Remember when the Jacksonville Jaguars beat the defending AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs in Week 5 to improve to 4-1 on the season? Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?
Since then, the Jaguars have lost 20-12 to the Seattle Seahawks and then got pasted 35-7 at home in London to the Los Angeles Rams to fall to 4-3. They’re still in second place in a woeful AFC South, but they have to fix the stupid mistakes.
“We have to simplify,” head coach Liam Coen said Wednesday. “We have to play cleaner.”
Defensive end and former No. 1-overall pick Travon Walker agrees with Coen.
“It’s time for us to take a step back as we go into this bye and observe the things we made those same mistakes on and just try our best not to make those same mistakes over again,” he said.
Jacksonville Jaguars need to knock off the penalties
When it comes to shooting yourself in the foot and making mistakes in the NFL, you can usually start with turnovers (the Jags are surprisingly second in the league in turnover margin at +1.1) and penalties. To the latter point, the Jaguars are the most penalized team in the NFL with 9.3 per game. That’s ridiculous and it’s never good to be ranked worse than the Raiders in penalties in just about any era.
The Jaguars have committed 23 penalties for 195 yards in the last two weeks alone!
“New. New … new fundamentals, new techniques, new what you’re asking them to do, new style of play,” Coen said. “You’re ultimately all new together and so maybe some of the fundamentals get blurred. The answer for me to fix penalties is to simplify what we’re asking them to do.
“You have to emphasize it. I don’t know how to emphasize it more. I don’t want to have these guys playing in the back of their minds, ‘If I do this, I’m going to get a penalty.’ It’s not about that. It’s about, ‘Guys, we have to play cleaner.’
“We have got to play cleaner with our hands, with our feet, with our mind. There are some controllables, some non-controllable, there’s some bad luck. Until we clean up our football, it’s going to be hard.”
Jacksonville Jaguars’ players know it’s on them to fix things
Jaguars center and offensive captain Robert Hainsey is frustrated with the mental mistakes as well. The AFC South is infinitely winnable (although the Colts are clearly becoming a big problem) and a few errors here or there could be the difference in a playoff spot and a January golf trip.
“The things that show up obviously are the penalties, just those operational errors,” Hainsey said. “Operation, penalties, missed assignments … those are all things that are super controllable as a group and as individuals.
“Everyone’s good and you’re competing and you’re battling, but when you add all those up it becomes way too many and the negatives just decrease your chances of continuing drives and scoring on drives by astronomical numbers every time you get one.
“Every time you have a negative play, you’re really fighting an uphill battle, even if it just is one. It’s only one play, but it almost kills that drive statistically.”
The Jaguars are off on a bye this week and then fly to Las Vegas (they could walk if they got started now) to take on a moribund Raiders team. Should be a good place to start fixing mistakes and get back in the win column.
Like Heavy Sports’s content? Be sure to follow us.
This article was originally published on Heavy Sports
The post One Specific Area is Killing the Jacksonville Jaguars appeared first on Heavy Sports.