When the Jacksonville Jaguars hit their bye week a year ago, the team was 3-7 and looked like a group that simply didn’t know how to win football games.
“We’re just learning things the hard way, you know?” Jaguars coach Doug Pederson said in a press conference after one of five October 2022 losses. “We just have to keep hanging together and keep working. Just like I told the guys after the game, we do that, stick together, you know, good things are going to happen for them, and we’ll get it flipped around.”
That switch finally flipped in the latter half of the 2022 season when Jacksonville won its last five regular season games to steal the AFC South crown.
Along the way, the Jaguars had a flair for the dramatic, erasing a 17-point second half deficit to beat the Dallas Cowboys, scoring a defensive touchdown in the last three minutes to beat the Tennessee Titans, and digging out of a 27-0 hole against the Los Angeles Chargers in the playoffs.
It was a welcomed change for a Jaguars squad that previously found ways to blow it in crunch time. But Jacksonville’s habit for coming from behind was one the team wanted to kick before the 2023 season started.
“There were a lot of things last year that got us down and we had to really scrap and get back in the game and make a lot of comebacks. That taught us what not to do,” Jaguars tight end Evan Engram said.
Yet, the Jaguars found themselves in a familiar spot when they needed a fourth quarter comeback to win in Week 1 of the 2023 season. That victory was followed by back-to-back losses, including an embarrassing 20-point loss to the Houston Texans at home.
“That was a nice little punch in the mouth like, ‘Hey, we still gotta go earn everything that we want,'” Engram said. “That was a nice wake up call for us. For us to understand that we know what we have, but there are a lot of things we have to make happen on the field and in the week in our process for it to translate into us getting the dub.”
Since then, the Jaguars have been the ones jumping out to big leads. Jacksonville has led by double-digits in each of the last five weeks and, when a couple of those games got uncomfortably tight late, the Jaguars used the lessons learned a year ago to gut out wins.
“We’ve done it,” Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence said. “We’ve been able to do it so much in the past that I think we have that confidence of — whether you talk about the playoff game last year, the Dallas game before that, even this season in New Orleans, not playing great, they kind of have all the momentum at the end of the game — we find a way to score.
“You have to be able to fight through it, battle back, play the next play. We’ve gotten good at that.”
