2017 Jaguars: The Most Underrated NFL Team of My Lifetime

The 2017 Jaguars are a serious pick for the best defence in the history of the NFL. I'm going to tell you their story.

The Jaguars don’t matter.

The Jaguars have never mattered.

In the interest of full disclosure before this article starts, I am a Jaguars fan, so they have always mattered to me, but when have they ever mattered to the NFL world at large?

You can argue maybe once, when they upset the Broncos in the playoff game in 1996, if your memory stretches back that far, and if you were a particularly avid watcher of the 1990s NFL, you can argue maybe twice, when in 1999 they went 14-2, and served as a hill for the 1999 Titans to climb to kickstart a good era for the new Nashville team, and that is all.

Fast forward all the way to the 2017 offseason, and you will have missed only three winning seasons over the course of 17 years, and even those winning years were not particularly impactful. Don’t get me wrong, the 2007 squad in particular was a really good team, but the 2015 Cincinnati Bengals were also a really good team, and they didn’t go down as legends of the game either.

And this was a good year.

After 2007 is when it gets really bad. David Garrard is pretty good still, but the whole team falls apart around him as Jacksonville sinks into the depths of nine years in a row without a single winning season, but even that undersells just how bad this stretch was.

It’s not just nine years without a winning season. It’s nine years in a row of being one of the worst teams in the NFL. It’s nine years of never having a point differential better than -65 (even the Cincinnati Bungles of the 1990s, so bad they got a nickname making fun of how bad they were, had a positive point differential one season). It’s nine years of never even having any great players to get behind (even the generally horrendous Arizona Cardinals of this same time period at least had Larry Fitzgerald to get excited about). It’s nine years of never having an Expected Win total better than 6.64.

You think the Jets in recent years have been bad. In the last nine years, they’ve beaten this mark twice, and had a winning season.

It’s been that bad. The 2015-2024 New York Jets have nothing on us, and that ought to tell you something right there.

That leaves us in the 2017 offseason, where relatively new owner Shahid Khan (my pro wrestling friends may know him as the owner of the AEW wrestling promotion) makes his first regime change. He decides to go back to who made us relevant the last time, and brings back Tom Coughlin to have final say on all personnel matters. He does stop short of bringing him in to be the head coach, leaving (interim from the end of last season) Doug Marrone in that role, but this is a major changing of the guard.

I must say that I did not think this was going to work, because generally going back to what worked in 1996 is not a good way to win football games in 2017, but as it turns out, Tom Coughlin is smarter than we all gave him credit for.

In the 2017 offseason, the Jaguars are all of a sudden big spenders. They bring in big profile free agents Calais Campbell (who is an All-Pro player at DE, but seen to be on the back nine and in need of a move to DT by this point), and AJ Bouye (a breakout player at CB on the division rival 2016 Houston Texans) to pair with incumbents Jalen Ramsey, Myles Jack, Telvin Smith, and Yannick Ngakoue to bolster the defence that shoulders most of the blame for this nine years of misery, but had been showing signs of life in the 2016 season.

On the offensive side, things are left mostly the same as they were before, with the exception of the selection of RB Leonard Fournette in the first round of the 2017 NFL Draft.

This pick (not taking a QB) was a massive vote of confidence in QB Blake Bortles, and because the receiver group, with Marquise Lee, Allen Robinson, Keelan Cole, and Allen Hurns was already quite good, there were legitimately signs of life on the offensive side of the ball, on the condition that Bortles could figure it out.

What a downer on the end of that paragraph.

Do you think he can figure it out?

I can look back in hindsight and view these signings as sources of potential optimism, but in reality all the Jaguar fans are looking forward at another season that looks hopeless. All the publications are picking us to finish fourth in the AFC South for the second year in a row, which would add onto a streak of seven years not finishing better than third in the division. The over/under is just 6.5.

Our offence is relying on solid play out of a QB that’s been one of the NFL’s worst for the past two seasons, and our defence is relying on an old defensive line to create solid pass rush to benefit the bright young players at every other position.

This is all looking promising for the future (maybe once we bring in another QB), but it’s not quite there yet.

Or so we thought.

