Putting Trevor Lawrence Back Together Again
The "great fall" of a rookie season that the young quarterback endured was a result of, and must be fixed by, the perennially unstable Jacksonville Jaguars franchise.
Somewhere, among the infinite branches of the professional football multiverse, there’s a universe in which an otherwise clean hit, laid by linebacker Mo Lewis of the New York Jets on quarterback Drew Bledsoe in Week 2 of the 2001 NFL season, doesn’t result in Bledsoe suffering something called a “hemothorax” (in which Bledsoe was internally bleeding out a pint of blood each hour). Bledsoe’s backup fills in for a couple of mostly unspectacular weeks, before Bill Belichick re-inserts the healthy Bledsoe back into the starting role—dramatically altering the career trajectory of the aforementioned backup quarterback, who goes by the name of Thomas Edward Patrick Brady.
There’s a universe in which some team takes a flier on the skinny Pennsylvanian kid named Joe Montana who helped the Notre Dame Fighting Irish win the National Championship in 1977, before he fell to the 82nd overall pick in the 1979 NFL Draft—owned, of course, by the San Francisco 49ers. In that universe, Bill Walsh doesn’t land the quarterback seemingly born to orchestrate his West Coast Offense, and the duo never come together to become of the five greatest head coaches and five greatest quarterbacks respectively.
Somewhere else, there’s a universe in which Patrick Mahomes isn’t drafted by Andy Reid, meaning Mahomes never receives the incredible mentorship setup he received in Kansas City, starts too early for the woebegone team that did end up drafting him, and doesn’t emerge as one of the most unique quarterback talents we’ve seen in our football-viewing lifetime.
There's a universe in which the Miami Dolphins' medical staff doesn't get in the way of the team signing quarterback Drew Brees in the spring of 2006, so Brees never gets the chance to sign with the New Orleans Saints and partner up with new head coach Sean Payton to average just under five thousand passing yards (!?!?) per season between 2007 and 2016.
There’s one in which Trent Green doesn't blow out his knee in the preseason of 1999, and he becomes the maestro of “The Greatest Show On Turf” in St. Louis—while the name “Kurt Warner” forever remains in anonymity.
There’s also one in which the Atlanta Falcons decline the overtures of Ron Wolf and the Green Bay Packers, and never trade Brett Favre—followed by Jerry Glanville’s disdain for the young quarterback resulting in the coach torpedoing Favre’s career before it ever got started.
There’s another one in which a young Troy Aikman, disgusted by Dallas Cowboys head coach Jimmy Johnson showing zero sense of commitment to him after using a supplemental draft pick on quarterback Steve Walsh (whom Johnson coached at the University of Miami) only months after selecting Aikman, demands that the team trades him—and Johnson actually grants said request.
There’s even a universe in which the Baltimore Colts select Stanford University quarterback John Elway with the first overall pick of the 1983 NFL Draft, and Colts’ owner Bob Irsay even further pre-empts the efforts of his General Manager (Ernie Accorsi) to trade Elway. Out of disgust for Irsay’s antics and the general incompetence of head coach Frank Kush, Jack Elway advises his son to accept the grand overtures of New York Yankees’ owner George Steinbrenner, and John Elway goes on to have a distinguished baseball career wearing pinstripes and playing right field for the Bronx Bombers1.
The extent to which so many football fans enjoy chortling at the misfortune of successful and talented college quarterbacks who end up failing in the NFL, forever earning the branding of being a “Draft bust,” is a pretty sad and dreary reflection of our society overall, if we’re being honest.
And the only thing these "fans” might love more than said chortling is playing armchair quarterback (pun intended) to diagnose why those guys ended up as busts. They’ll blame their race (let’s not pretend this isn’t a thing to far too many people), their upbringing (and subsequent sense of entitlement), playing style, coaching, collegiate supporting cast and scheme, their enablers (not enough people talk about this particular reason in my opinion), and/or a myriad of other things directly attributable to the player themselves. And while so many of those are contributing factors to one of these prospects becoming a “bust,” I think the biggest reason they end up as such is a lot more simple and obvious than any of the other reasons broached during the usual watercooler pontification.
Every instance of the oft-repeated “picking quarterbacks is an art and not a science” cliché that you hear is nothing but a groupthink red herring for perhaps the most obvious (and most critical) reason they succeed or fail. And the reason why scouts never want to talk about it is because it’s the one thing that, for all the film and workouts they watch, they still can’t provide any intel about it:
The overall surrounding circumstances in which that quarterback ends up.
