2018 Midseason Review: Part One

We have reached (and even slightly surpassed) the midway point of the 2018 NFL season. Every team in the league has played at least eight games, and we’re entering the downhill stretch of the regular season. Over the next few weeks the playoff field will begin to take shape, as one by one 20 teams are eliminated to leave 12 competing for the final prize. So now seems like as good a time as any to step back and see where we stand.

This is the sixth year I’ve done this, and I’m going to be following the same format as in the past. Over two posts I will group teams into various tiers based on how I think they stack up now, from the Super Bowl contenders down to the teams fighting for the first pick in the draft.

I’m starting today with the bottom half of the league. In the five years I’ve done this, only six of the 80 teams I’ve listed in this bottom half have gone on to make the postseason. In all likelihood there will probably be another one that makes it through this year. But the vast majority of these teams are far away from competing for a spot in the postseason, and it’s reasonable to write them off starting today.

(FYI, don't pay any attention to the order within each tier. It's pretty much random.)

Who the Hell Knows

 

If there are going to be playoff teams that come out of this post, they will be from this tier. At times these teams look like legitimate contenders, while at others they get rushed off the field by teams they should be able to match. I could see any of these teams getting hot and making a run down the stretch, and I could also see them finishing with around the same win total they have now.

Miami Dolphins (5-4)

Congratulations to the Dolphins, the only team with a winning record I like little enough to drop into the bottom half of the league. They have five wins, but three of those have come thanks to games against the Jets and the Raiders. Their early season success was bolstered by ridiculous success forcing turnovers in the red zone, and since this regressed to normal levels they have won only two of their last six games.

That said, there is still a very easy path to the playoffs for them. They have two games left against Buffalo and one each against the Colts and the Jaguars. If they win all of those, or if they get three and steal one of the cross conference matchups against the Vikings or the Packers, they can get to nine wins which is right about where the last playoff spot in the AFC will end up. Getting Ryan Tannehill back will help as well, assuming he ever recovers from the still slightly mysterious shoulder injury.

Baltimore Ravens (4-5)

In a way I kind of feel bad for the Ravens. They have put together the best defense in the NFL this year, and it simply doesn’t matter. The balance of power has shifted so far to the offensive side of the ball that absolute dominance on defense isn’t enough to get a team to the playoffs, as three straight defeats to high powered offenses have revealed. The Ravens actually did a reasonable job holding New Orleans, Carolina, and Pittsburgh in check, but they still need their own offense to be able to put up nearly 30 points a game just to compete.

Simply put, the offense is not capable of doing that. There has been a rush of calls for Lamar Jackson to take over as the team has fallen off, and I think by the end of this year he will be the starter for this team. But they still have an inexperienced offensive line and no dynamic athletes who can make plays on their own. They’ve built a team that can’t win in the modern NFL, and it is probably going to take a couple years for them to fix this.

Tennessee Titans (4-4)

This team is all over the place this year. A couple weeks ago they lost back to back games against the Bills and the Ravens, failing to score even a single point against the latter. The following week they came within a two point conversion of knocking off the Chargers, and on Monday night they looked excellent in a road victory over the Cowboys. Marcus Mariota hasn’t taken the leap people expected after being freed from Mike Mularkey, but he still makes occasional intriguing plays to carry an offense without much supporting talent.

I’m not sure I can see this team making a run at the playoffs, but I can’t rule it out either. They have winnable games remaining against both the New York squads and a pair against the Colts, and if they can knock off the Texans in Houston they have a chance to get back into the division race. But that relies on them finding a level of consistency they haven’t reached yet this year, and I think their main goal should be to try to identify the talent on offense worth keeping around, and hope that they can take a real step forward in year two.

In Other Circumstances…

These aren’t necessarily bad teams. In fact, if a few things had broken a little differently they might be in position to make a run to the playoffs this year. But they aren’t good enough to dig their ways out of the holes they now find themselves in, and they should realistically turn their focus towards making sure the same failures don’t repeat in 2019.