A really bad habit of this Jacksonville franchise for years had been to come out of the gates losing in September, always losing at least three of the four September games, ensuring that everybody (both inside and outside the building) will give up, and there will be talk of the Draft in November, but picking it up after that to finish with four or five wins to ensure that we will be picking sixth instead of first.

That’s how you could tell the 2017 Jaguars were different.

We come out in week one of the season and win as six point road underdogs (a very hefty spread) 29-7 over the top of the first NFL action for Deshaun Watson.

To play week one of a season as six point underdogs to the first start of a rookie QB is indicative of the level of disrespect the Jaguars organisation had earned itself over the prior decade, especially in the early months of the year. The bookies just didn’t think we could beat anybody, and in week two we show them why.

This game is against the Tennessee Titans, who are going to make the playoffs in 2017, but aren’t going to deserve it with their 7.35 Expected Wins on the season. This is before they get Ryan Tannehill and AJ Brown and turn into a real team. This is the Marcus Mariota and Delanie Walker Tennessee Titans. They come into our house and whoop our butt anyway.

We allow the Tennessee Titans (who are going to finish the season as the league’s 22nd ranked offence) to come into our stadium and generate 0.141 EPA/Play on us. The high from the season opening win is out the window. It’s a 37-16 loss in front of a stadium that is not full, a group of fans that is not interested, and just a bad day all around.

With week three coming against the always difficult Baltimore Ravens, it’s entirely possible that this game will be the beginning to yet another long season, and to make matters worse we’ll have to wake up at 9AM to see it.

It’s so typical of a Jaguars article that the season turns around in London.

The 2017 Baltimore Ravens are not a terribly intimidating opponent, but they’re better than the Titans, particularly on the strength of their defence that’s going to finish the season ranked third in the NFL in EPA/Play. This explains why we’re underdogs for the third week in a row to begin the season, this time by three points, but no bookie in the world could have predicted what was going to happen on this day.

The Ravens begin with the ball. Three plays and a punt. We get down the field for a FG in response, which gives Baltimore the ball back again. Three plays and a punt, and this time we respond with an easy touchdown that gets us a 10-0 lead. For a September game (where we normally get killed) this is exciting, but I understand not to count the chickens before they hatch. Let’s see what the Ravens can do.

Three plays and a punt. 13-0.

At this point I’m beginning to feel like this is too good to be true. 2017 Joe Flacco is not a very good NFL player anymore, but even rookie Deshaun was doing better than this. Baltimore has had two successful offensive plays in the entire first quarter. Now we’re into the second, and surely that has to change right?

Three plays and a punt.

Next Baltimore touch goes even better for us. It’s a one play interception to AJ Bouye. We’re up 20-0 by the point we give them a first down with an offside penalty. By the time they get a first down for themselves, there’s 11:10 left in the third quarter and it’s 23-0. It’s 30-0 by the time they get their second, and on the first play of the fourth quarter, Leonard Fournette scores to make it 44-0.

I cannot contain my happiness over how awesome this win is, and the reasons are twofold. The first and most important is that our offence has just taken a real defence (3rd in the NFL) and bent it over our knee. 0.566 EPA/Play for Blake Bortles. 0.240 for the whole team, and we have just gotten a second win in the month of September for the first time since 2008.

2008.

It’s been ten years since the Jaguars have even been .500 in the first month of the season, and we’ve just embarrassed a Baltimore team that is only a QB change away from being an AFC contender to 2024 and beyond. They’re only one year and a much better QB away from being a real AFC threat, and not to be taken lightly in 2017 either, and it took us just 45 minutes to be up 44-0.

Is there something going on here?

Some heads in the NFL have turned, because in week four we go to New York to play the Jets, and we go there as four point road favourites.

This may not make an impression on you, who I’m assuming does not know the context of the situation, but let me tell you something. Playing in the AFC South in the 2010s means the Jaguars always get to play a lot of weak teams. Nevertheless, we have not been a road favourite against anybody since we travelled to Indianapolis in 2011. That’s six years since anybody thought the Jaguars had a better than 50/50 chance to win a road game.

I understand the Jets are a weak opponent, but being favourites on the road against anybody at all is a foreign feeling to the Jacksonville Jaguars, and in the end the 2017 Jets don’t end up being that weak of an opponent after all (their 5.7 expected wins does not put them in the bottom five).

