My Most Heartbreaking NFL Moment

How the Jacksonville Jaguars were robbed of their only chance at the Super Bowl.

I really don’t want to talk about this.

I promised I would, but I don’t want to do it. The forefront reason is obvious, that reliving this memory is painful, but there are more subtle reasons too, primarily that I don’t believe I write very well when engaging with something as a fan. I’m no

Gary Davis

. He is a Chiefs superfan since 1989 (I think) who writes Chiefs Chronicles, which is all about the experience of being a Chiefs fan at the best possible time to be one.

He pulls this off in fantastic fashion, and I highly recommend you check him out. He’s great at this kind of thing, but the quality of my material tends to come out a lot better when I maintain my veil of objectivity, which is why this publication has always had very little Jaguars writing on it.

However, the one piece I could not resist doing was my article on the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars, and how they are the greatest (era adjusted) defence of all time, with their EPA/Play Allowed+ (a statistic I invented, adjusting defence to league average, no different that a ‘+’ stat in baseball) of 204 ranking them number one all time in the play tracking era, an era which includes the 2000 Ravens. The 2017 Jaguars are the only team ever to be 100 percent better than the league average defence.

2017 Jaguars: The Most Underrated NFL Team of My Lifetime

The number two ranked EPAA+ team (the 2002 Bucs and their 192) easily coasted to a Super Bowl. However, of the top ten all time teams in EPAA+ (a stat which only dates back to 1999, so be somewhat careful) only three of them have won the Super Bowl. The 2002 Bucs (2nd), 2013 Seahawks (5th), and the 2000 Ravens (7th) are the only three of the top ten defences of the new millennium to win championships.

This is because the truly elite defences tend to be stuck with horrendous offence. This did not hinder the 2002 Buccaneers, whose defence was so dominant that they won the Super Bowl even without much help at all from their offence, but the 2013 Seahawks and 2000 Ravens both had offences much better than could be expected from a team with this level of defence, which is why they won Super Bowls.

Looking at the other teams on this top ten list, there is the tenth place 2001 Chicago Bears, and eighth place 2012 Chicago Bears. You can guess the problem with those teams. Both were bottom ten by both EPA/Play and offensive success rate. Next is the ninth place 2006 Baltimore Ravens, who in the regular season were an acceptable offence. They were at least outside the bottom ten, but nevertheless in their one and only playoff game they were able to score just six points against the worst defence in the NFL in the 2006 Indianapolis Colts. Offence was the problem here too.

Sixth place is the 2009 New York Jets, who were saddled with a rookie QB. If they’d still had Chad Pennington, this team would’ve easily won the Super Bowl in my opinion, but without him, their offence almost held them out of the playoffs altogether, let alone the Super Bowl. The same goes for the fourth place 2003 Baltimore Ravens, whose QB combination of Kyle Boller and Anthony Wright still causes nightmares in some Baltimore households. It’s why a defence much better than the 2000 version got nowhere near the championship.

2003 Ravens: The Defence That Time Forgot

QB issues are also the problem with the third placed 2019 New England Patriots, who were mid pack in total offence, held up by one of the better rush offences in the NFL, but when they got behind in their only playoff game, their bottom ten pass offence in Tom Brady’s final year there came back to bite them, and they lost to the Tennessee Titans.

This leaves the only team left to analyse. The 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars. My favourite NFL team of all time. I’ve written several thousand words already about why they are the best defence of all time. I need not explain further here, but the thing that I must explain is how this team is different from all the rest. People tend to remember the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars as if they had a bad offence. That is not true. The thing that you need to remember is that this team did not have a bad offence. Not even close. Their 0.02 EPA/Play ranked them tenth in the offensively depressed 2017 season.

THIS GUY led a top ten offence.

These Jaguars and the 2013 Seahawks are the only two teams in the new millennium to have both a top ten defence (all time) and a top ten offence (in-season). This defence-offence combination is what causes the 2013 Seahawks to be remembered as one of the best NFL teams of all time. The same thing could’ve happened for the 2017 Jaguars, but it didn’t. It didn’t for two reasons.