Indianapolis Colts (3-5)

There was a lot of work that needed to be done with this team at the start of the season, and no one is shocked that they are looking up towards the playoffs. But they still have to be feeling a little bit of regret as they look back at missed opportunities earlier in the year. They had opportunities to beat the Eagles and the Texans and let them slip away, and they should have beaten the Jets a couple weeks ago.

This team isn’t good, but they are trending up. Andrew Luck has settled in after some rust over his first few starts, and he looks like he’s found an excellent rapport with new coach Frank Reich. They’ve finally built an offensive line that can protect him, and this offense only gets better with each passing week. They will win more games over the second half of the season than they did over the first, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see them threaten the playoffs, even if their tough early losses have left them too far back to have any real hope.

Detroit Lions (3-5)

The situation is grim for the Lions after being shut down by the Vikings this past weekend, and they are now looking up at everyone else in their division. They traded away one of their best offensive players a week ago, their coach is feuding with the local media, and their performance seems to get worse on the field every week.

Except. Except that Detroit’s best games have come against their toughest competition. They dominated the Patriots, outdueled the Dolphins, and survived against the Packers. These are the sort of wins you would expect to see from a legitimate contender, not a team that’s lost to the Jets, 49ers, and Cowboys. They’ve proven that they can play with the best teams in the league, and now they’ll have an offseason to figure out what it will take to get that kind of effort every week next year.

Jacksonville Jaguars (3-5)

This is the same team that nearly made it to the Super Bowl a year ago. Yes, their pass rush has fallen off some, and yes, they haven’t forced as many turnovers. They have more injuries, and they haven’t gotten off to as many early leads, forcing Blake Bortles into less comfortable situations. When things break right for them, they still have the ability to beat teams like the Patriots. But after four straight losses, none of which were particularly close, it seems like the season has slipped away from the once hopeful Jaguars.

This team has the ability to bounce back next year, but they need to learn some resiliency. The locker room is filled with big personalities, and there has been a lot of tension as they’ve struggled over the past few weeks. They need to learn that it’s okay for things to go wrong, that they can still win if they get behind early and they don’t have to press for everything to work out. Bortles is what Bortles is, but there are plenty of good pieces on this roster, from Jalen Ramsey on defense to Keelan Cole on offense, setting them up for more success down the road.

Denver Broncos (3-6)

Is anyone really surprised that the Case Keenum signing did not work out? Outside of an all too brief appearance by Peyton Manning this team has been floundering at the quarterback position for twenty years now, and bringing in another journeyman veteran wasn’t going to magically fix things. The emergence of Phillip Lindsay and Royce Freeman has certainly made life easier for the offense, but it doesn’t matter with a quarterback they can’t trust to run the offense.

This team still has pieces to compete, and they need to be aggressive about fixing the quarterback spot. Von Miller and Chris Harris aren’t going to be around forever, and they need to take advantage of the talent while it’s still there on the roster. The good news is that it looks like they did an excellent job in this year’s draft, giving them the sort of young talent they can build around starting new next year.

Are We Sure They Know They’re Playing Football?

There was never any real hope for these teams, and the first half of the season has only served to confirm what we suspected all along. They’ll spend the second half of the season trying to figure out what they have on their roster that’s worth preserving for the future, and what parts are holding them back and need to be tossed aside.

New York Jets (3-6)

The opening game against the Lions was a lot of fun. Since then, things have gotten ugly. Sam Darnold has been bad for the most part this year, covering up for it with pleasant memories of his first game on Monday Night Football. He still hits an occasional big play down the field, but his accuracy is all over the place, and his decision making isn’t much better. He has a lot of time to grow before any decisions need to be made, but it is a grim start to his career and gives plenty of reason to ponder whether they should make a change in the coaching staff this offseason.

