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Michael DiRocco, ESPN Staff WriterOct 12, 2024, 01:14 PM ET
- Michael DiRocco is an NFL reporter at ESPN. DiRocco covers the Jacksonville Jaguars. He previously covered the University of Florida for over a decade for ESPN.com and Florida Times-Union. DiRocco graduated from Jacksonville University and is a multiple APSE award winner. You can follow DiRocco on Twitter at @ESPNdirocco.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jaguars owner Shad Khan has voiced his support for general manager Trent Baalke and coach Doug Pederson after the team’s 1-4 start.
Khan told the Florida Times-Union in an interview in London that while he is disappointed with the way the season has started, he is more concerned with how the Jaguars finish the season, beginning with Sunday’s game against the Chicago Bears at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
“I still believe in them,” Khan told the newspaper Saturday. “I believe in the players, I believe in the coaching staff. I believe in Trent. Obviously, the results are disappointing for all of them, just as well as me or any other Jaguar fan, but the key thing one has to understand [is] we have evolved and really got to a level. I think we’ve got the players, we’ve got the coaching, we’ve got the facilities.”
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Other than a 47-10 blowout at Buffalo on “Monday Night Football” in Week 3 — which Khan called embarrassing — the other three losses have been one-score games by a combined 12 points.
The Jaguars got their first victory last week against the Indianapolis Colts, but the team needed a 49-yard field goal by rookie kicker Cam Little with 17 seconds remaining to win 37-34 after blowing a 14-point fourth-quarter lead.
“Every game you go to, you want to do everything to win it, and this is the NFL, that’s hard,” Khan told the newspaper. “Every game is competitive. A loss is a loss, but [it’s about] how you lose. To me, the three games we lost early in the season, it’s disappointing, [but] we could have won them.”
Khan told the team the night before training camp that this is the best Jaguars team ever assembled and that “winning now is the expectation.” However, only one team has made the playoffs after an 0-4 start: the 1992 San Diego Chargers, who won 11 of their next 12 games to claim the AFC West title and beat the Kansas City Chiefs in a wild-card game before losing to the Miami Dolphins in the divisional round.
The Jaguars did rally from a 2-6 start in 2022 to win the AFC South and make the playoffs, but it might be tough to pull off a similar comeback this season with games remaining against Green Bay, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Detroit and the New York Jets — especially with a long list of injuries and the way quarterback Trevor Lawrence and the offense (until last week) underperformed.
Pederson is 19-20 in his three-plus seasons with the Jaguars, but that includes a 2-9 record in the team’s past 10 games dating to the start of December 2023.
However, the Jaguars won five in a row to end 2022 with a 9-8 record and duplicated that record in 2023, which marks the first time Jacksonville has posted back-to-back winning seasons since 2004-05.
But the Jaguars also were 8-3 and in contention for the No. 1 seed in the AFC last season before finishing 1-5, a stretch that coincided with injuries to wide receiver Christian Kirk (abdomen/groin) and Lawrence (ankle, concussion and shoulder).
Still, finishing with winning records the past two seasons is significant progress for a franchise that had lost 10 or more games 10 times in an 11-season span from 2011 to 2021, and Khan acknowledged that to the newspaper.
“I expect us to be competitive and winning every year, and we have graduated to that point and not be someone we don’t know,” he said. “So sharing my expectations, I believe that. The coaches who are there, players who are there, they’re coming here to win, and if they’re not comfortable with that, they shouldn’t be here. That’s the team institution we want to be.”
