After a 33-yard scramble by Trevor Lawrence to set the Jacksonville Jaguars up inside the 3-yard line for a first-and-goal situation in the second quarter Sunday, Doug Pederson took his second timeout.
The play call coming out of said timeout was a handoff to Travis Etienne Jr. who was stuffed two yards into the Jaguars’ backfield. The next play was an incomplete pass, after which the Jaguars were forced to use their third timeout of the half with 4:51 to go in the second quarter (Lawrence spiked the football in frustration). The play call coming out of said timeout was a pass for Lawrence against six Cleveland Browns defenders positioned either right in front of the end zone or inside it. There did not appear to be any complementary receiver action to legally pick a defender and create an opening. Lawrence fired the ball toward Gabe Davis and it fell incomplete.
The team settled for a field goal and, because it had already burned through all three timeouts, had no ability to prevent the Browns from winnowing the clock down and keeping the ball until halftime (after which they received the kick).
Two trips to the red zone later (the Jaguars missed a field goal in the third quarter after Lawrence was sacked for a loss of eight yards on third down), with a little less than nine minutes to play in the fourth quarter, the team had a touchdown nullified via illegal shift. A pass on second down to Etienne gained no yardage and, on third down, Lawrence appeared to pass up an open wide receiver at the pylon (or couldn’t see him thanks to a screaming Browns defender coming from his front side) to sky the ball out of the back of the end zone.
Pederson, despite trailing by six points, opted to kick the field goal.
If that’s not enough of a portrait of a team completely out of sorts, we can go on …
The Browns, having gathered some steam, committed a series of egregious penalties that knocked themselves out of field goal range, resulting in a punt. Jacksonville got the ball at its 1-yard line and put Lawrence in the shotgun with a six-man protection. Myles Garrett was single-blocked on the left side and forced Lawrence to step up into a penetrating Alex Wright. By the time Lawrence finished what looked like a designed three-step drop, the television broadcast view showed just one receiver who had run a route short enough to be considered an option. Etienne had stopped chipping to flare out as a receiver, though he, too, was about three yards deep in the end zone and was spied by a linebacker. Obviously, the Jaguars were hit with a safety.
Coming out of the safety, the Jaguars, despite having two timeouts and in desperate need of field position, opted to try an onside punt, which was easily free caught well inside Browns territory. The Browns helped the Jaguars by calling an ill-advised play-action pass for Deshaun Watson, stopping the clock with 1:33 left to play. But because the drive had started at the Jaguars’ 42-yard line, Lawrence got the ball back at his own 10-yard line with no timeouts for an impossible 90-yard drive.
This is a long preamble to a simple point: The Jaguars are playing like a team that, all at once, does not trust its quarterback or trusts him so much that they’ll leave him in borderline heroic situations against a Hells Angels pass rush. Through two weeks, the offense has been consistently marred by administrative mistakes or fundamental mistakes and has appeared panic-stricken in the red zone, leading to a 20–17 loss in Week 1 followed by an 18–13 loss in Week 2. The Jaguars’ first two red-zone positions Sunday totaled a negative eight yards and just three points.
Despite being just two weeks into the season, Pederson now stares down an absolutely monstrous schedule—road games against the Buffalo Bills and Houston Texans are next, followed by the Green Bay Packers, Philadelphia Eagles and Minnesota Vikings before the bye—and the perception that he is wasting away the most valuable prime athletic years of his quarterback’s career. By signing Lawrence to a monstrous five-year, $275 million extension, the Jaguars have already declared which side of the line they are standing. Fair or not, it’s up to Pederson to prove them right or get out of the way for someone who can.
It’s now also up to Pederson to do this with questions about his job—Jacksonville has lost eight of its past nine regular-season games—likely starting to surface. Last year, as the Los Angeles Chargers struggled despite having a supremely talented quarterback, then-head coach Brandon Staley became chum in the water for coaches who obviously saw the job as an attractive opening and began to move in. The same could soon be said for Pederson and the Jaguars.
Each one of the decisions he made Sunday, described above, could have had a perfectly good reason behind them but are now being folded into the optics of chaos. Lawrence’s NFL career was born in chaos thanks to Urban Meyer and going back in that direction isn’t an option for an organization that has had to battle against a reputation for incapability for decades now.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Doug Pederson Running Out of Time to Reach Trevor Lawrences’s Ceiling.
