Quote:We're still making up for about a decade of bad drafting, but I feel like Caldwell's last two drafts were just about as good as he could have done even with hindsight. I know some point to the Fowler injury, but how do you project that? If anything one might project that Amari Cooper would be in for a guaranteed hamstring injury in his rookie offseason here.

 

A decade of bad drafting has an effect, but there are two problems with what you're saying. First is that the team is still horrificly bad, so bad it got physically whooped by a bad team at home last week. Losing by double digits to other bottom feeders is a bad indication of the quality of the team assembled so far. Second is that this is the era of free agency. A team doesn't have to just stick with whatever they can get in years of poor drafts. The Jaguars have had plenty of cap space and a wealthy owner. The problems we're seeing right now aren't because the team couldn't be decent under the circumstances surrounding them, the problems we're seeing right now seem to be because Gus and Dave think "it's built."

 

The problem with Fowler isn't that he's injured, he's symbolic of everything wrong with the way Dave Caldwell approaches the draft. Need drafting is for bad teams that stay bad. When you come to the draft and say "we need an impact player at DE" you're not necessarily going to get one by selecting one, sometimes it's a bad year for DEs, in which case you need to take the great player at WR or DT, because we're finding out right now that the Jaguars aren't nearly as "set" at WR as people were thinking at draft time.

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