being exposed for what it actually is: A poorly constructed roster with a lack of depth due to the need to be supplemented by high priced free agents because draft picks flopped.

This isn’t even taking a look at the offense, mind you, it’s looking at how this front office took a real strength and gutted it because they so horribly misjudged what they had done.