What the hell happened to the Jaguars?

Early in the season, it felt safe to anoint the Jacksonville Jaguars as the best team in the NFL. On Sept. 16, the team bullied the New England Patriots in a 31-20 win in which the defense held Tom Brady in check and Blake Bortles shredded the Patriots defense.

Now the Jaguars look like a disaster.

After getting resoundingly defeated by the Kansas City Chiefs, and destroyed by the struggling Dallas Cowboys, 40-7, Blake Bortles was benched in a 20-7 loss to the Houston Texans. He was put in the starting lineup again for a London game against the Eagles, but the Jaguars lost, 24-18, dropping to 3-5 on the year.

So what gives? How did the Jaguars go from a Super Bowl favorite to fraudulent so quickly?

The Jaguars haven’t had the best injury luck. The injured reserve is littered with players who should’ve been offensive contributors like offensive tackles Cam Robinson and Josh Wells, tight ends Austin Seferian-Jenkins and Niles Paul, and wide receiver Marqise Lee.

With Leonard Fournette also sidelined for most of the year, the Jaguars need to rely on the combination of T.J. Yeldon and recently acquired Carlos Hyde at running back. And with such limited options for Blake Bortles to throw to, the Jaguars are relying on Keelan Cole, Dede Westbrook, and Donte Moncrief to step up. That hasn’t worked out.

Those injuries help explain why the Jaguars offense is as anemic as ever, but the struggles of Bortles are tough to ignore. His supporting cast is bad, but he’s still probably the league leader in inexplicably horrible decisions like this lob into triple coverage against the Cowboys that was intercepted.

For years, Bortles had random games of brilliance to counter his random moments of disaster. But without much help around him, it’s been consistently poor showings from the quarterback.

He struggles to make most throws and the Jaguars’ pass offense has devolved into little more than crossing routes and short passing. It’s made things easy on defenses that can focus on stopping the run and keeping everything in front of them.

With the offense struggling, the defense hasn’t been able to carry the Jaguars the way it did in 2017.

The Jaguars defense has dealt with its share of injuries, but its six 2017 Pro Bowl players — AJ Bouye, Calais Campbell, Malik Jackson, Yannick Ngakoue, Jalen Ramsey, and Telvin Smith — have mostly been ready to go. The only one to miss a game was Bouye, who sat out the trip to London.

And yet, it’s that side of the ball that’s caused Jaguars fans to scratch their heads.

One of the Jaguars’ most egregiously bad defensive plays against the Cowboys came just before halftime when Dak Prescott found Cole Beasley for his second touchdown of the day. Jacksonville dropped both of its defensive tackles, leaving just two defensive ends to rush Prescott and nine players in coverage.

The extra men in coverage didn’t matter, however. Beasley was still wide open in the end zone:

Dropping the middle of the defensive line was so odd and ineffectual that CBS color commentator Tony Romo was convinced it had to have been a miscommunication and one of the defensive linemen was supposed to rush.

Regardless if there were supposed to be eight or nine men in coverage, it was another painfully conservative call by Jaguars defensive coordinator Todd Wash that stripped away so much of what’s great about the Jacksonville defense.

The strength of the Jaguars since the beginning of 2017 has been the ferocious pass rush led by Ngakoue, Campbell, and Jackson, coupled with the tight coverage of Ramsey and Bouye. But with the team playing an odd amount of zone defense, the rushers haven’t had time to get home and the cornerbacks haven’t been able to eliminate opposing receivers.

It’s the reason why Beasley was able to go off with nine receptions for 101 yards and two touchdowns. He found gaping holes in a zone defense that looked confused most of the day.

The odd scheme decisions haven’t gone unnoticed by the people who are regularly keeping an eye on the Jaguars, either:

Despite the play calling, the Jaguars defense has still been good, overall. They did a lot to slow down Carson Wentz and the Eagles in Week 8 — even when they lost the cornerbacks who were second, third, fourth, and fifth on the depth chart due to injuries.

The bigger issue is that when the Jaguars defense doesn’t have a ridiculously great day, the team has close to no chance at a win.

It’s hard to be optimistic about the Jacksonville offense, but if there’s a glass-half-full way at looking things it’s that the Jaguars found their rhythm in the back half of the 2017 season.

Despite some impressive victories, the Jaguars were 3-3 with frustrating losses to the Titans, Jets, and Rams, mostly due to the fact that the Bortles-led offense was averaging just 203.6 passing yards per game.

The offense eventually found a rhythm, Bortles’ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde act started producing more good days than bad, and the Jaguars won six of their next seven.

But there’s a bigger hole and many more red flags this time around. The defense wasn’t nearly this shaky early in the year, and the offense hadn’t been sapped of so much skill talent by injuries. Eventually Fournette will return, but unless Bortles is able to play the way he did against the Patriots when he had 376 passing yards and four touchdowns, the Jaguars offense may be bad all year.

Are the Jaguars still a Super Bowl contender? Not right now they’re not.