Quote:OK.  The questions are simple.  How can a team improve the roster, and get worse results?  How can players who were good, come to the Jaguars and under-perform?  How can the Jaguars defy the rules of parity?  How can their turnover differential be so historically impossible?  How can they have a quarterback who has regressed so badly from his reasonable expectation, while seeing every other promising quarterback thrive.  How after about a decade of Peyton Manning can they not even compete in a division that 8-8 could win?  How do calls never go their way?  How do bounces never go their way?  The Jaguars situation seems almost impossible.  None of it adds up.  

 

I have a theory on what is happening, why no matter what we do, no matter how much talent we add, no matter how good or bad we are at coaching, we will still be bad.   And here it is: The Jaguars are out of sync with the rest of the NFL.  

 

The NFL is like a wave, constantly changing.  The Jaguars are not riding the wave.  They are not changing with the rest of the NFL.  They are behind, and wiping out. 

 

So who's to blame?  It starts with Caldwell.  At the very inception of his plan, the same plan that led him to hire Gus Bradley, there was a flaw.  His plan on building a team did not accurately project the NFL's future.  Same thing happened with Gene Smith.  His talent evaluation wasn't his main problem,  it was that he couldn't project the future NFL well enough in his rebuild, and wasn't skilled at building a team that would thrive in it.  He didn't master the timing.  He was building a team that may win now but would lose 3-4 years into the future.

 

And then we get to Bradley.  Bradley, part of the same plan, builds the team exactly as envisioned starting at 2013.  Couches it exactly as envisioned.  But the end result is a team that is destined to be a loser because they didn't correctly predict what the NFL would be 4 year into the future.  The Jaguars as a whole is now out of place in 2016.

 

There may be a lesson here.  The danger of "rebuilding" a team, building a team for a future you do not know.  

 

But he silver lining is this:  Caldwell may have made some mistakes in forming a longterm plan for the franchise, but he still may be a great talent evaluator and may still be a great GM.  He just has to recognize he's made a mistake, figure out how to correct it, and make the changes.  Khan has to be careful with Caldwell.  He can't just hire a GM off the Super Bowl winning team.  Firing Caldwell is a HUGE risk, because what you are replacing him with is an even bigger question mark.

 

I know some are finding plot holes in my story.  For instance, how possibly could Gene and David predict the quarterback play would be so poor.  Well it's beyond quarterback play.  It doesn't account for all the questions mentioned in the initial paragraph.  For instance, if Bortles had played well this year, he'd just be covering up all the other problems the team is having.  They would win more, but something may still be fundamentally wrong.  Dave would still have to fix the same issues, just he could do it in the background while the quarterback is covering for him.  Bortles just exposed a problem that was already there.