People may not like hearing this, but the truth is that the combination of a team’s day-to-day functionality (or lack of dysfunction), the astuteness of coaching staff, the synchronicity between the team’s front office and said coaching staff, and the general “supporting ecosystem” a team provides, has a significantly greater impact on a young quarterback’s chances for success as ANYTHING else related to his own football talents.
Put much more bluntly: it doesn’t matter how good a rookie quarterback may be, if his teammates suck, his coaches suck, his organization sucks, and his owner sucks. Nobody is going to succeed in those circumstances.
All of this (finally) brings us to the subject of this column: quarterback Trevor Lawrence of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
The box score-watching section of NFL fandom who want to already write off Lawrence as a bust does have some empirical evidence to support their (absolutely preposterous) claim. At the end of his rookie season, Lawrence ranked:
28th among all quarterbacks in touchdown passes thrown (among quarterbacks with at least 300 passing attempts)
28th in QBR
29th in completion percentage
31st in yards per attempt (with a groin-grabbingly short distance of only 6.0 yards per throw)
If you throw out the wonkiness of Weeks #1 and #18 of the NFL season, Lawrence threw twice as many interceptions (14) as he did touchdown passes (7). He was also near the bottom of the list of his peers, in terms of the highest percentage of interceptions thrown per passing attempt.
With all of that being said: if you somehow think that those numbers are more reflective of Lawrence’s performance and potential as a professional quarterback, as opposed to a reflection of the football hellscape he found himself in during the 2021 NFL season, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention.
It’s not just about the fact that Urban Meyer had no interest in doing anything that would be for the benefit of his players, as he was too busy kicking his kicker and treating his coaching staff how Vladimir Putin treats his subordinates.
There’s a reason why multiple players on the 2021 Jaguars said the same thing: that Lawrence has everything you could ask for in a quarterback, but there was a system-wide failure in putting him in positions to actually use his talents. That’s a fair assessment, considering if you’re comparing football teams to ecosystems, then the best comparison for Jacksonville would be Chernobyl. And from what I understand, it’s to develop any crops in a nuclear wasteland that’ll be uninhabitable for the next 10,000 years.
Maybe it’s worth taking a look at the fact that no NFL team suffered from dropped passes more than the Jaguars this past season ( the guys paid to catch passes from Lawrence dropped more than 6% of the targets thrown in their collective direction).
Or the fact that their maniacal head coach decided to off the team’s nose to spite its face when benching maybe their best player on offense (running back James Robinson), then denying it, and then reinstating him only after Lawrence and company practically begged Meyer to do so.
Or the fact that the Jaguars asked Lawrence to throw the ball over 600 times last season (he finished 6th in the NFL in most passing attempts per game), and yet he didn’t have a single pass catcher with more than 850 receiving yards last season. That almost feels like a mathematical impossibility, yet that’s exactly happened.
And just for good measure: it’s not exactly like Lawrence was getting any modicum of help from the guys on the opposite side of the football, considering the Jaguars ranked 31st in overall defensive DVOA last season. So when you decide to judge Lawrence’s rookie season body of work based almost exclusively on what you’re seeing in box scores, don’t forget to add in the fact that literally 75% of his passing attempts came when his team was either tied with or losing to the opponent.
So yeah, maybe we should slow down for at least a minute or two before we all start going full comic book guy and declaring Lawrence to be the “worst. quarterback. ever.”2
One of the beliefs that I’m continuing to workshop (but becoming increasingly confident in nonetheless) is the idea that drafting at the quarterback position in the NFL is going the way of drafting basically anyone in the NBA: a player’s polish and production coming out of college are substantially (and increasingly) outweighed by the overall athletic toolkit, his positional talents, and a preternatural ability to play the game itself. 3
In today’s NFL, a team who finds themselves with the opportunity to draft a kid endowed with such gifts must find a way to place him in a scheme that amplifies his existing strengths, while giving them a roadmap to work on their areas needing development.
In case you haven’t figured out where I’m going yet:
Trevor Lawrence has everything you could ask for, in terms of being one of those types of “singular destroyers of defensive worlds.”
He’s 6’6,” and at “only” 213lbs, he’s still about as easy to tackle as a wildebeest. He has the ability to thread passes into the tightest of "NFL windows." He can attack any level of the defense with ease. He can move safeties with his eyes. He has the God-given athletic ability to take seemingly broken plays, and turn them into backbreakers for the opposing defense. He demonstrates a level of footwork and pocket awareness you simply don't see from guys his age.
Lawrence was, and still remains, and off-the-charts talent—as in, his aggregation of talents well exceeds the boundaries of talent levels we see for the majority of guys entering the NFL.
