On Friday, NFL.com’s Ian Rapoport reported the Jacksonville Jaguars were one loss away from firing head coach Doug Pederson. This was not surprising. After an impressive 2022 debut, Pederson spiraled into the same pit of despair over which the Jaguars claim dominion.
His one chance to save his job, seemingly, came down to a game against the NFC’s best team on the road. As a 13.5-point underdog. With Mac Jones as his starting quarterback.
Things went roughly as expected, though Jones’s offense wasn’t the biggest problem in Jacksonville’s Week 11 52-6 implosion against the Detroit Lions. Instead, that honor goes to a defense that gave up 645 yards of total offense.
Brock on ????#JAXvsDET | ???? CBS pic.twitter.com/9M4hdMMovV
— Detroit Lions (@Lions) November 17, 2024
That was just one of seven touchdowns Detroit scored in Week 11. Those came on their first seven drives. Drive number eight ended in a field goal. Drive nine, engineered primarily by Hendon Hooker and Sione Vaki, gained 54 yards in 11 plays before the clock mercifully ran out.
On one hand, this was an uneven matchup between a wildly talented team and an objectively bad one. The Jaguars had the league’s worst defense. The Lions had a top six unit capable of shredding you on the ground or through the air. With little resistance to either, Detroit head coach Dan Campbell executed a mercy killing on Pederson’s Jacksonville career by stomping his team into a puddle in both regards.
Waymo on the loose to start the second half ????#JAXvsDET | ???? CBS pic.twitter.com/HV5RLzMadK
— Detroit Lions (@Lions) November 17, 2024
The Jaguars tried, but not really. This was a team hung out to dry. They were challenged by their ownership to rise up and save their head coach’s job if they truly wanted Pederson in the fold. They responded by taking a beating the likes of which hasn’t been seen in the NFL in more than four decades.
The Lions out-gained the Jaguars by 475 yards today. That’s the biggest yardage differential in an NFL game since 1979.
— Michael David Smith (@MichaelDavSmith) November 17, 2024
This was a silent vote of no confidence with a deafening effect. It wasn’t the mere outcome of a talent disparity or Jones’s presence behind center. This is a team that leaned into the skid knowing the only way out of the ice cave of defeat in which it’s been trapped is to go deeper into the crevasse and start over.
Thus, the Doug Pederson era likely ends not with a bang but with the volumeless screech of a black hole set down upon a bustling town. Pederson, should he be fired Monday, finishes his Jaguars career on a 3-14 slide owed partially to injuries to Trevor Lawrence, partially to the drafting and talent acquisition around him and partially to Pederson’s own inability to create something more valuable than the sum of its parts.
It’s a remarkable fall for a coach who’d began his Jacksonville career with a 17-11 run and one of the greatest comebacks in NFL playoff history. But it’s one his players quietly signed off on in the midst of a historic loss.
Christian D’Andrea
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