Of course, these are the Jaguars, so we mess this up and lose as road favourites and give the Jets their second win of the season, dropping us to 2-2, but I cannot emphasize enough how good it feels to come out of the first four games of the season with a record even this good.

It hasn’t happened in ages, nor has a win the likes of which we’ll see in week five.

Week five sees us going on the road to Pittsburgh to take on the 3-1 Steelers. In 2024, we think of the Steelers as the AFC’s stepping stone. If you can beat them, you’re likely a playoff team. Otherwise, you likely are not. However, in 2017 we’re still in the heart of the killer B’s era, with a top five QB in Ben Roethlisberger, the league’s best receiver in Antonio Brown, and a very good offensive line propping up RB Le’Veon Bell. These Steelers are no stepping stone. They are going to finish 13-3 with a bye in the AFC playoffs.

Our defence has been fantastic so far, but against a rookie’s first NFL start, Marcus Mariota (who torched us), Joe Flacco, and Josh McCown, there’s not much a defence can do to prove itself. Offences like that struggle against everybody.

That is entirely different now. These are the 2010s Steelers. They have defensive weaknesses (which is why this decade will end with no SB for them), but offensively they struggle against nobody. This Jacksonville defence can keep a lid on Joe Flacco and Josh McCown sure, but nobody believes we can do it here. As such, we walk into Pittsburgh as eight point road underdogs. Nobody gives the Jaguars a prayer.

This is where we make the league take notice.

It doesn’t look good when the Steelers’ first play from scrimmage is a 50 yard pass to immediately get into our red zone, but we hold from there, forcing them to take three, but with nothing coming from our offence we have to hold them off again. As they slowly grind their way down the field (taking six minutes off the clock) it’s beginning to look like the league was correct, and this defence will struggle against some better opposition, but that’s when it all changes.

Sacksonville is born not with a sack, but with an interception thrown to Jalen Ramsey to end this Steeler touch, and keep us in the game. We easily get down the field for a touchdown as the second quarter begins. The next two Pittsburgh touches end with no danger whatsoever, as we cannot score any points ourselves but take almost ten minutes off the clock. However, a Blake Bortles interception does allow them a FG to go into the half with a 7-6 score.

I cannot understate how impressive it is to give up just six points in a half to the 2017 Pittsburgh Steelers, especially on the road. This is one of only two instances in the entire 2017 season of the Steelers scoring fewer than seven points in a half at home (wink wink). The Jacksonville defence is proving to the world that it’s real after all, and yet, after a Pittsburgh FG to open the second half, we are still facing a 9-7 deficit.

Our offence is struggling pretty badly against a Steeler defensive unit that’s actually not bad themselves (13th). We’re consistently managing to stay out on the field for a while, but not actually scoring any points.

What are we going to do about that?

How about have the defence score the points themselves?

Right when we needed them, back to back Pittsburgh possessions end in pick sixes. One is thrown to Telvin Smith, the other to Barry Church, and we have gone from a rather tenuous 9-7 deficit with an offence showing no signs of life to a 20-9 lead, with our offensive style of chewing up time but not actually scoring all of a sudden looking quite optimal.

Pittsburgh punts their next possession away, and our offence chews up eight minutes in taking a 23-9 lead, leaving 6:48 left in the game, and after one final interception (this time in the end zone) this game is over. One final meaningless touchdown makes this a 30-9 victory. You’ve just seen the other half in which the 2017 Steelers fail to score at least seven points at home, and we have arrived onto the scene as a real contender in the AFC.

Oh my goodness.

Going on the road into Pittsburgh is not an easy thing to do. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The New England Patriots are going to go there later in the season and require some catch rule shenanigans (2017 is the catch rule season) to get out of there with a three point win.

We’ve just beaten them by 21 points.

To put this further into perspective, the Steelers (as of 2017) have lost only eight times by 21 or more points at home since the merger in 1970. They haven’t gotten their butt kicked this badly at home since they lost 31-7 to Baltimore in 2006.

We haven’t just beaten them, we’ve made them look totally feckless. These Steelers have generated -0.282 EPA/Play today, the only time they’re going to be held to a negative EPA all season, and we’ve done it as eight point underdogs. All of this against a Pittsburgh team that’s going to take just one more loss all season (the aforementioned against New England).

A good team could not have done this. This is was great teams do.