There isn’t much else to say about this team. Whatever they are building towards, I don’t know how many of the players currently on this team will be a part of this. Outside of Leonard Williams, Jamal Adams, and maybe Quincy Enunwa, I don’t see a single player on this roster who will ever be anything more than a role player. They need star talent, and fortunately they’ll be in position to draft it next year.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers (3-5)

All the attention has gone to the quarterback position in Tampa Bay, which has conveniently covered for the fact that this defense is absolutely dreadful, particularly against the pass. They are giving up more than 300 yards per game through the air, and have managed only one interception against 22 touchdown passes. They basically turn every quarterback they face into Drew Brees. No matter who you start at quarterback, you’re not going to win that battle.

Fortunately, defense is a lot easier to turn around than offense, and with pieces like DeSean Jackson and Mike Evans in place, I could see them taking a leap next year. Of course, I’ve said that each of the past five seasons, and it never comes to fruition. They still don’t have a clue of what they are going to be doing long term at quarterback, and a lot is going to ride on what route they end up going with their coaching staff this offseason.

Cleveland Browns (2-6-1)

There were some exciting moments at the start of the year, but nine games in the Browns have fallen back to their familiar trainwreck status. Baker Mayfield has hit a lot of bumps in his rookie season, and they finally torched their coaching staff, only to elevate walking turd Gregg Williams to the head role. To his credit the defense is playing very well this year, led by the young pair Myles Garrett and Larry Ogunjobi.

This team has done a good job tearing things down over the past few years, and now they are in a position to start building up again. It would be good to see them win a few more games down the stretch, but honestly that doesn’t matter in the long run. They need to step back and go a new direction with the coaching staff, and continue to make good decisions selecting young players in the draft. Of course, with Jimmy Haslam still running things there are clear limits to how good their decisions can be. But there is hope in Cleveland, for the first time in a decade.

San Francisco 49ers (2-7)

The season for the 49ers obviously ended when Jimmy Garoppolo tore his ACL, but it wasn’t really going anywhere before that. It’s unfortunate that they don’t have this season to develop and evaluate their big money quarterback, but I don’t think he would have added more than two or three victories to their final total. If anything his loss puts them in better position to snag an impact player in the draft, whether that is an edge pass rusher to make up for the disappointment of Solomon Thomas or a weapon to contribute to the passing game.

The fact that this team hasn’t totally bottomed out with CJ Beathard and Nick Mullens starting at quarterback suggests that there are some good things going on here. Rookie tackle Mike McGlinchey has been solid, and young players DeForest Buckner, Reuben Foster, and Fred Warner show signs of a core that can be built around on defense. And of course, Kyle Shanahan remains one of the best play designers and callers in the league. If they can continue to add to the talent onto this roster, there is a bright future here.

Dallas Cowboys (3-5)

This is the folly of building a team around the running game. When everything goes perfectly as it did two years ago, you can control games and run away from the competition. When things start to get messy though, you don’t have enough versatility to win in different ways. The Cowboys hoped that Dak Prescott would develop to give them that versatility, but so far he has failed to do so, struggling to hit even routine passes when his team demands it of him.

Things don’t look any better for the Cowboys in the long term than they do the rest of the season. The Prescott issue will remain until he either proves himself worthy or they move on altogether, and after trading a first round pick for Amari Cooper they are running short on options to improve their team. They have some interesting young athletes on defense, but it will take time to pull them together, and even if they improve that side of the ball they will still have serious questions to answer on offense.

Crimes Against the Sport

There are bad teams in the league, and then there are these teams. Maybe it feels like this every year, but it seems like this season in particular the bottom feeders are particularly atrocious. Not only do these teams have no shot of making the playoffs, they have very little chances of winning multiple games the rest of the way.

Arizona Cardinals (2-6)

The good news for Arizona: Josh Rosen looks like he’s going to be very good. The bad news: everything else about their roster. No one expected this team to be good this year, but they were expected to have a few bright spots. But instead Patrick Peterson has caused discontent in the locker room, and David Johnson has looked limp and irrelevant since making his way back onto the field.

