Did Derrick Henry kill the Jacksonville Jaguars franchise?

How a few runs from Derrick Henry changed the Jacksonville Jaguars franchise.

Derrick Henry is no joke, just ask the burning husk of what used to be the Jacksonville Jaguars franchise.

What you have to understand about the Jaguars is that they are a franchise that has struggled to adapt to the modern NFL, much like the Tennessee Titans. So much of that falls on the failure of front offices to bring in a franchise QB or to surround average QBs with top talent.

In the last 20 seasons, the Jacksonville Jaguars have only had 3(!) winning seasons. To put that in perspective for Titans fans who think they have had it hard lately, Tennessee has had 10 winning seasons in the same stretch.

This matters because a “winning culture” is a fragile thing in the NFL and if you are trying to change a culture of losing into that winning culture, you have to find a way to have sustained success.

That is why many Titans fans (and fans in the AFC South) took notice of the Jaguars 10-6 record in the 2017 season. They had just done the hard part by taking a massive leap forward from 3 wins one year to 10 wins the next, they were just one or two more good seasons away from having an entire locker room that believes in the team.

Unbeknownst to most, the reason for the eventual demise of the Jacksonville Jaguars had already gotten into the heads of that front office. The team was metaphorically dead by the time the 2018 season started, and the cause of death was Derrick Henry.

Setting the stage

Let me go back to 2017 and remind you what the vibe was around the Jacksonville Jaguars.

In Week 1, the Jaguars destroyed the Houston Texans and forced Deshaun Watson on the field early after a 10-sack day from the newly dubbed “Sacksonville” Jaguars. The Jags looked hot and they looked poised to be a defensive force in the NFL heading into a game against Tennessee in Week 2.

The Jags were favorites at home against a Titans team that had just lost to the Oakland Raiders to start the season.

By the end of that Sunday, the home favorites were confused after the game was controlled almost entirely by the Tennessee Titans running game. The team who had just beaten a team like the Houston Texans on the road had basically gotten run over by the Titans.

Fast forward to the end of the season and the Jags lose a game vs the Titans that gives Tennessee a playoff berth. While the Jags shrugged it off as them not really trying to win a game that was meaningless to them, it was also a game where Jacksonville got to see Derrick Henry’s real potential for the first time.

Despite a mediocre stat line, Henry scored on a 66-yard screen pass and in that moment he became the symbol that most people associated with the Titans sweep of the Jacksonville Jaguars that season.

Henry was a problem that needed to be dealt with.

Huge draft miss

The Jaguars had gotten to the playoffs on the back of their pass defense, and decided that Blake Bortles was good enough to repeat what he did in 2017.

Remember that decision, it will be important later.

To support Bortles, the Jaguars decided to make a huge move in free agency and sign Andrew Norwell, the biggest free agent to hit the guard market since Andy Levitre (insert foreshadowing joke here).

The rest of the offseason was pretty vanilla, but the draft was a mystery. Matt Miller was projecting an offensive lineman, Mike Mayock was projecting a tight end, but no one thought that the pick they ended up making was bad.

For some reason, a mediocre career at Florida and some solid athletic testing had analysts fawning over future Jacksonville backup defensive lineman Taven Bryan. McShay called it the best pick of a great Jags draft class:

"Jacksonville did a great job getting value from all four of its picks in Rounds 1-4, but Bryan was No. 21 on my board. When teams prioritize the best player available over need, it generally works — and this is another example. Jacksonville has an elite defense (especially its defensive line), but we just saw in Philadelphia how valuable a deep D-line rotation can be over the course of a season. Bryan has elite first-step quickness and outstanding short-area explosiveness. He needs some refinement, but he will create disruption for offenses while he learns better technique. A strength for Jacksonville becomes stronger."

It never made sense to me to roll the dice on Blake Bortles again for a player that was never even that good

Now, when you pick 29 you really don’t have a lot of options to land a great QB…except…the Jaguars did and it was a player that everyone thought was worth a roll of the dice for a team that was stacked at other positions.