This is the coming out party for the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars, and the league is now somewhat convinced, because we’re going to go into week six as favourites (for just the second time all season), but there is one more question that hasn’t been asked yet.

What can we do with a Sean McVay offence?

For week six we welcome the Los Angeles Rams into our stadium for our second matchup in a row against an elite offence, and what happens here reminds me of something that happens in another article I’ve written.

Recall my article about the 2003 Baltimore Ravens, specifically the game where the Rams score 33 points despite playing one of the worst offensive games I’ve ever seen, because of incompetence everywhere on the Ravens except the defence. Well, the Rams are back again, ready to score lots more points without doing a single thing to earn them.

The Rams score 24 points in the first half of this game, but they do it with just five first downs, as our defence shines their shoes with Jared Goff and Todd Gurley and everything Sean McVay is trying to throw at them. Nothing is working. However, a kickoff return touchdown, a touchdown on a blocked punt, a shanked punt allowing the Rams a FG without moving the ball at all, and just one legitimate offensive drive that accounts for all but one of the five first downs leave us with 24 points on the board against us.

Sometimes, there’s only so much a defence can do.

Our offence has ben performing admirably (by their standards) to try to keep us in this game, so we go into the half down just 24-14, and eventually we do get within one score at 24-17, but it’s no use. There is no more scoring from our offence, so while our defence has done their part (restricting a McVay offence to -0.192 EPA/Play is not to be taken lightly), we lose as favourites again, this time by a 27-17 score.

Games like this are why the 2017 Jaguars are terribly underrated. We’ve generated 11.94 more total EPA than the Rams have, and have still lost by ten points, almost entirely because of the astonishing -24 total EPA contributed by special teams. This should’ve been an easy win against a good Rams team that’s going to cause some real trouble in the NFC moving forward. They had nothing for our defence, but we lost anyway.

Luckily, this won’t continue for long.

We see in week seven that the NFL world still doesn’t exactly know how to treat these Jaguars, as we’re just three point favourites against the woeful Indianapolis Colts, but we show bettors their folly by winning 27-0 in Indianapolis. Week nine (after a week eight bye) is more of the same, this time playing as real favourites against Cincinnati, blowing them out 23-7 in a game featuring just 115 offensive plays because of our suffocating offence running the air out of the ball.

Week ten actually sees a QB generate positive EPA/Play against us (a feat not to be taken lightly against this defence), and we trail for the first time in a month, but we do manage to make the comeback and defeat Philip Rivers and the Los Angeles Chargers by a 20-17 score, and week 11 is just not fair, pitting the Cleveland Browns (who will eventually go 0-16) and their horrendous rookie QB Deshone Kizer against this defence.

It’s actually a rather ugly performance out of our offence, but it doesn’t matter as we hold the Browns to -0.629 EPA/Play as a team, one of the worst offensive performances you will ever see, in a not inspiring but never close 19-7 win to bring ourselves to 7-3.

It’s unfortunate that all of our fumbling around in September has left us out of position in the AFC’s seeding race, as the first round byes are now down to three real contenders, the 8-2 New England Patriots, 8-2 Pittsburgh Steelers, and our 7-3 Jacksonville Jaguars. If we could’ve just won those games in September we clearly should have (bearing in mind our our win over Pittsburgh) we would’ve been clear and gone by now, and it would’ve left us in a much better position to cope with what happens in week 12.

Our offence shows up looking to take a week off again. That’s okay against Cleveland or the LA Chargers, but it just so happens not to be okay against the 2017 Arizona Cardinals. Our defence tries their best, but can only hold Blaine Gabbert’s Cardinals to -0.111 EPA/Play on this day (which is terrible, but the best any offence has played against us since Marcus Mariota in week two), which on this day happens not to be enough.

The Cardinals do nothing well on offence, but they do everything just slightly better than our offence is able to do it, and we lose 27-24 to drop to 7-4, falling out of the hunt for a first round bye altogether.

This is where I ought to talk about our offence a little bit, because people’s memories are wildly incorrect about this topic. I remember when I wrote my article about the 2009 Jets, I made the comment that since then, only two teams have made it as far as the conference championship with truly bad offences (2011 SF and 2015 Denver), and people brought up the 2017 Jaguars as if they were fact checking me.