This team is a long, long way from being competitive, and even a high draft pick next year will not put them in position to win soon. If given a choice to forfeit the rest of their games, it probably wouldn’t be ridiculous to take it. Their goal for the rest of the seasons should be to keep Rosen from being destroyed, so that next year they can maybe play well enough to win four or five games.

Buffalo Bills (2-7)

The true tragedy in Buffalo is how their miserable offense has covered up a strong performance by this defense. Their secondary isn’t making as many big plays as it did a year ago, but they are still excellent at challenging receivers at all levels of the field. Jerry Hughes has come on strong again after a dip last year, and Tremaine Edmunds shows flashes of elite ability in the middle of an inconsistent rookie year.

But this offense is just the worst thing in the NFL right now. They have no capable wide receivers, they lost their two best offensive linemen in the offseason, and the quarterback position has been a revolving door of incompetence. They have to hope that Josh Allen’s return down the stretch will provide them a bit of a spark, something to go with into the offseason so they aren’t stuck with the memory of Nathan Peterman leading them out onto the field.

New York Giants (1-7)

I’ll give the Giants some credit. Unlike the rest of the teams in this tier, they are occasionally fun. Odell Beckham is still a freak of nature who makes plays that no one else in the league can, and now they have a second player who fits that description as well with Saquon Barkley. Barkley is still maddeningly inconsistent, and I don’t buy the Rookie of the Year hype for him. But he’s good for a couple plays each game that are electric in a way very few players in the league can replicate.

It is too bad that every play still goes through Eli Manning. Manning is completely incapable of playing quarterback in the NFL right now. He has no accuracy when trying to throw the ball more than ten yards down the field, and he has no interest in standing in the pocket. But it’s not like the Giants have a more interesting option on the bench, so they might as well humor the guy who brought them two Super Bowls. Just don’t expect the rest of us to watch.

Oakland Raiders (1-7)

I really don’t know what to say about what the Raiders are doing at this point. It is shocking how quickly they have gone from one of the most exciting young teams in the league to the absolute bottom of the barrel. Some of it was just bad luck—the regression of Derek Carr and Amari Cooper notably—but much of it has been self inflicted, as Jon Gruden has come in and artfully stripped this team of its best pieces.

Maybe this will all look brilliant in a couple years. Maybe the three first round selections they have next year will produce three Pro Bowl caliber players. But that’s putting a lot of faith into a front office that has been consistently poor at evaluating talent, and in a coach that has gotten less out of the roster given to him than anyone thought possible.

The Florida Quarterback Project

The 2018 season started from an unusual place. For the first time that I could remember, every team entered the league with at least some plan at the quarterback position. Some had a long term starter they felt they could rely on, others had recently invested a high pick in the draft, while a couple more had just added big money free agents. No team entered 2018 relying on one of the soggy pieces of driftwood that floats around the league, praying for the best and looking forward to next year’s draft.

Of course, it was inevitable that some of these plans would blow up in the teams’ faces. Case Keenum hasn’t been what they expected in Denver. Marcus Mariota hasn’t taken the leap forward everyone expected once he escaped the clutches of Mike Mularkey. And Dak Prescott has continued to regress since his rookie year.

But the biggest issues at quarterback have been located—as most American disasters are—in Florida. The three teams entered the season with some of the more tenuous hopes at the quarterback position, and at the midpoint of the season all three have had their hearts broken by the position. All three are now looking up the standings at the playoff race above them, and down the barrel of imminent questions at the most important position.

Miami Dolphins

Let me describe for you a quarterback. He’s 30 years old and has been up and down throughout his NFL career, showing flashes of sensational ability interspersed with regular struggles. He has plenty of talent, as a former top ten pick out of a Big 12 school, but his career has been derailed by injuries. He missed most of last season due to the recurrence of knee issues that were thought to be behind him, and he hasn’t been on the field for the past few weeks after starting the season at the head of his team.