First is that this was a team that had trouble getting up for the lesser teams on the schedule. They fell into a lot of trap games, losing to the 7.35 expected win 2017 Tennessee Titans twice, losing to the 7.04 expected win 2017 Arizona Cardinals, losing to the 5.7 Expected Win 2017 New York Jets, etcetera. Despite beating every good team on their schedule (most of them in convincing fashion, like a 30-9 win over the 13-3 Pittsburgh Steelers), this caused the team to fall to a 10-6 record. It’s hard to argue you’re one of the best teams in history with a 10-6 record. That’s the first reason.

The second reason is that, unlike every other team with an all-time great defence and even passable offence, this Jaguar team did not win the Super Bowl. They should have, but they didn’t. Saying that sentence causes me the same pain today as it did when I watched this team live seven years ago, but it’s the truth. I cannot change it. The 2017 Jaguars did not win the Super Bowl.

Allow me to tell you that story.

The Jaguars’ playoff run in 2017 begins with what might be my favourite game in NFL history, against a Buffalo Bills team that’d just ended a playoff drought of 18 years. Many people who talk football with me know that I am an aficionado of defensive football. I love to watch defences make plays, perhaps even more than I like to watch offences make plays, and I tend to like low scoring football games a lot more than anybody else does.

Does the fact that my favourite team boasts (in my opinion) the best defence of all time have an impact on my enjoyment of games like this? 100% it does. I’m not going to attempt to deny that.

Having said that, I must sleep in the bed I made, as until it’s replaced (if it’s ever replaced), I must say that my favourite NFL game of all time features a QB matchup of Blake Bortles and Tyrod Taylor, with even a few Nathan Peterman throws in there to boot.

Look at the way this game turns out for both offences:

This wild card football game is the story of the Bills being dominated on first and second down, yet consistently finding ways to pull the rabbit out of the hat on third. For the Jags it’s the absolute opposite, with the offence finding success on first and second down, but failing miserably on their late down chances, even though most were third and shorts.

Both defences play fantastic, but they do it in two separate ways. Jacksonville is suffocating the Buffalo rush attack, making any LeSean McCoy touch a waste of a down, but they’re also suffocating Tyrod Taylor and the pass game. There’s almost nothing the Bills can do to actually move down the field. Of their 18 third downs today, 11 of them (61%) are seven yards or longer.

This makes Tyrod’s nine successful conversions feel even more impressive than they look on the stat sheet above, but it’s the exact opposite for the Jags. They’re having a much easier time with the Buffalo defence, with the pass game in specific operating at a 55% success rate on first and second down. This causes us to have to go seven yards or further on just five of our third down tries, but nevertheless the Buffalo defence just keeps getting off the field.

The Bills play the double fluke game, relying heavily on both third down offence and third down defence, neither of which are a sustainable strategy, but in a one game sample, they were enough to cause me to have significant doubts over whether or not we were going to be able to pull this game out.

This game spends 42 minutes of its 60 minute runtime tied either at zero or at three, but a nine minute drive (one which, thankfully, sees just one third down) ending in a touchdown on the final play of the third quarter gives Jacksonville a 10-3 lead which we never give up. Buffalo gets over midfield on three of their four fourth quarter possessions (as the Jacksonville offence does nothing to close this game out), causing some serious tension, but our defence bails us out of the jam every time, eventually winning the game by that same 10-3 final score.

This WP graph doesn’t paint the picture of a game that has you biting your nails in anticipation, but I swear. You could cut the tension with a knife. These were two franchises that desperately needed a playoff victory. Jacksonville hadn’t won a playoff game in ten years. Buffalo hadn’t won one in 20. Spending 42 minutes of a playoff game tied, a situation where at any point something as minor as a CB falling down could’ve entirely shifted the outcome of the whole season, was a horrifying experience watching the game live, but one I look back on extremely fondly as a die-hard fan of the victors.

In the absence of any real fun as a Jaguars fan most of the time, I’ve never gone a full year without watching this one back since it happened. At least once a year I break this game out to enjoy the memories, to enjoy the time when I thought my team was going to win the Super Bowl.

