Gus Bradley was a dead man walking for a long time. His fate looked sealed after a Thursday Night Football blowout loss to the Tennessee Titans back in Week 8, but after seven more losses, the Jacksonville Jaguars finally sent him out the door and temporarily replaced him with Doug Marrone before Week 16.
Scapegoating Gus Bradley as the problem is bad for the Jaguars’ future
The Jaguars don’t look like they’ll make sweeping changes, and that’s a dangerous choice.
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No coach in the history of the NFL has a lower win percentage than Bradley among coaches with more than 60 games on the sideline. It was an easy choice made way too late by Jaguars owner Shad Khan, but what became more important was the much tougher choices Jacksonville faced in January.
After a 3-13 season, the Jaguars had to ask: Was Gus Bradley the reason the team wasn’t a contender, or do more changes need to be made?
Khan evidently believed the former, extending general manager Dave Caldwell for two seasons and hiring Marrone as the team’s head coach.
“Dave Caldwell agreed and will now be charged with exploring all options to hire the best head coach possible to lead what I feel is an extremely talented team and reward a very loyal and patient fan base in Jacksonville,” Khan said in his statement announcing the firing of Bradley.
Caldwell was hired by the team in Jan. 2013 and tasked with building a team from scratch. Nine days after Caldwell was added to the fold, Bradley was hired as the team’s head coach.
The pair were seemingly tied together, but Khan decided Caldwell will stay with the Jaguars and be paired with another coach.
That sends a message that Caldwell built a winning roster, but Bradley couldn’t lead the team to those wins. And now it’ll be up to Marrone to find the success that evaded Bradley.
In Week 15, the Jaguars blew a fourth quarter lead for the fourth time in five weeks. That lends credence to the possibility that Caldwell’s roster is good enough to get wins, but Bradley can’t get the job done.
The Jaguars’ blowout victory over the Tennessee Titans in Week 16 seemed to drive home that point, but Jacksonville jumped out to a big lead over the Indianapolis Colts in Week 17 and lost when Andrew Luck orchestrated a come-from-behind win. The blown lead showed many of the same problems that the Jaguars had under Bradley.
“Gus isn’t the only man to blame here,” Caldwell said at a press conference in December. “When you find yourself as an organization where we are right now, there’s a lot of blame to go around, including myself. Talking with Shad, we’ve talked at length about what we need to do to correct this, and that means looking at all facets of our football organization.”
The Jaguars finished the year No. 25 in points scored and No. 25 in points allowed. The single biggest problem was the play of Blake Bortles, who ended the season with a 78.8 passer rating — near the bottom of the NFL, among starting quarterbacks.
In just 46 career games, Bortles has thrown 11 pick-sixes. That’s tied with players like Troy Aikman, Boomer Esiason, Jeff Garcia, and Archie Manning, who all played over 120 career games.
Bortles was Caldwell’s decision. As were unsuccessful free agent acquisitions like Julius Thomas, Toby Gerhart, and Zane Beadles, and his first ever NFL draft pick Luke Joeckel.
But it appears as though the Jaguars are ready to give Bortles another chance in 2017. In the final two games of the season with Marrone as coach, Bortles passed for 626 yards with two touchdowns and no interceptions.
Caldwell may have built a roster capable of winning, but there isn’t much proof of that, even if there is young talent to be excited about. And maybe the biggest danger of extending Caldwell and hiring Marrone is that the team looks set to stick behind Bortles, a third-year quarterback who looks to be headed in the wrong direction.
“There won’t be any mandates for anybody who comes in,” Caldwell said after the firing of Bradley. “My vision in looking at this team is that we’re going into our first year.
“I do still believe in Blake very much, but the head coach will have a lot of input into who the quarterback will be.”
The Jaguars needed to take a real tough look in the mirror and decide if Bradley kept a good team from being good, or if bigger changes were necessary. Khan’s decisions indicate he’s scapegoating Bradley and that may keep the Jaguars from turning around their consistent struggles.
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