Obviously from the image above I am describing Ryan Tannehill, the franchise quarterback for the Dolphins since 2012. But I am also describing Sam Bradford, the journeyman veteran now on his fourth team and looking like he’s on his way out of the league.

There is still this view of Tannehill as a young player just waiting to break out, and most people don’t seem to realize how old he actually is. He is the same age as Bradford and Matthew Stafford, a year younger than Andy Dalton and a year older than Cam Newton and Russell Wilson. He is smack in the middle of what should be the best years of his career, and the fact that he hasn’t emerged as a top flight NFL starter by this point suggests that he probably never will.

Tannehill’s season has once again been knocked off the rails by an injury, this time to his throwing shoulder. It is unclear when he’ll be back, or at what capacity he will perform. The Dolphins have elected to hold off on surgery for his shoulder, which is the same thing they did after his knee injury following the 2016 season, only for it to get worse and cost him all of 2017 as well.

Tannehill has only played in five games over the past two years, and the results have been a very mixed bag. On paper his performance over the first three games of this season looks excellent, completing 73% of his passes for 687 yards with eight touchdowns to only two interceptions. The Dolphins got off to a 3-0 start, but there were always signs that things would turn against them. They had unsustainable defensive success in the red zone, and large chunks of Tannehill’s yards came after the catch, including a 74 yard touchdown to Albert Wilson on a pass that traveled less than a foot in the air. And inevitably things did turn around, in back to back blowout losses to the Patriots and the Bengals that saw Tannehill throw for less than 200 yards in each game and have only one touchdown against three interceptions.

The salary cap situation with Tannehill is interesting, largely due to a contract that was structured around the albatross that was Ndamukong Suh. His cap hit this year is only $8.6 million, but next year it balloons to $26.6 million. He’s under contract through 2020, but the Dolphins can save more than $13 million in cap space by releasing him after this year.

I keep going back and forth on this, and I can’t give a clear answer because I don’t really know where the Dolphins are heading as a franchise. Both the Bills and the Jets have decided to scrap the next couple of years in the hopes of building a competitive team once Tom Brady retires. The Dolphins could do the same, but they’d be missing out on the chance to take advantage of an extremely weak middle of the AFC right now. But with the roster they have, and with Tannehill leading it, can they honestly hope to do any better than the first round exit they had two years ago?

I don’t think this is the last year for Tannehill with the Dolphins, but I expect he’ll enter next season in a bit of a lame duck position. A lot will depend on the coaching staff, whether they decide to give Adam Gase another run or jump after a new offensive system that might unlock Tanehill’s potential. But at this point, I think it’s unreasonable to expect a quarterback to suddenly break out in his age 31 season. Tanehill probably just is what he is, and that’s why I expect Miami to have to start over with a fresh young option under center in 2020.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers

The only quarterback situation more perplexing than Miami’s right now is Tampa Bay’s (well, maybe Oakland’s, but that’s just because Jon Gruden is the ultimate wild card.) This seemed like a sure thing only a couple years ago, after first overall selection Jameis Winston showed promise through the early stages of his career. But issues both on and off the field have turned the situation against him, and he is now seated on the bench watching 35 year old journeyman Ryan Fitzpatrick lead the team.

It’s amusing to me that this team has bounced back and forth between these two passers this year, because in truth they are really just the same player. High variance, aggressive passers who can look explosive and dynamic on any given day while looking like they’ve forgotten which team they play for on the next. It was ugly when Winston threw four interceptions this past Sunday, but let’s not forget that Fitzpatrick once threw six of his own in a single game, and at no point in his career has he shown signs of getting over his recklessness.

That is the biggest problem with Winston as well. Turnovers were an issue in his final season at Florida State, and even when they recurred during his first couple years in the NFL the hope was that he would grow out of them. But that has not happened, and midway through his fourth year in the league it is fair to wonder if it ever will.