This next one I don’t break out as often.

The divisional round sees us go on the road to face the same 13-3 Pittsburgh Steelers that we’d already blown out 30-9 in the regular season, and we blow them out again in the playoff game. Somehow, the public thought the result was going to change the second time round, as we came into this playoff game as seven point road underdogs, but the reason I watch the Buffalo game all the time, and this game almost never, is that there was no tension here.

We’re up 14-0 before the end of the first quarter, 28-14 at the half, and spend most of the rest of the game up 14 points. Some garbage time stuff narrows the final score to 45-42, but this WP graph makes clear exactly what happened here.

That’s a lot of green, and not a lot of black, and that’s exactly how it felt watching the game. There were points in the third quarter where the WP model got close to 50 percent, but as a fan watching, there was no point where I thought we were in any serious danger of losing. We had crushed the Steelers in the regular season, crushed them again in the playoffs, and I was beginning to get quite full of myself at this point in time.

When the 2017 NFL playoffs were happening, I was a 17 year old kid, and I absolutely let my euphoria of finally having a team worth cheering get the better of me. I was repping every piece of Jaguars merchandise I owned at every place I could, over the two week period between the Buffalo game and the AFC Championship game.

I was in green at school. I was in green at parties. I believe there was a Toronto Maple Leafs (NHL) game I attended in this two week period, and I was in the green there too. I had never been shy about representing my NFL team before this playoff run, but beforehand it’d only ever prompted laughter and pity. Now, it prompted scorn and envy, because it would turn out that (in terms of expected wins) the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars were the best chance the league would have to beat the Patriots in their second (2016-2018) run of domination, and I was letting everybody around me know about it.

As funny as this sentence may sound, I was not particularly intimidated by the Patriots. In the second dynasty (2014-2018), the 2017 rendition is the weakest Patriot team of them all. They won 13 games, but they had to play six one possession games to do it, and needed some catch rule shenanigans to barely squeak past the Pittsburgh Steelers in the regular season game that got them the one seed. The same Pittsburgh Steelers that we’d humiliated on two separate occasions.

In addition, this is a Patriot team that comes into the AFC Championship with the 26th ranked EPA/Play defence, which gave me faith that we were going to be able to score on them. A tenth ranked offence against a 26th ranked defence normally goes well for the offence. This Patriot team did not make it here on the strength of their defence.

What got the New England Patriots this far is their offence, which is by far the best in the NFL in 2017, with by far the league’s best QB in Tom Brady. 2017 is the most like the GOAT Tom ever looked (not having to share the league with Peyton Manning anymore helps with that), but still this did not intimidate me. This Jacksonville team hadn’t played the best QB in the league in the regular season, but we’d played the second (Philip Rivers), fifth (Ben Roethlisberger), and seventh (Russell Wilson) best, allowing a combined -0.129 EPA/Play to those three guys.

That’s worse than our season-long EPA/Play Allowed against the pass, which was -0.225, but not exactly enough to have me quivering in my boots at the fear of good competition. This Jacksonville team had seen good competition, and not just lived to tell the tale, but beaten all three by a combined score of 80-50. Call me a naive 17 year old kid if you’d like, but I saw no reason we couldn’t hold Tom Brady to negative EPA/Play also, and if we could do that, I knew we would win, because the Patriot defence was so bad.

I was riding extremely high, because for the first time in Jacksonville Jaguars history I knew we could win the Super Bowl. We’d had two consecutive electric upsets in the 1996 playoffs to reach the AFC Championship in just our second year of existence, but were still just a 9-7 team. We’d gone 14-2 in 1999, but there was no way we were ever going to beat the Greatest Show on Turf anyway. We’d gone 12-4 in 2007 and were a really good team, one that could’ve won the conference, if not for the existence of the 2007 New England Patriots, and those are the only three noteworthy seasons this franchise had ever had as of 2017.

