(01-04-2023, 11:55 AM)mikesez Wrote:

(01-04-2023, 11:37 AM)Bullseye Wrote: I think any Jaguars fan who is alive and at the AFCCG in 1999 would have had a difficult time getting over that loss.  I believe in many cases, that loss won't be out of our system until the Jaguars reach/win the Super Bowl. 

They have tortured and dominated this team for the better part of two decades, starting in 1999.

Under those circumstances its hard for Jaguars fans to NOT harbor hatred of the tacks.

I was alive for it, I watched parts on TV and heard other parts on the radio.  I was in high school for it and it was the only topic of discussion both the week before and the week after.  
But the simple fact is the 1999 team just wasn't very good.  They lucked out with their schedule.  The 2007 and 2017 Jags teams were both more talented and more physically dominating than the 1999 squad.  I don't think the 1999 defense would have slowed down the Rams.  It would have been a shootout and the Rams had more weapons that year.  The Titans actually slowed the Rams down and made that Super Bowl a competitive game.
So if we're ranking disappointments, the losses in 2006, 2007, and 2017 rank higher, for me.

(Emphasis added)

I could not possibly disagree with the passage in bold any stronger, especially the part about the 1999 Jaguars not being very good.

That 1999 team was the culmination of teams that advanced to the playoffs for three straight years prior to 1999.  Nobody asserts they "lucked out with the schedule" in 1996-1998.  As for the 1999 schedule, the argument they didn't beat anyone with a winning record dominated the discussion.  But that was a particularly specious argument  The Jaguars earned the sweep over the Ravens that year.  However, if they wanted to avoid that criticism of not beating a team with a winning record, they could have lost one of the Ravens games.  The Ravens (who, BTW, were a season away from winning the Super Bowl with one of the best defenses of all time) would have finished 9-7 and voila!  That criticism disappears.  The detractors who point out the schedule actually penalize the Jaguars for superior performance and reward the Jaguars for inferior performance.  The Steelers, Bengals, and expansion Browns reboot were clearly inferior teams.  Why should the 1999 Jaguars team be penalized for other teams' ineptitude?  Lest we forget, the 1999 Jaguars team had Hall of Famer Tony Boselli, three different skill players who finished their careers with over 10,000 yards (Fred Taylor, Jimmy Smith and Keenan McCardell) and had at least 7 Pro Bowlers.  How in the world does that translate into not being very good?  Did the team match up well against the tacks?  No.  But that's a LOT different than not being very good.

This brings me to the one thing that mitigates the untenable nature of your observation.  They may not have fared well against the Rams explosive offense had they advanced to the Super Bowl. They could have scored more points against the Rams than the tacks, but I think the Rams would have won a higher scoring game.

Having said that, it's hard for me to envision a more disagreeable football take than the one I just quoted above.

---