Trust me, I did not overlook my favourite NFL team of all time.

This is not a bad offence. It’s actually a pretty good offence. Their 0.02 EPA/Play is not negative, and it ranks them tenth in the 2017 season. Tenth place in EPA/Play in 2023 is the Seattle Seahawks, so there’s a modern comparison for you, but much more interesting is one spot below Seattle in 11th place, where you can find the 2023 Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs.

I’m not saying that the 2017 Jaguars are a better offence than the 2023 KC Chiefs, because 2017 is a long enough time ago that there must be era adjustments and things of that nature, but it’s fact that the 2017 Jaguars rank tenth, and the 2023 KC Chiefs rank 11th in offence. Relative to their competition in their season, the 2017 Jaguars are in fact better than the 2023 KC Chiefs at offence, so be careful when considering the idea that the 2017 Jaguars were bad at offence. They were not bad at offence. They were merely not great at offence, and as we’ve just seen in the 2023 season, you can win a Super Bowl while not being great at offence.

These Jaguars are not hindered by poor QB play in the way that people remember either. Blake Bortles is going to finish this season generating 0.113 EPA/Play, which continuing the comparison above, is not in an entirely different ballpark (especially when adjusted for 2017’s down offensive environment) than 2023 Patrick Mahomes’ 0.134. Blake’s -3 CPOE for this season means that it was never going to happen twice, but that doesn’t matter, because we’re talking about trying to win the Super Bowl right now.

As far as I’m concerned, with this defence we’ve got, and a QB that’s not all that much worse (if any worse at all) than 2023 Patrick Mahomes results wise, these are just the 2023 KC Chiefs (a Super Bowl champion), with a much better defence. We’ve got everything we need to win the Super Bowl ourselves.

I say all this now because in week 13 against the Colts, the defence will again perform its worst since week two, allowing the Colts to generate -0.071 EPA/Play on us. However, this time, our offence gives them the help they need, and it’s really no contest. We win the game against a division rival 30-10, and quite frankly make it look easy. Finally, we’ve justified the books installing us as a ten point favourite, but in week 14 the unimaginable happens.

An opponent generates positive EPA against us.

In a poignant illustration of just how much things have changed, the same team who opened the season as six point underdogs to the terrible 4-12 Houston Texans are now three point favourites hosting the Seattle Seahawks, and what a weird game this is.

Seattle opens the game by getting over midfield (no lean feat against these Jaguars) but failing to score. We respond with a FG to take a quick 3-0 lead, and from here both sides combine to do absolutely nothing on offence for the remainder of the first half. We manage to hold Russell Wilson to only seven first downs, which is barely enough to hold them off the scoreboard entirely with the benefit of a missed field goal, but our offence does not get close to providing anything either, so we coast all the way into half with a 3-0 lead.

It’s clear that one of these offences is going to have to come alive in the second half, but I think most in the audience would’ve put their money on the wrong one.

Russ opens the half with an immediate interception, and we go straight down the field for an immediate 10-0 lead. Just four and a half minutes later though (due to a muffed catch on a kickoff) the score is 10-10, and this is starting to look a lot like some other games this season where we desperately needed our offence and it just wouldn’t come through for us.

This time it’s different.

A one play touchdown to Keelan Cole, three plays and a punt for Seattle, and a one play touchdown for Leonard Fournette set us straight back up with a 24-10 lead. A seven minute long FG drive makes this a 27-10 lead, and even with an offence as electric as the Seahawks’, this is too big a fourth quarter deficit to come back from. They do try, but in the end we take this win 30-24, and this is a real turning point.

The last time our defence gave up positive EPA to an opponent, we lost 37-16 and it was ugly. All of a sudden now we’re getting far enough ahead to allow the defenders to relax a little bit, and if we can do that consistently I don’t see any team in the AFC that can beat us. From New England straight on down, they cannot handle this.

Now at 9-4, the division is a done deal, but just for fun we defeat the Houston Texans 45-7 next week to ensure that it’s actually a done deal. That leaves us 10-4 going into the final two weeks, without all that much to play for, which means I have to talk about week 16.

I do not want to talk about week 16, but here goes.

