The Jacksonville Jaguars are coming off of a miserable 2018 campaign in which they won just five games and were probably the most disappointing team in the league.
Just a year prior, the Jaguars won 10 games and captured the AFC South division title and made it to the AFC Championship Game, where they came within a quarter of beating the New England Patriots and advancing to the Super Bowl.
Naturally, going into 2018, Jacksonville was one of the trendy picks to win the championship, but things did not exactly work out that way,
A lot of that had to do with the Jaguars' shaky quarterback situation, as Blake Bortles was not nearly as capable as he was in 2017 and actually lost his job to Cody Kessler late in the season.
The worst part was that the Jaguars gave Bortles a $54 million contract extension following the team's playoff run, a decision that looked awfully poor after Jacksonville released Bortles earlier this week.
Still, Jaguars executive Tom Coughlin is defending the team's decision to re-sign him last year:
“It was the right thing to do,” Coughlin said, according to Phillip Heilman of The Florida Times-Union. “The guy took us to the AFC Championship Game, and there wouldn’t have been anybody that would have disputed the fact that he deserved the opportunity and we played well behind him.”
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but Coughlin is right.
Bortles looked fine in 2017 and was actually impressive during the Jacksonville's playoff run, so extending him certainly seemed like the proper course of action at the time.
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