I think it was a mistake for the Buccaneers to keep Winston on the bench. Fitzpatrick’s start to the season was incredible, but he showed plenty of signs of falling apart by the time the fourth game came around, which is how Winston ended up taking the job over in the first place. That hasn’t changed, and neither has the fact that there really isn’t any reason to play Fitzpatrick in these games. The Buccaneers are 3-4, in the bottom half of the NFC with a roster that doesn’t leave them much upside. They have a handful of winnable games down the stretch, but they are still a longshot to make the playoffs, and Fitzpatrick isn’t going to be the magic piece that puts them over the top. The most important thing they can do is figure out what their plan is at quarterback next year, and that won't happen with Winston on the bench.

Winston was given the fifth year option prior to this season, which means that next year he is due to make just short of $21 million. Assuming he passes a physical at the end of the year, the Buccaneers have the ability to save all of that by cutting him loose. And considering the still lingering questions off the field that cost him the first three games of the season, public perception seems to be trending in that direction.

Winston is a strange player because he does a lot of things extremely well, and a lot of things extremely poorly. The only player since he entered the league with more interceptions is Blake Bortles (we’ll get to him in a minute), and the only other player with at least 1000 attempts and an interception percentage greater than 3% is, of course, Ryan Fitzpatrick. He is a turnover machine, and he is going to have outings like he did against the Bengals a week ago, where his performance costs his team any chance they had to win the game.

On the other hand, Winston is extraordinary at an underrated aspect of the game, and that is picking up first downs, as highlighted by Chase Stuart of Football Perspective. Since 2015 Matt Ryan leads the league with a first down percentage of 38%. Numbers 3-7 on that list are Carson Palmer, Drew Brees, Tom Brady, and Philip Rivers, a who’s who of the top quarterbacks in the league.. And number 2? That would be Winston, who over the course of his career has thrown for first downs on 37.3% of his pass attempts. (Another sneaky name in the top ten of that list? That’s right, Ryan Fitzpatrick.)

A high interception rate and high first down percentage are both functions of the same aspect of Winston's game: his aggressiveness throwing down the field. Part of this is Dirk Koetter’s system, and maybe if the Buccaneers change coaches this offseason they can change Winston’s game enough to cut down on his mistakes. But it’s likely that a great deal of this is simply who he is as a player, and no scheme changes will erase that.

Something that has been on my mind for the past few years is whether quarterbacks might be throwing too few interceptions. The league has steadily transitioned towards more short, safer passes, encouraged by statistics like completion percentage and passer rating that reward this strategy. But is it possible that they are chasing the wrong stats here, much as baseball wasted a century batting their best hitters third in the lineup because that was the best spot to get RBIs? I don’t know, and I’m not sure how to figure it out. But Winston is an excellent test case for teams and coaches that would be interested in a more aggressive passer.

In the end I think the Buccaneers need to move on, as much for Winston as for themselves. But it isn’t something I feel great about. If Winston is in fact the next Fitzpatrick, he could end up drifting through the league for years as a backup and occasional starter just as Fitzpatrick did. And while no one ever regretted not handing Fitzpatrick a long term deal, how many teams actually got better after he left? Fitzpatrick started every game for the Bills in 2011 and 2012, and the next year they split time with EJ Manuel, Thad Lewis, and Jeff Tuel. He then started 9 games for the Titans, and was replaced by Zach Mettenberger, Jake Locker, and Charlie Whitehurst. His time in Houston was followed up by Brian Hoyer, Ryan Mallett, TJ Yates, and Brandon Weeden, while his stint with the Jets led them to starts from Josh McCown and Bryce Petty.

Winston may not be the answer for the Buccaneers, but I have a feeling he’s better than whatever is going to come next.