In week 16, the Jacksonville Jaguars finally allow themselves to be taken advantage of, giving up 0.256 EPA/Play and 44 points to the San Francisco 49ers, in what I believe is still Kyle Shanahan’s magnum opus, to tear apart a defence like this in a 44-33 win.

This is all fine. We’ve lost as favourites again, but this was a meaningless game anyway. It would’ve been really cool to have gone a whole season without allowing any team at all to play this good on offence, but this one game in itself doesn’t bother me.

What I take issue with is the narratives people try to leverage this game in order to create.

There are two schools of thought on this game. The first is that the 49ers proved this Jaguar defence was never real to begin with, and provided the rest of the league a blueprint going into the playoffs. Generally, if you’re in the camp that Jimmy Garoppolo was never an especially good football player, this is the stance you take.

If you believe (like I believe, in large part due to this performance) that Jimmy Garoppolo was a great talent who had what could’ve been a great career ruined by injuries that wouldn’t end, this game isn’t all that important to you. This is the NFL. Great offence will beat great defence most of the time. We can tip our cap to the 49ers and move on.

It’s now been irrevocably proven that this Jaguar defence is not invincible, but what this defence has above all others is that this proof was given by a Kyle Shanahan offence. Other teams around the league cannot mimic Kyle Shanahan’s offence. They’ve been trying for years, and this makes the way that this Jaguar offence got exposed much more impressive than the ways other great defences have gotten exposed.

This is something that just happens to elite defences. Invariably, they all take a week off somewhere. The Legion of Boom gave up 0.279 EPA/Play to Mike Glennon. The 2009 Jets got blitzed by Chad Henne. The 2003 Ravens got destroyed by Jon Kitna. The 2002 Buccaneers could not keep a lid on the rush attack of the 2002 Vikings. The 2000 Ravens gave up 36 points to a badly faded Mark Brunell, etcetera. Notice that all these failures were not against the quality of opposition that these Jaguars were facing today.

I can name you examples until the cows come home, but the point is this. All of the all-time great defences took one week off. Only one, but there’s always one.

It’s taken all the way until week sixteen, but we have just used our week off.

On that note (and with a 15-10 loss in an utterly meaningless week 17 game that it might have actually benefitted us to lose), this season is over, and let’s do some reflection on these 2017 Jaguars shall we?

The thing that makes the 2017 season (in general, not just in the Jaguars’ case) so difficult to analyse is that there was no mush in the middle. Throughout the NFL (especially in the AFC), there was a lot of great, and a lot of terrible. It’s easier to be great in a polarised league such as this, because it results in a lot more easy opponents. This is shown in the Pro Football Reference page for the 2017 season, where every team in the AFC except two is shown to have a strength of schedule below league average. On that same page, you will see that the 2017 Jaguars had the easiest schedule in the entire NFL.

This easy schedule is what naysayers have been using to claw at these Jaguars for years, but what does it mean to me?

Trying to argue that a team is extremely underrated despite going just 10-6 with the easiest schedule in one of the easiest conferences in NFL history leaves me with a big hill to climb, but let me see what I can do.

First and most important to understand is that great teams will (almost without fail) have an easier than league average schedule. You can go on football reference and look at any season you want. The great teams, with maybe one exception per year, will all have had easy schedules. When seeing that, it may be tempting to think that all the great teams have lots of wins because they got to play against a lot of easy teams, but that is not the reason.

The great teams all have easy schedules because that’s two divisional games per season that they do not have to play against themselves. It’s the same thing turned around, which is why bad teams all end up with really difficult schedules. That’s two divisional games against themselves that they do not get to play.

Therefore, having a weak schedule is not as immediately big an indictment as some think, because all the great teams have weak schedules due to having the two games on the schedule that would’ve been divisional matchups against themselves replaced with two games against presumably weaker opposition. This means a weak schedule is not entirely random. Teams can do themselves some favours to make their schedule easier.

These Jaguars, instead of the games the rest of the AFC South had to play against themselves, got to play the New York Jets and Los Angeles Chargers instead. Are these easier matchups? Absolutely, but that is the advantage you get for being the great team yourself. Now let’s dive into this weak schedule that we had, to answer what is truly the key question of this entire piece: did we pump our stats up against weak opposition?

