When the Philadelphia Eagles collapsed late in 2023, it wasn't hard to see parallels between the team's last two regimes -- both of which enjoyed unexpectedly sudden surges to Super Bowl contention, only to fall back to Earth just as swiftly. Now, one of the coaches from this ongoing boom-or-bust Eagles era, Super Bowl LII champion Doug Pederson, just might be reliving history of his own with the Jacksonville Jaguars. And it's not pretty.
Desperate to get their first win of the 2024 season on Monday night, Pederson's Jaguars instead looked as deflated as they've ever been, mercifully yanking starters before the buzzer of a 47-10 blowout loss to the Buffalo Bills. Former No. 1 draft pick Trevor Lawrence, now one of the four highest-paid quarterbacks in the league, flailed around like he's done for much of the last year. And Pederson had no choice but to leave the door open for wholesale change in his postgame news conference, admitting with gutting resignation, at 0-3, that "this is who we are."
Yes. It's also who Pederson's teams have been. Change the names of the players, the colors of the uniforms, the stadiums in which they're trotted out, and you're left with almost a perfect replica of Pederson's late-stage Eagles. Not the Super Bowl-winning Eagles. The Eagles who crashed, burned and required a lightning-speed rebuild.
Let's start by acknowledging the good, even if it's the furthest thing on which Duval County cares to dwell: Pederson is a respected leader of men. It's why the Eagles tapped him to replace Chip Kelly almost a decade ago, and it made him the perfect figurehead for a squad full of underdogs in that spirited 2017 title run. It's also why the Jaguars hired him in 2022, to wash away the stink of a failed Urban Meyer marriage, rebuild locker-room morale, and uplift the ailing Lawrence.
On both occasions -- in Philly, and then in Jacksonville -- Pederson's everyman presence helped produce a contender sooner than anticipated. No. 2 overall pick Carson Wentz went from gutsy gunslinger to full-on MVP candidate for the Eagles, earning the No. 1 seed that ultimately helped Nick Foles go the distance. Lawrence, meanwhile, went from erratic underachiever to Pro Bowl playmaker in his first year under Pederson, overcoming a four-pick first half against the Los Angeles Chargers in his playoff debut to make a 27-point comeback. Jacksonville was rightfully primed to be Pederson's next great underdog story, complete with a splashy young signal-caller.
So where did it all go wrong? Pederson's past provides some clues. The post-2017 Eagles suffered from questionable personnel gambles by the front office, to be sure. Wentz practically dragged a collection of backup wide receivers to the postseason in 2019. And yet 2020, when everything went south in a 4-11-1 cratering, primarily stemmed from a total breakdown in offensive infrastructure. Pederson refused to carry a traditional offensive coordinator, perhaps soured by the middling reception to prior promotion Mike Groh. The weekly designs lacked the creative punch that powered the aggressive Eagles of Pederson's peak. And Wentz succumbed to it all, leaning too much on his big arm and less on timely decisions, becoming a turnover machine before a late-year benching that effectively ended his relationship with the club.
Wentz, mind you, had only cashed in with a lucrative long-term contract extension the previous year. That's another key to this puzzle: At the time of the Eagles' big-money commitment to Wentz, the former star was coming off a solid, if unspectacular, 2018 season in which he played just 11 games due to injury. The Eagles were paying partly for his 2017 breakout, but mostly for projection, betting that his durability and occasionally reckless tendencies would subside under the security blanket of a rich new deal. Sound familiar? It was just this summer, immediately upon news of Lawrence's mega-extension with the Jags, that fans began wondering what, exactly, Jacksonville was paying $275 million for.
That's not to say Lawrence lacks physical gifts. He most clearly does not. The way the ball leaves his hand, it's fairly easy to identify him as a top-10 talent. The problem, as it was with Wentz in the late stage of his what-could-have-been Eagles tenure, has been either an unwillingness or an inability to play smart football within Pederson's offense. That's on the quarterback. It's also on the offense. Pederson, see, only split from the Eagles following that disastrous 2020 campaign after he and the team reportedly failed to agree on plans to install Press Taylor, then a passing game coordinator, as the new chief of offense. And it's Taylor who's served as Pederson's much-maligned coordinator and play-caller in Jacksonville.
At 0-3, and 1-8 over their last nine games dating back to 2023, the Jaguars' issues run much deeper than a couple of individuals, be it the guy throwing the ball and the guy dialing up the plays. Where's the vaunted pass rush? Or the new speedsters out wide? For a team headlined, however, by an offensive coach in Pederson, a highly-paid quarterback in Lawrence, and a lineup decorated with former first-round talents at the skill spots, it's telling that Jacksonville's most glaring issue is incompetence with the ball in its hands. It's what put an abrupt end to Pederson's lightning-in-a-bottle Eagles era not long ago, and, for as beloved as the coach may be personally, it's what's promising to bring sudden and demonstrable change in Jacksonville.
