Trevor Tracker: Jaguars QB ‘looks great’ at OTAs, is ranked as top-five NFL passer, joins The Journey podcast, and more

Every so often, a special athlete comes around and transcends his or her team, league, and even sport in popularity.

Babe Ruth. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. Serena Williams. Joey Chestnut. LeBron James.

For the Jacksonville Jaguars, that special athlete is Trevor Lawrence. The football messiah. The prince who was promised. The quarterback who has brought one of the losingest franchises in North American major sports history to the brink of perennial Super Bowl contention.

Lawrence is entering his third NFL season; his second with head coach Doug Pederson, and his first with wide receiver Calvin Ridley. There will be many touchdowns.

In this day and age, there will be much more than that. Lawrence’s press conference quotes, game day outfits, Waffle House order, the way he throws his hair back with one hand -- it’ll all be covered.

Today we are introducing the first edition of the Trevor Tracker, a column dedicated to giving you any and all QB1 content available.

Update from OTAs

Jaguars media members aren’t able to offer much analysis from voluntary offseason workouts -- partly due to PR restrictions, but also because it’s football without pads.

Thankfully, Demetrius Harvey of Jacksonville.com provided an update on how Lawrence looks on the practice field.

Calvin Ridley told Juston Lewis (also of jax dot com): “Last Thursday out here was a pretty impressive day for Trevor. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of great throws and I was like, wow, really?”

Breakdowns and rankings from film guys

Former NFL quarterback J.T. O’Sullivan of The QB School recently broke down Lawrence’s tape from the 2023 Divisional Round against Kansas City.

I love the way that Trevor Lawrence is playing, I think he’s got a very special skillset, dude can run it as well as spin it, and was dealing with all sorts of little details or weird nuances where you’re not on the same page. I think it got kind of magnified because of some upfront free runners, and so getting hit like that starts to impact your time clock, how you’re playing the position, led to some maybe errant misses that you don’t see in some kind of bizarro decisions, compounding the kind of circumstances late in the game.

But man, he’s still got the ability to drive the ball down the field, to be super precise, to play with great rhythm. Now you’re just looking for everyone around him to kind of elevate their game, to be able to protect him more, to be able to be a little bit more efficient in the drop back game as far as precision, as far as details, as far as the route running, the timing of some of these combinations to look for to take that next step as we move into the next year.

Derrik Klassen, who charts quarterbacks for Reception Perception, dropped some Lawrence clips on the timeline as well.

Klassen also recently appeared on The Athletic Football Show with Robert Mays and Nate Tice. The podcast prompt was drafting quarterbacks you’d want on your team for the next three seasons. Trevor Lawrence came in at fifth overall behind Mahomes, Allen, Burrow, and Jackson (all of whom Jacksonville will face in 2023).

On the Mina Kimes Show this week, Steven Ruiz (who ranked Lawrence seventh in The Ringer’s final 2022 quarterback rankings) also selected him fifth in another offseason quarterback draft podcast, after Mahomes, Allen, Herbert, and Burrow.

I think [Lawrence] can do all of the stuff that we talk about these great quarterbacks doing in terms of processing, I think you saw the improvement from year one to year two, the improvement you want to see. And then you throw in the physical attributes, and then you throw in the Justin Herbert’s ability to mitigate pressure thing... he does everything you want in a modern quarterback: he can move, he has the arm, he can mitigate pressure, he knows how to play football, he has a good feel for the game. The sky’s the limit with him.

And I love the coaching match, I loved him getting Doug Peterson, I just think that’s a match made in heaven. We saw him at Clemson in this rudimentary offense that didn’t ask him to do much, he was running the same concepts over and over again, and now he’s got like a pure West Coast coach, who’s really teaching him how to get through progressions faster, and I think that was the one concern people had with him coming out of Clemson, and two years in, I don’t think it’s a problem at all, I don’t think it’s an issue at all, and we’re seeing his natural talents kind of take over.

Ruiz and Tice both mentioned they had Lawrence ranked over Burrow.

National shoutout

Former NFL defensive lineman Gerald McCoy predicted “Trevor Lawrence will be a finalist for the MVP” on Good Morning Football last week.

The reason I say, is man, Doug Pederson, what he was able to do with him last year, if you go back and look before his fall from grace what he did with Carson Wentz in his second year- Trevor Lawrence made a huge jump, and I think people are forgetting Calvin Ridley is officially back. They have Zay Jones, Travis Etienne is healthy.

...And the thing that people are forgetting, is that at the end of last season last year, they built up confidence. And when you have a leader in Trevor Lawrence, who I belive will make an even bigger jump this year, with the confidence they built going toe-to-toe with Kansas City after the HUGE comeback? I think people need to look out for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Podcast spot

Earlier this month, QB1 was a featured podcast guest on The Journey with Darien Rencher.

Lawrence and Rencher spent four years together in Clemson, South Carolina, where they suited up for the Tigers and had a major role in college football being played in 2020.

The former teammates reunited for an episode on Rencher’s show to discuss the pandemic season, Clemson’s national championship appearances, Lawrence’s first two years in the league, the differences between college and the pros, and much more.

It might be the longest and most in-depth interview Lawrence has ever done.

The NFL game is so much different than college, and I’ve learned that a lot my first two years, of just, you know, no matter how the season’s going, whether it’s a stretch of a couple games, or it’s been like the first half of the season, it’s such a long year that you can- I mean there definitely is a point where it’s too late, you know, if you struggle for too long and you get in a rut and you can’t get out of it, then, obviously there is a time, you know, you see teams that miss the playoffs towards the end of the season. But, really, it’s not really ever too late, and I think if you look at what our team did, as long as you have like the right leadership, obviously you have to have good players, and every team in the NFL does have good players, but if you use them the right way, and you have to have great coaches, but the leadership’s so important because it’s such a long year. And no matter how good you are, like you look at the Chiefs and the Eagles, they’re a little bit of an outlier, I mean they only lost I think three, four games each, which is obviously an incredible season, but even that, like compared to college, I remember when we were in college, if you lost a game, you thought you didn’t have a chance to make the playoffs, any of that stuff.

So, it’s just so much different, and you gotta have the right people and leaders and voices in your locker room, because the season is gonna be- there’s gonna be ups and downs no matter how good your team is, so I think that’s something I’ve learned, is how to manage those, and not let those mess with your emotions, ‘cause you’re gonna have, even as an individual, you’re going to have some bad games in the 17-game season. You know, you limit those, and it’s how bad are your bad games, like don’t let your bad games be, you know, as a quarterback have a ton of turnovers you know, whatever it may be, but you’re going to have those moments, but how do you week in and week out continue to be yourself and trust what got you there and the process and your team, because, obviously I felt confident in our leadership from the beginning, so that was easier, that was easier to do even when we lost five straight in October.

Trevor’s wife Marissa joined the show too, which was recently released as a seperate podcast.