Since coming into the league as an expansion team in 1995, this team had never had a real chance to win the Super Bowl, and in retrospect are not going to have one after this either. Now we have one. The NFC Championship game is being played between the Eagles, featuring backup QB Nick Foles, and the Minnesota Vikings, featuring backup QB Case Keenum. I just knew in my heart (and still know it to this day) that neither of those teams were ever going to be able to score on us. We can beat either of those teams in the Super Bowl.

That means all we have to do to reach the promised land is get by a New England Patriots squad that, by their extremely high standards, is weak. By expected wins, these Patriots’ 10.75 is their lowest since their outlier 2013 season, and other than that is the worst in over ten years. It’s an odd sentence to say, because 10.75 expected wins is really good, but New England is almost never this bad. If you’re going to have to play the Patriots, 2017 is the year to do it, and I thought that lady luck had smiled down on me. Of all the teams in the league, the Jacksonville Jaguars were going to be the ones to show New England that they’re not the only ones that can take advantage of this weak mid-2010s AFC.

The general public is not convinced, as after being seven point underdogs in our straightforward win on the road in Pittsburgh, we’re eight point underdogs on the road in New England. Infamously, at least in my mind, this public sentiment is capped off by Stephen A. Smith going on First Take and saying that there is ‘really no concern’ for the Patriots. However, I am convinced. I take all the money I made betting the Jags to win straight up in Pittsburgh at +270, and put it all back on Jacksonville to win outright against the Patriots at +290.

This is years before I swore off sports gambling, and I thought this was can’t miss. Even if it weren’t a good bet, I would’ve made it anyway, because this was a special case, but it was a good bet. If you can get a team with 13.38 expected wins at +290 to beat a team with 10.75, you take that bet every day of the week, and don’t go small either.

This all happened in the leadup to the game. I had been thinking about very little else since we defeated Pittsburgh. As a late starting fan that’d only been watching football for about four years at this point, albeit one who had gone back and watched most games the Jacksonville Jaguars had ever played, this game was, and remains, the most important moment of my football watching life.

Very rarely do I make time to watch football games live. If I’m busy on a Sunday afternoon, I will generally just watch them later in the week, but this is one I had to see as it happened. Even though this was a Jaguars team built on a stacked young core that we all thought was going to be back to the AFC Championship multiple times going into the future, something deep within me was sceptical about that, so I knew I had to watch this one live.

I may never get this chance again.

As I woke up on the Sunday morning of January 21, 2018, I already knew we’d won an important victory. Living not even ten hours’ drive away from Foxborough, Massachusetts in Ontario, Canada, their weather is not significantly different from mine, and when I woke up, it was warm. Unseasonably warm.

On January 21st, almost as far Northeast as Northeast can get in America, this game is going to be played in ten degrees Celsius weather. This can’t be construed as anything other than a significant win for the Florida team. The Jags have never had as much trouble in the cold as the other Florida teams, and we did win in -6 temperatures in Pittsburgh just last week, but the warm weather cannot hurt our cause.

By the time the ball finally gets in the air to begin this game, I had been donning everything green I could find for several hours already. I wish I had a photo from that day to show you all. I must’ve looked like a Christmas tree, but I was ready to watch our defence dominate. When we win the coin toss and allow the Patriots to take the ball first, I’m chomping at the bit. Let’s see what the almighty Tom Brady can do against this opposition, the likes of which he’s never seen before.

What I see is not encouraging.

The first two pass attempts of this game go for a combined 44 yards, bringing New England straight into FG range already, and it dawns on me that we are going to trail. Normally, this wouldn’t be something you would even notice, but this Jacksonville team does not get behind. Aside from the ten minute stretch in the Buffalo game being behind 3-0, all of which we spent grinding down the field on offence to tie the game at three, these Jaguars have not been behind in a meaningful football game since we lost to the Arizona Cardinals in November.

It’s been a long time since we’ve trailed for any length of time, but we’re going to be behind for a little while now, as our first offensive drive sees way too much Leonard Fournette, and we have to punt the ball away. It’s not really worrying with this defence we’ve got, as the Patriots run just four offensive plays and punt the ball back to us, but it’s the beginning of a trend that will hamper the Jacksonville offence all day.