But even for a quarterback as immensely talented as Lawrence, I cautioned the same thing days before the Jaguars made him the first overall pick of the 2021 NFL Draft:
“The limit to [Lawrence’s] upside will only be defined or capped by the competence of the NFL coaches whom he gets to work with.”
While I still don’t believe Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan has the football competence to understand the difference between a quarterback and a refund, he at least didn’t get in the way of two critical steps towards not squandering the talents of arguably the most gifted quarterback prospect entering the NFL since Andrew Luck:
He actually went through with firing Urban Meyer4
He replaced Meyer with a quarterback-friendly (and recent Super Bowl-winning) coach in Doug Pederson.5
To be clear: an “offensive-minded” head coach alone, without the proper infrastructure further down on the org chart, does not an offensive juggernaut make; just ask fans of the Chicago Bears how things went under Matt Nagy.
So while “The Jacksonville Jacksonville made a” and “smart move” almost always feels like a non sequitur these days, I will say I like what they’ve done with Lawrence’s development in mind, in addition to hiring Pederson—namely, the additional quarterback-friendly coaching infrastructure they’ve put in place, with the specific goal of getting everything they can out of Lawrence:
Press Taylor as the Offensive Coordinator: the brother of Cincinnati Bengals’ Head Coach Zac Taylor, Pederson thought so highly of Press Taylor — who reportedly was the one who came up with the “Philly Special” play —that one of the inciting incidents that led to Pederson’s departure from Philadelphia was his steadfast conviction in making Taylor the Offensive Coordinator; Lurie disagreed, and Pederson decided he’d rather quit than have a different offensive coordinator foisted on him.
Jim Bob Cooter as the Passing Game Coordinator: the long-time offensive coordinator to Matthew Stafford in Detroit (Stafford averaged over 4,200 passing yards per year the first five seasons that Cooter oversaw the Lions’ offense) and a former offensive assistant of whom Peyton Manning spoke highly. Cooter did some offensive gameplan consulting for Philadelphia Eagles Head Coach Nick Sirianni last year.
Mike McCoy as the Quarterbacks Coach: McCoy was once one of the most highly-respected offensive minds in football, but after a disastrous two-year stint between 2017 and 2018 (he was hired and fired in less than a season by the Denver Broncos and then hired and fired again in less than one season by the Arizona Cardinals), there were whispers that his philosophies hadn’t evolved alongside the way the rest of the NFL was evolving offensively. But it’s also likely that he was somewhat of a victim of the Peter Principle—meaning that while he might’ve been overmatched as a coordinator, he could still prove quite effective as the primary day-to-day guy for Lawrence.
One of the interesting takeaways from this triumvirate—or quartet, if you count Pederson—is that Lawrence will have a support system of people who were all quarterbacks themselves, meaning they’ll be able to see the game—and the responsibilities he carries as a quarterback—in the same ways he does.
But at a macro level, it’s clear that Pederson is trying to install a very similar infrastructure around Lawrence that he did for Carson Wentz during the latter’s time in Philadelphia, when Frank Reich and John DeFilippo (also both former quarterbacks themselves) were Pederson’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.
The upgrades around Lawrence also extend to the on-field personnel as well. Jacksonville added Christian Kirk (albeit through a ridiculous overpay contract) and Evan Engram6 as pass-catching options. Travis Etienne (who couldn’t hide his happiness for the regime change) returns after missing his rookie season with an injury, and should have an instant rapport with Lawrence, considering the two played together at Clemson. Jacksonville threw a boatload of money to sign away Brandon Scherff7 at guard, and used their third round pick at the center spot, to help shore up the interior of their offensive line. And that’s not even mentioning any of the upgrades to last year’s porous defense.
Simply put: the Jaguars have done a commendable job in renovating and resuscitating the infrastructure around Lawrence, with the hopes that those changes effectively allow Lawrence to hit the reset button from the disaster that was the 2021 season for the Jaguars, and develop amidst circumstances set up for him to succeed.
Year 2 is a critical juncture for young quarterbacks in today's NFL. It's when we saw guys like Patrick Mahomes, Justin Herbert, Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow and Kyler Murray make the proverbial “leap.” In his second season under Pederson back in Philadelphia, Carson Wentz had one of the most singularly-dominant quarterbacking performances we’ve seen from a young quarterback over the past decade. Even Jared Goff turned a miserable rookie season (under Jeff Fisher) into a Pro Bowl season in year two (under Sean McVay).
The early signs are there for Lawrence to make that jump. Though two of his biggest flaws—”hero ball” decisions and lack of experience reading defenses at the line of scrimmage8—have continued to manifest in the NFL, everyone who sees him on a daily basis keeps saying the same thing: the more reps he gets, the more comfortable he starts to feel, and the more the game slows down for him, the more those shortcomings will go away—and the more his preternatural ability to play the quarterback position will continue to shine.
