Jaguars vs. Patriots live stream: How to watch AFC Championship 2018 online

Jacksonville isn’t supposed to be here. The Pittsburgh Steelers were counting on it.

But the Jaguars took advantage of every opportunity a favored Steelers team gave them last weekend, turning four turnovers (one fumble, one interception, and two on downs after failed fourth-and-short plays) into 28 points before stunning a sea of black-and-gold fans at Heinz Field. It was a confidence-boosting win for a team with no shortage of swagger — but its biggest challenge awaits Sunday afternoon.

The New England Patriots will appear in their seventh straight AFC title game, extending their own NFL record in the process. Bill Belichick’s team pummeled an overmatched Titans squad in Foxborough to get here, though it had some unnecessary help from some questionable calls along the way. The Patriots haven’t lost a game to the Jaguars since 1999, and that 10-1 stretch includes a win in the 1997 AFC Championship.

The two teams meet at 3:05 p.m. ET. The game will be broadcast live on CBS (live stream via CBS All Access or fuboTV).

Tom Brady has struggled against Tom Coughlin teams with vicious pass rushes. The veteran head coach, now executive vice president of football operations for the Jaguars, laid the blueprint for beating Brady in the playoffs by handing him his only two Super Bowl defeats while he was with the Giants. He’ll have to recreate that magic to send his new franchise to its first NFL title game.

Ben Roethlisberger has struggled against the Jaguars historically, and that looked like it was going to be the case again when he started the game with an interception thrown to Myles Jack and a fumble that was returned by Telvin Smith for a touchdown. But he finished the game with five touchdowns — a much better showing than his zero touchdowns and five interceptions against the Jaguars in October.

Still, the Jaguars held off Pittsburgh’s second-half surge and put the game away with 61-yard and 75-yard touchdown drives in the fourth quarter.

A report from ESPN’s Seth Wickersham says that tensions between the team’s twin icons, head coach Bill Belichick, and quarterback Tom Brady, have festered to the point that the situation might just be untenable going forward.

In the middle of it is Robert Kraft, the team’s owner, who inserted himself into the fray in a meeting with Belichick this season that ended with Kraft instructing his head coach to trade backup quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo,

On the surface, last week’s win looks like a classic Brady playoff outing. He threw for 337 yards and three touchdowns, targeting many of the players who’d missed games late in the season — James White, Chris Hogan — along the way. But the veteran quarterback also needed 53 passes to get there, and the bulk of his receptions came on short-to-intermediate routes as he struggled to connect with players like Brandin Cooks on deep balls. The Jaguars defense is too fast to get burned by screens — and Brady will have to step up his game to have a similar performance Sunday.

Our Super Bowl picks are in! Four out of seven experts think the Jaguars will advance to the big game, while the three who took the Patriots are joined by OddsShark’s computer in their dissent.