The Patriots are all over the line of scrimmage, just begging Blake Bortles to beat them, and are biting very hard on every play action fake. On the first drive, offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett (of later 2020-2021 Aaron Rodgers fame) seems reticent to try to throw the ball over New England’s heads, but quickly realises that it’s going to have to be the pass that does it today.

The Jags’ second offensive touch sees Leonard Fournette touch the ball just twice for just ten yards, as the pass offence does the rest, in spectacular fashion. I told you before that the Patriot defence was not especially intimidating to me, and this drive is the reason why. Nothing is difficult. There are no third downs. Every completion (even the one in the end zone) is to a wide open receiver, and on the second play of the second quarter Marcedes Lewis has caught the touchdown pass to make this a 7-3 football game.

The Patriots can respond with nothing but a negative yard run and two incomplete passes, and I’m over the moon. Not only am I thinking I called it, that we are not going to have as much trouble scoring as everybody thought, but what comes with this revelation is the idea that New England just can’t beat us. Like I said earlier, if this game goes this way, the Patriots cannot beat us. They are not equipped for it.

Our third offensive drive is a little bit harder than our second, but harder than extremely easy still does not make it very difficult. The Patriot defence is still leaving seven people within five yards of the line of scrimmage, which is making it easy for Blake to pitch and catch the ball to wide open receivers. The pass game does almost all the damage again, but Leonard Fournette is the one that scores the touchdown, and we go up 14-3.

Once again, New England responds with nothing. One 21 yard pass to take Rob Gronkowski over the mark for the most playoff receiving yards ever for a TE, and no other positive offensive plays, as we’re actually exposing Tom Brady’s biggest weakness. One that not many teams could expose over his career.

If you can make Tom Brady hold the ball, he will not beat you. This is the case even on a 2017 Patriots team that’s one of the best non-2007 supporting casts Tom ever had. The 2017 Jaguars are fantastic at covering receivers for the first couple seconds, which leaves Tom Brady (never a great tight window thrower) just standing there and looking. Tom’s great feet mean that the pressure never really comes, but he’s just standing there, looking for receivers to come open, but in this first half, they never do. After just one first down, the Patriots have to punt the ball back to us again, and this is our chance.

We’re up 14-3 already. If we can score again to make this a three possession game, it’s going to send New England’s estimated Win Probability plummeting, probably into the teens, because we also get the ball back to start the second half. It would put them in serious danger of simply running out of time to catch back up to us, which means a touchdown here is imperative.

Saying this as somebody who has watched every game the franchise has ever played since their inception in 1995, this touch, starting at 5:26 of the second quarter of the 2017 AFC Championship game, is the most important offensive drive in the history of the Jacksonville Jaguars.

It’s a shame we couldn’t have had Mark Brunell or David Garrard for this moment. Perhaps either of those two men could’ve convinced Nathaniel Hackett to throw the ball.

For some reason, despite a pass game that’d been having such success for the whole of the first half, four of the six plays on this drive are runs, all of which generate negative EPA. Blake Bortles completes a 26 yard pass on one third and long, but gets sacked on the other, and for a pass game that’s had its struggles on third down throughout these playoffs, why would you ever operate the most important offensive series in team history this way?

I didn’t get it in 2018. I don’t get it in 2025. This feels like a big time self-inflicted wound. A needless throwaway of the best chance at the Super Bowl this franchise has ever had. I know Blake Bortles sucks. I knew it then and I know it now, but as an NFL coach you’ve got to live in the present a little bit, and as of the start of this drive, Blake had completed 12 of his 14 passes and generated 0.614 EPA/Play so far in this game. You’ve got to give him a shot.

Hackett doesn’t. He gives him no chance at all, instead relying on a rush game that’d done nothing but hurt the team all half. The Patriots walk down the field and score easily, and despite having a minute left plus two timeouts, the Jags just kneel out the clock and elect to go into the half with a 14-10 lead.

I am furious.

Just five and a half minutes of game time ago I was on cloud nine. Now I am beside myself with anger. My family and friends watching the game with me ask what I’m so mad about. My favourite team is winning the AFC Championship after all. My answer is this.