If you’re someone with any vested interest in success, the biggest thing you have to hope for is the dysfunctionality of this franchise finding a way to ruin everything they’ve done around him—like taking a well-cobbled dish with an thoughtful flavor scheme, and taking a colossal dump in it. ■
2022 NFL Picks — Week 1
My picks in bold
Jacksonville at Washington (-2.5)
Baltimore (-7) at NY Jets
Philadelphia (-4) at Detroit
Indianapolis (-7) at Houston
San Francisco (-7) at Chicago
Pittsburgh at Cincinnati (-6.5)
New Orleans (-5.5) at Atlanta
New England at Miami (-3.5)
Cleveland at Carolina (pick 'em)
Kansas City (-6) at Arizona
Green Bay (-1.5) at Minnesota
Las Vegas at LA Chargers (-3.5)
Tampa Bay (-2.5) at Dallas
Denver (-6.5) at Seattle
As a colossal football nerd, the “Elway to Marino” episode of ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary series is easily my favorite. As Bill Simmons once said, this episode—and the 1983 NFL Draft alone—presents around a half-dozen “What If?” scenarios that would’ve altered the entire landscape of the NFL for the rest of the decade, and beyond.
Two of the most fascinating of those scenarios include:
What if the decades-long hatred between then-Commissioner Pete Rozelle and (now deceased) Los Angeles Raiders owner Al Davis doesn’t exist— meaning Rozelle never puts the kibosh on the Draft day deal between the Los Angeles Raiders and the Chicago Bears, the Bears add Howie Long to a defense that would already go down as the greatest defensive unit in the history of the NFL, and in exchange for Long, the Bears provide the Raiders the requisite Draft capital to meet the asking price set by Accorsi, paving the way for the Raiders to acquire Elway (whom Davis was increasingly intrigued by?)
What if Bill Walsh’s worries about Joe Montana’s slight frame and potential durability issues actually led him to follow through with trading Montana to the Colts, in exchange for the rights to Elway? The episode clearly calls out the aforementioned concerns harbored by Walsh, and Walsh’s intrigue around what the fleet-footed and rocket-armed Elway could accomplish in a West Coast Offense setup.
Let’s also not forget about the fact that team owner Shad Khan continues to retain General Manager Trent Baalke—a slimy, sycophantic politician who is almost universally reviled by basically everyone who crosses paths with him, but has the knack for telling head-up-their-ass billionaires exactly what they want to hear as a method for self-preservation.
It just reaffirms that Khan doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to know the first thing about running a successful NFL team).
The perfect examples of this? Look at Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen—two guys with enormous upside but a terrifying list of scouting “cons” on their scouting report. In particular, go back and watch what they did in the most recent AFC Championship Game. That game left every other NFL team with a chilling revelation: you need a certified wrecking ball at the quarterback position, if you really want your team to have a chance to compete at the highest levels.
Don’t shrug your shoulders and say “well duh!” in response to this, considering that Khan reportedly had to agonize over this decision for weeks, and didn’t make this move until a week before Christmas, despite the fact that Meyer had accumulated a laundry-list of termination-worthy offenses by early October.
Let’s not forget that Khan and company arrived at Pederson only after:
openly flirting with making Bill O’Brien the head coach, despite the fact that O’Brien—as the offensive coordinator at the University of Alabama—designed the most unimaginative, clogged-toilet-level of offenses I’ve seen in nearly a decade of closely watching Crimson Tide football. It was only after Shad Khan’s son Tony Khan—the only high-ranking official in the Jaguars front office who doesn’t make their living by tossing the owner’s salad—(thankfully) intervened in the process that the Jaguars decided to look at other options.
Completing several successful interviews with Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich, but ultimately deciding not to hire him because of his blind spot for Baalke; Leftwich basically said “it’s me or [Baalke],” and Khan chose the latter.
For the record, Engram is an “upgrade” in name only. Let’s not forget that Engram was tied for the second-most drops by a tight end in the NFL last year. Lawrence is going to suffer some serious PTSD from 2021 when Engram continues to drop everything thrown his way.
Watching the Washington [I still refuse to use the stupid new team name] burn the bridge with two of the three players named to an All-Pro team since the turn of the century (Scherff and Trent Williams) makes me want to binge snack on a family-sized carton of Tide pods.
I will say it until I’m blue in the face: Dabo Swinney and his staff did virtually nothing to prepare Lawrence for success in the NFL. That’s probably because Swinney is an excellent recruiter and program builder, but a mediocre (at best) football coach.