That was Lamar Jackson, I wonder whatever happened to that guy…

Now…why do you think a team that got swept by the Tennessee Titans because of an inability to stop Derrick Henry, would choose to invest another premium pick in a front seven player despite clear needs on offense and good players on the board? I wonder…

Cracks start to show

Now the Jacksonville Jaguars are heading into the 2018 season with all of this momentum and it had gotten to the point where USA Today predicted the Jaguars to end up as the #1 seed in the AFC ahead of the New England Patriots with a 12-4 record. (Also a good time to tell you that USA Today not being high on the Titans here is probably a good thing for Tennessee.)

But, that isn’t what happened. In fact, the Jaguars didn’t even get half as many wins as they were projected finishing at just 5-11.

So what happened? How did Jacksonville just fall off of a cliff? Well, the descent took a month to happen, but when it happened it was a steep fall.

After four games the Jaguars were 3-1 with their one loss belonging to the Tennessee Titans who again road the running game to a win because Marcus Mariota was suffering from a rash of injuries again.

Then then the Jaguars lost seven straight and finished the season on a 2-10 run. During that stretch, they scored more than 20 points twice.

Remember that decision to keep Bortles and to pass on Lamar Jackson to take Taven Bryan? Well, Jackson was developing into one of the most difficult players in the NFL to stop and Taven Bryan had 1 sack and 20 tackles.

The Jaguars defense was fed up with carrying an offense that wouldn’t do their share of the work, and the franchise took this to heart and tried to go after a quarterback who was at least expected to raise the low bar in place.

One more try

Armed with Nick Foles and a massive new contract, the Jaguars were ready to rebound from a very disappointing season.

2019 was going to be the season where the defense rebounded and went back to being elite with the addition of yet another 1st round draft pick spent front-seven player. On top of that, analysts had convinced themselves that with a passing game that would hopefully be better (it wasn’t), Leonard Fournette would finally make them look right for their pre-draft analysis.

This was going to be the year where everything clicked for that team.

Through the first half of the season in 2019, it really seemed like they might have had a chance and they even beat the Tennessee Titans for the first time in years. With a 4-5 record that included a one-point loss to Houston and one-score losses to New Orleans and Carolina, and people were confident in the Jags.

Except, those games were really more of an aberration that came from playing with a young quarterback in Gardner Minshew that no one really had any film on. Once the NFL started catching up, a change had to be made during the bye week once Nick Foles was healthy.

With a game under his belt, Nick Foles made his first trip to Nashville to play the Titans, and that is where Derrick Henry was waiting patiently.

See, the first matchup of the season caught the Titans in a bad spot. Starting guard and should-be free agent Jamil Douglas was getting worked by Calais Campbell like he owed him a favor and without Taylor Lewan, the Titans just didn’t have it in them to overcome the Thursday night road game in Week 3.

However, now Derrick Henry and the Titans offensive line was healthy and available while Ryan Tannehill was finding his stride as one of the most efficient QBs in the NFL.

Henry scored two touchdowns in that game and ran for 160 yards on less than 20 carries. That is when the Jaguars fell apart.

Hitting the reset button

After that game, the Jaguars went just 2-4 in their remaining 6 games and Nick Foles was benched quickly the week after the loss to the Titans.

During the last two years, you can make a case that the Jaguars’ inability to stop Derrick Henry with any sort of consistency led to confusion and doubt in that franchise and the success the Titans offense had against Jacksonville made it very hard to justify paying their top players.

Jalen Ramsey and Calais Campbell have been traded and Yannick Ngakoue desperately wants out. Meanwhile, nearly all of the remaining defenders from the 2017 season have been released. This is a quote from today:

From the best defense in the NFL in 2017 to a team that has at least seven spots up for grabs. How does a team fall off like that without mass retirements or deals expiring? Not only that but what has to happen to make an entire franchise collapse like this? You could make the argument that it looks exactly like this TL;DR version:

1. Great year in 2017 is marred by a sweep from the Titans thanks in large part to the run game led by a young Derrick Henry.
2. Complacency leads to Bortles being brought back, but to combat the idea that teams need to run the ball on the Jaguars instead of dealing with their pass rushers, the Jags use their first pick on Taven Bryan and not Lamar Jackson.
3. Despite a mirage of hope early in 2019, all that money that they invested in Foles was a waste and Garnder Minshew isn’t the answer either and a despondent defense gets obliterated on national tv to effectively end the season.
4. Mass exodus of talent on defense and no clear vision on what to do next.