Why did we have two chances to take a multiple possession lead into the half, and let both of them slip away, without trying our best to score? In my Tom Brady playoff article, I constantly derided and chastised him and the Patriot offence for allowing inferior teams to stay in the fight far longer than they should’ve, which led to countless playoff losses they shouldn’t have taken. This time, Tom Brady is the inferior team trying to stay in the fight, and we let him get away with it.

As I say all the time on this publication, complacency will be the death of your NFL team. The motivation behind my constant reminders of that fact is this very game from 2017. The Jaguars got complacent in a big way, content to walk into half with what they thought was going to be a 14-3 lead. The fans were complacent too, as both contemporaneously and in retrospect there is nowhere near enough outrage in the Jaguar fandom for letting this chance slip through our fingers.

In light of what’s to come, this sequence to end the first half has been forgotten by most, but I haven’t forgotten. I’ll never forget, and I’ll never forgive either Nathaniel Hackett or Head Coach Doug Marrone for allowing it to happen.

Nevertheless, there is an entire second half to play. NFLFastR’s WP model views this game as dead even. 50/50 to begin the half. I don’t view it much differently watching the game live, but I begin to view the situation less favourably as five of the first seven plays of the second half are Leonard Fournette runs for ten yards total.

I’m not the type to yell at the television screen, but you could see the steam coming out of my ears I’m sure. What the heck is with this Leonard Fournette business? What happened to the play action passing? Did we just forget that Blake Bortles generated 0.619 EPA/Play in the first half? If not for the two passes in the first seven plays each being completions for 28 yards between them, I shudder to think how I would’ve reacted.

It’s clear that these play callers are not watching the same game I am. Thankfully, these two successful pass plays are enough on their own to get us into field goal range. Josh Lambo gives us a 17-10 lead, and it’s a much less frustrating experience to watch our defence on the field. We allow just one successful play (a third down completion), and New England gives the ball right back.

I cannot blame the play calling for our next offensive series, as it’s torpedoed by (for once) the Pats not buying a play action fake, and Blake taking a sack that ends the drive before it starts. Oddly enough, this actually calms me down a little bit. At least I know our coaches haven’t forgotten how successful our PA pass has been, and I still feel no danger whatsoever from the Patriot offence. We’ve got some time to figure it out.

The New England touch is three plays and a punt again, which begins to have me believing we may be able to win this game, even in the absence of any more Jacksonville points.

I don’t have to worry about that though, as even though this drive begins with two Fournette runs, one of them is actually successful (his first touch generating positive EPA since the second quarter touchdown eight carries ago), and puts us in a good position to get another real drive going. There’s not much here, but with an 18 yard pass, and then a 15 yard pass, and then a 14 yard Fournette run, it does get us in position to kick the FG that gives us a 20-10 lead.

At this point, I have spent a lot of this game being very unhappy. That unhappiness has almost entirely been wrapped up in our offence though. Every time our defence has been on the field, it’s done nothing but assuage my worries, and right now is when they make the biggest play that they will ever make, but it’s tainted.

It’s tainted because it should’ve been seven points. It should’ve been the game, but it wasn’t.

New England knows they need some trickery to get through this voracious Jacksonville defensive attack, so they try to pull a double reverse pass. It actually works very well, and they get a nice 20 yard gain on it, but the impossible happens. Myles Jack strips the ball out of Dion Lewis’s hands, picks it up, and has only Tom Brady between himself and the end zone. On the assumption that Myles Jack can find a way not to be tackled by Tom Brady, we are about to take a 27-10 lead, and even the great New England Patriots are not going to be able to overcome that.

The feeling is absolute elation.

It’s an unbelievable feeling to be 100% sure that you’re going to the Super Bowl, especially as a team with such a long history of losing. Falcons fans in 1998, Bears fans from 2006, Chiefs fans from 2019, Bengals fans from 2021, there a few fanbases that know this feeling. They can vibe with what I was feeling as Myles Jack picked up this ball and was running, virtually unabated, to the end zone.