Jacksonville Jaguars

This should be the easiest one. Blake Bortles has all of the downsides of Winston, with virtually none of the upsides. He throws interceptions at an insane rate, struggles to put together any forward momentum against tough defenses, and routinely costs his team opportunities at victories. Yes he won two playoff games a year ago, but in one of them he actually had more yards rushing than passing. He has been, by just about every measure, the worst quarterback in the league since the day he was drafted, and yet somehow he remains as firmly entrenched as a starter as any quarterback in the NFL.

To understand how we ended up here, let’s take a look season by season through Bortles’s career. He was expected to ride the bench most of his rookie year, but as often happens, incumbent starter Chad Henne proved to be a total disaster, completing barely over half his passes through three straight losses to start the year. So Bortles took over, and it was an absolute disaster, as he threw more interceptions than touchdowns and led the league in sacks taken.

It was a grim start to his career, but no one was calling him a bust after his rookie season. He was always considered a bit of a project, and on paper his second year looked like a huge jump forward. He still only completed about 58% of his passes, but his touchdown number jumped from 11 to 35. He led the league with 18 interceptions, but signs were pointing up for him.

At least that was how it looked on paper. Already Bortles had acquired a reputation as a garbage time stat padder. Of those 35 touchdowns, 14 came in the fourth quarter, usually when the Jaguars were far behind. Somehow he threw only 2 touchdowns in the first quarter, struggling early and playing a major role in Jacksonville’s eventual 5-11 record.

Entering his third season there was already plenty of questionable buzz around Bortles, and a 3-13 record with a 23 to 16 touchdown-to-interception ratio did not help matters. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable for the Jaguars to move on from him following that, but they decided to give him another chance, granting him the fifth year option on his contract so he would be under team control for two more seasons. A brief attempt to bench him in the preseason went awry, as Henne once again proved to not be worthy of taking the starting spot. So they went into the regular season with Bortles under center, and somehow everything went right.

There are two sides to the situation the Jaguars have found themselves in. On the one hand, they have made no effort to give Bortles any real competition, sticking until this season with Henne as their backup option. On the other, you can argue that they passing up on using resources at quarterback allowed them to build the roster that carried Bortles to the postseason last year. They spent heavily in free agency, invested high draft picks in stars like Jalen Ramsey, and with Bortles cutting his interceptions to a career low 13, they were able to run all the way to the AFC Championship game.

There was a stretch last year where Bortles looked like he was taking a step forward, but it all fell apart in the postseason. By now most people understood that he is what he is, and that for the Jaguars to compete at the level they’d like they needed to move on. The problem was, Bortles had suffered a nagging injury down the stretch that required surgery in the offseason, and he wouldn’t be able to pass a physical in time for them to cut his fifth year option at no cost. He was due to make $15 million no matter what this year.

This is where the Jaguars really screwed up. They couldn’t cut Bortles, which prevented them from getting into the sweepstakes for one of the big free agent quarterbacks. But because of the other big free agent contracts on their salary cap, they needed to clear up money to make other additions in the offseason. So instead of keeping Bortles on the final year of his contract, they signed him to a three year contract, turning his guaranteed $15 million into $26.5 million.

This cleared up space (which they used to sign Donte Moncrief, so yeah), but it also locked them into Bortles for an additional year. He is scheduled to count $21 million against their cap next year, less than $5 million of which they could save by cutting him. This made it harder to justify spending a first round pick on a quarterback, or trading for the one year contract of Teddy Bridgewater. Whether they wanted it or not, Bortles was going to be on their books in 2019.

The Jaguars sent Bortles to the bench midway through their loss to the Texans two weeks ago, but new backup Cody Kessler isn’t any better than Henne, and Bortles is back under center again. And in all likelihood he will remain the starter through the rest of this year, and likely at the beginning of 2019 as well. They don’t have the salary cap space to bring in veteran competition, and they will likely be looking to spend a high draft selection on a quarterback in next year’s draft. By now I think even the management of the Jaguars understand that Bortles isn’t the solution, but he’s proven over and over that he isn't easy to get rid of.