Funnily enough, according to my expected wins model, the easiest team we got to face was not the 0-16 Cleveland Browns but in fact the Indianapolis Colts. If you remember, the Colts put up one of the better performances any offence all season put up against us in the week 13 game, and on the whole for the season generated -0.186 EPA/Play against us. Comparing this to our season average, which is -0.192, shows that having this poor team in our division did not help boost our stats. In fact, it hurt them slightly.

However, doing this exercise for the six weakest games of our season (two Indy, one Cleveland, one NYJ, two Houston Texans) does show that our defence across these games did allow -0.296 EPA/Play, so they did boost our defensive stats a little bit, but this is not a truly fair exercise. Every team boosts their stats against the bad teams.

Let’s see how we did against the good teams.

Doing the same exercise in the five strongest games of our season (one LA Chargers, one Pittsburgh, one LA Rams, one Baltimore, and one Seattle Seahawks) shows that in these games we allowed opponents to generate -0.207 EPA/Play, which is also better than our season average of -0.192.

Wait a minute. You mean to tell me that the team with the weakest schedule in the NFL actually got its stats boosted by the good teams?

Yes. That’s exactly what I mean to say.

Additionally, only one of our losses (the sham against the LA Rams) came from our five most difficult games. Considering only one of the losses came from the worst part of our schedule, this means that against the middle part of our schedule we went 1-4, and this struggling against the mid part of our schedule is why these Jaguars were able to turn their 13.37 expected wins (tops in the NFL, and 11th best NFL team since 2000) into just ten real ones.

This sucks, because only getting to ten wins is why this team will forever be underrated, but trust me (I’m again looking squarely at the 2023 KC Chiefs when I say this). Nobody cares if you struggle with the middle of the pack teams, if you can beat the bottom teams, and also beat the top teams.

I will grant you that the Jaguars did not have to play any of the top three teams in the NFL in 2017 (Jacksonville, Philadelphia, Minnesota), but they did have to play the fourth, sixth, and seventh best teams, and once again, avoiding the top teams is an advantage that you get when you are one of the top teams. We cannot play against ourselves.

So now that we understand these numbers are real, where do they rank amongst the all time greats?

It is immensely difficult to compare defences across different offensive eras and environments in football. For example, I can tell you that in terms of the per drive stats, these Jaguars don’t need to be in the same breath with the Legion of Boom, based on the sheer strength of statistical superiority. That Seattle team has nothing on this Jacksonville team, but that falls away when I tell you that in 2013, leaguewide offence was about 27 percent better than in 2017.

That’s sort of like comparing raw numbers from the offensively depressed 2023 to ones from the high flying 2019. It just doesn’t work.

Every defence in NFL history must be compared with the league average NFL defence, in order to ascertain a statistic that can rank defences across all different defensive environments. Once this is done, you come to a shocking result about the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars.

When comparing defences based on how dominant they were in their native offensive environments, the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars allowing -0.192 EPA/Play in a relatively modern NFL season grades them out as being best defence of the entire play tracking era.

According to my era-adjusted EPA/Play measure, adjusted to the league average in the 2017 season, they come out as being 104 percent better than an NFL average defence, the only team ever to be better than twice as good as an average NFL defence in their season.

This is absolutely incredible. The only other team that even comes close is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers allowing -0.205 EPA/Play in the high (for the time) offensive environment of 2002, and even they stop short at 92 percent better than league average, a full 12 percent short of these Jaguars. That’s a defence that carried a really bad offence to a Super Bowl without even being challenged. Just imagine what these Jags could’ve done if not for those pesky New England Patriots.

I can definitively say that this is the best defence the NFL has seen since 1999, and I wish more stats existed for the 70s, so I could compare with that era also.

That is my definitive statement on the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars. They have the best defence I’ve ever seen in my lifetime (including the 2000 Ravens and 2002 Bucs and whoever else you may like to name), buoyed by an offence that is better than everybody remembers. I have tried to tell this story in as unbiased a fashion as possible (as always), but if my fandom has come through at all at any point, my sincere apologies.

At some point (maybe next. Maybe not) I will write another article on how the playoffs went for these 2017 Jaguars, and how they never reached these heights ever again, but for now, I hopefully have made you rethink your position on this team, so you can remember it for the best team in the NFL that it was, and not just another bump in the road on the way to another Patriot Super Bowl appearance.

Thanks so much for reading.