Then we hear a whistle. The ball is being placed at the spot of the fumble.

This game was played seven years ago, and I still cannot ascertain why we heard a whistle. Referee Clete Blakeman announces that the ruling on the field is a fumble recovered by the defence, which does not explain why I just heard a whistle. In fact it does the opposite. If you knew it was a fumble in the first place, why did the official take our unstoppable touchdown away from us? Nothing can explain why this happened. Nothing ever does explain it. Nobody ever even tries to explain it.

It’s not an easy call. It looks a lot like the play from the college football playoff game a couple weeks ago. Myles Jack is touched down, but he’s never touched down with possession of the ball. By rule, this means he should’ve had to be touched down again. He never was. By rights, this game should’ve been 27-10, and over with.

There were a few examples before this, but this game is why in the modern day, referees don’t blow the whistle on fumble plays. They let the play run, and can go back and review the fumble if they have to. In 2017, this is not the case, and it stole the AFC from the Jacksonville Jaguars.

I’m not trying to claim the league is rigged. Nobody got anything incorrect on purpose in order to steal the win from Jacksonville, but the call was incorrect, and it did steal the win from Jacksonville.

Everybody on the Jaguars is celebrating as they watch this, happy with the turnover. Myles Jack himself is the only one who knows we just got screwed. He is violently angry. Video replays make that abundantly clear to the rest of us, and the league changes their fumble play policy in shame in the immediate aftermath.

None of that helps the Jacksonville Jaguars, or their fans, who have just had the feeling of a certain Super Bowl berth ripped away from them. From a 27-10 score needing only to depend on Tom Brady failing to make a tackle back to a 20-10 score is a very big emotional swing, and if I’m being honest, I’m not sure it’s one the team ever recovered from.

I can tell you I’ve never recovered from it as a fan.

Our offensive possession is three plays and a punt, and here come the Patriots. At first, things don’t look too dangerous, as we force them into an immediate third and 18 situation, but once that third down is converted, the bottom falls out. Our unbreakable defence finally breaks, and New England scores to narrow the margin to 20-17.

A drive like this is what would’ve made a defensive touchdown so valuable, but I digress. We have to play on.

Our offence is not entirely dead. We do pick up one first down, but that’s all we can get. We must punt the ball back to New England again, and this is where things begin to get scary, but it’s still not that scary. This is still the best defence of all time we’re talking about. There’s one big pass interference call, but no completed passes, and no additional successful offensive plays. At six minutes of the fourth quarter, we once again force the Patriots to punt the ball back to us.

Once again, we are facing down one of the most important offensive touches in the history of the Jacksonville Jaguars. Once again, I would’ve loved if we could’ve had Mark Brunell here to do it, because Blake Bortles isn’t ready for this. No pass completions and a very quick punt mean that we’re in serious danger, but it’s not until I see the punt itself that I realise what fate we’re in for.

It’s just a 40 yard kick, and a pretty solid return means it’s only 21 net yards. The Patriots start with the ball on our 30 yard line, and only then did I know that no matter how good a defence is, this is too much to ask. On back to back plays we lose Myles Jack to injury and Marcell Dareus to injury. New England scores, and now we’ve found ourselves in the only situation we couldn’t afford.

We must rely on our offence.

It’s a disaster. There is one successful play (a 29 yard completion), but that’s all, and it’s a numb feeling as we lose the AFC Championship game 24-20.

The feeling is always odd when the flashpoints of a football game don’t happen right at the end, and instead happen at the end of the first half, and on the fourth play of the fourth quarter, but that’s what this game was. I honestly don’t know how to describe the feelings of this game to you. I used the word heartbreaking in the title, but I don’t know if that’s the right word.

In the first half I was on cloud nine. From there, I transitioned to fuming in the middle of the game. From there, I felt elation like no other, a 100% chance to go to the Super Bowl with a 27-10 lead in the fourth quarter, but when that got ripped away I just felt nothing.

I felt nothing, and I think my team felt nothing also, because none of it was ever the same after that.

Our offence that’d been fairly successful beforehand got just two first downs after that. Our defence that’d been unbreakable all season long allowed New England to generate 0.506 EPA/Play after this moment. All of it as a result of a tremendously positive play (a takeaway), but one that just wasn’t as positive as it should’ve been.

My team lost. We lost a game that we should’ve won. I lost all the money I put on that +290 bet. We lost a Super Bowl that would’ve been ours (Nick Foles against this defence? Come on now. Let’s not kid ourselves). We lost everything, and we don’t have anything on which to wipe our tears like other teams do.

In the play tracking era (which begins in 1999), only 14 franchises know what it’s like to be the very best team in the NFL. In terms of leading the NFL in expected wins, only the Rams (1999, 2001), Raiders (2000, 2002), Titans (2003), Colts (2004, 2005), Ravens (2006, 2008, 2019, 2024), Patriots (2007, 2016), Packers (2009, 2011, 2014, 2020), Chargers (2010), Broncos (2012, 2013), Cardinals (2015), Jaguars (2017), Saints (2018), Buccaneers (2021), and 49ers (2022, 2023) know what it’s like to be the best team in the NFL.

That’s a lot less than half the fans in the NFL, so I consider myself privileged to be a part of this group. I am not the only one who knows what it’s like to lose in the playoffs as the best team in the NFL. In fact, every team up there knows what it’s like to lose in the playoffs despite being the best team in the NFL. However, very few have had to take it on the chin like the Jaguars did.

The Rams, Ravens, Patriots, Packers, Broncos, and Buccaneers all have multiple championships in the last 30 years with which to dry their tears. The Colts and Saints at least have one. The Raiders, Titans, Cardinals, and 49ers all lost their seasons primarily due to QB injuries to Rich Gannon, Steve McNair, Carson Palmer, and Brock Purdy respectively, so they all at least can have gripes with the way it went down, and not quite have to take their losses straight up. The 2010 Chargers didn’t even make the playoffs, despite being top five in both offence and defence, due to an appalling special teams unit. They’re a unique case also, which leaves us looking at one team.

The 2017 Jaguars don’t have championships in multiple other seasons to dull the pain of their loss. We don’t even have one. We didn’t lose due to poorly timed injuries. We didn’t have any ludicrous special teams outcomes. The 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars are the first and only team since the 1998 Vikings to have to just take this loss on the chin, without anything to dull the pain.

I don’t have memories of championship glory to help me get over this missed chance. I don’t have a QB injury I can blame everything on. I just have to sit here and continue to look back in agony at what could’ve been. If only there would’ve just been no whistle. Myles Jack runs into the end zone, and we win.

The failure to ever get over this fumble touchdown moment doesn’t end in the 2017 season. In the 2018 offseason, every good offensive player on the team either gets injured or is allowed to leave. The team goes from having four very good NFL receivers in 2017 to none in 2018. This leaves Blake Bortles (never a very good player to begin with) to flounder, as with offensive ineptitude this extreme, there is no defence that can carry the team along. Despite leading the league in defensive success rate again in 2018, the Jaguars finish the season with just five wins on only 5.51 expected wins.

By the 2019 season, this defence regresses to the point of being one of the worst in the league. The bad offence stays, and the team settles right back into being the doormat we’ve always been outside of our four seasons of relevancy (1996, 1999, 2007, 2017). The Jaguars have not been relevant since 2017. We haven’t been close to being relevant. We did win one playoff game, but it did nothing to dull the pain of this loss.

It felt so good in 2017 to be a relevant football team. One that the league had to worry about, especially because all the players on the team were so young. I thought we were going to be the Buffalo Bills. That was supposed to be our spot. Instead, the Buffalo Bills are the Buffalo Bills, and the 2017 Jaguars have been relegated to the back pages of the history books. Nobody remembers them. Nobody is going to remember them, but I remember.

I will never forget.

Perhaps if this franchise ever does win a Super Bowl, looking back on 2017 will hurt less, but until that point, I have to look back at this season as the painful experience that it was.

At least that lets me feel something about this team.

Thanks so much for reading.