Jaguars All-Time Top 5 QBs: Is This The Bad Place?

A horror story with Jack Del Rio as the Grim Reaper, Trevor Lawrence as the Final Girl, and BOOORRRRRRRTLESSSSSSSSS!

Jack Del Rio has a lot of quarterbacks to cut, so let’s get started! 

1. Mark Brunell

Brunell has a wonderfully tidy legacy. He arrived from nowhere, led an expansion franchise to unprecedented, sustained success, faded with dignity (give or take an unceremonious benching at the end) and moved on to a distinguished career as a mentor, then a coach. His Jaguars never reached the Super Bowl but came closer than anyone ever hoped they could, so no couldn’t win the big game label was ever affixed to him. No one came before him in Jaguars history, and no one in Jacksonville has equaled his accomplishments in what is going on 30 years. There is nothing to argue about or quibble over.

Brunell shared the starting job at the University of Washington with Billy Joe Hobert, depending on who was healthy and not in hot water. (Hobert had a habit of finding trouble.) The Raiders drafted Hobert in the third round in 1993; the Packers drafted Brunell in the fourth. Hobert didn’t accomplish much in the NFL. Brunell spent two years on the bench behind Brett Favre, playing fairly well in one 1994 relief appearance (a loss to the Vikings) while absorbing the coaching of Mike Holmgren, Sherman Lewis, Steve Mariucci and some other offensive assistants named Andy Reid and Jon Gruden. 

Brunell became buzzy in league circles. The Eagles tried to trade for him when Gruden became Ray Rhodes’ offensive coordinator, but Brunell (a restricted free agent) managed to scotch the deal, fearing he would get trapped behind Randall Cunningham forever. The expansion Jaguars stepped up with an offer of third- and fifth-round picks, plus a chance to quickly rise up the depth chart. It was the first trade in franchise history. 

"There's not that pressure to take a quarterback with that 31st pick," coach/showrunner Tom Coughlin said at the time. "Maybe we can take one further down than we intended." The Jaguars would eventually draft Rob Johnson in the fifth round of the 1995 draft. He would play one outstanding game for them, then go on to Bills infamy.

Steve Beuerlein won the starting job in camp for the Jaguars’ inaugural season, but Brunell relieved him in the first two games, started the next two, then came off the bench after a Beuerlein injury to lead a comeback against the Oilers for the first victory in Jaguars history. Brunell became the Jaguars starter when healthy for the rest of the 1995 season. He spent most of that time running for his life.

The Jacksonville Jaguars enter their second season with a quarterback who is as media savvy as any player in the league. Handsome and poised, with a pleasant demeanor and a knack for speaking in complete sentences, Mark Brunell always seems to say the right thing at the right time. The Jaguars' coaches believe that when Brunell can master defenses the way he handles interviews and on-camera appearances, he'll be the sort of complete signal-caller they envisioned when they traded to get him from the Green Bay Packers the night before the team's first college draft in 1995. 

Because he wears a No. 8 jersey, throws left-handed and has a penchant for running, the comparisons between 26-year-old Brunell and San Francisco 49ers all-pro quarterback Steve Young have been inevitable."It's funny," Brunell said recently, "but I've never even met the man. Sure, there are similarities there, and I watched a lot of film on him when I was in Green Bay. I respect his game. He's an incredible quarterback, and so much fun to watch. But I don't model my game after him. He's a very talented guy. I'd like to think I am, too." – Leonard Shapiro, Washington Post, August 29t, 1996.

Brunell led the NFL in passing in 1996. He finished ninth in DYAR. The Jaguars went 9-7 but beat Jim Kelly’s Bills and John Elway’s Broncos in the playoffs. The Broncos upset, dubbed the “Ambush at Mile High,” was particularly shocking: the Broncos had gone 13-1 before resting their starters at the end of the regular season and entered the game as 12.5-point favorites.

Brunell is no Namath. He is more like Elway. He has Elway's magic cleats and Elway's Hollywood escapes and a touch on the football that took Elway 10 NFL seasons to learn. Brunell, 26, is only in his second year as a starter, but he did a better Elway than Elway on Saturday. Every time two Broncos looked as if they had him smooshed, he would squirt away or would leave them smashed into one another like cartoon bad guys as he sprinted for another first down or threw across his body to a receiver who didn't even realize he was open. "He was putting the ball on the money," Elway said afterward. "He just made huge plays all day. You don't see a lot of guys who can make things happen like he can." – Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated, January, 1997.

Brunell led Coughlin’s Jaguars to the playoffs again in 1997 and 1998. They went 14-2 and reached the conference championship in 1999. The Jaguars were suddenly, briefly, a marquee organization, with stars like Tony Boselli, Jimmy Smith and Keenan McCardell, as well as Father Flanagan-like Coughlin and the handsome-and-posed Brunell. There had never been an expansion franchise like them. Brunell finished among the top 10 in passing DYAR four times during the run of success, and he also added value as a rusher.

Brunell endured a brutal hit from rookie Gerard Warren in a September game against the Browns in 2001. “Brunell was struck by Warren near the end of the Jaguars' first offensive play of the game,” reported the Jaguars website.“Following an interception near the line of scrimmage, Warren took a 10-yard run at Brunell and struck the quarterback with a helmet-to-helmet blow to the side of Brunell's head. Brunell had to leave the game early in the second quarter due to ‘recurring headaches.’”

Brunell struggled for several weeks after the hit from Warren. A quadricep injury further slowed him and forced him to miss a start. The 2002 season brought a helmet-to-helmet hit from Samari Rolle which knocked Brunell out of a loss to the Titans and precipitated another run of wobbly football. 

"I'm not going to get into a position of defending myself," Brunell said at the time. "I'm just saying, the concussion has nothing to do with the last two weeks. Period." The Jaguars as a team were also aging. Boselli and McCardell were gone. An era was ending.

Jack Del Rio replaced Coughlin in 2003. The Jaguars drafted Byron Leftwich. As we are about to see over and over again, Del Rio liked to send mixed messages to and about his quarterbacks right up until the start of the regular season, then beyond. Leftwich held out in training camp, yet Del Rio refused to name Brunell his starter until after the final preseason game. When Brunell suffered an elbow injury after an 0-3 start, Del Rio demoted him to third string, even after he was medically cleared.

Brunell never even donned a helmet in his final game with the Jaguars. Still, “he got his special moment Sunday,” the Associated Press reported of a December victory over the Saints. “The pregame ceremony came complete with a video montage of his greatest moments: the first win (Oct. 1, 1995), the big playoff win over the Broncos (Jan. 4, 1997) and other dives, scrambles and pinpoint passes he made en route to 25,698 yards over nine seasons.

“Brunell was anything but bitter. Appreciative and a little overwhelmed was more like it.

"’I'll look back on this day for years to come with a great deal of gratitude to the Jaguars, and a lot of gratitude and thanks to the people,’ he said. ‘It was a moment I'll cherish as long as I live.’"

2. Byron Leftwich

Leftwich’s signature moment as a quarterback came when he was a senior at Marshall and finished a game against Akron despite fracturing his left tibia early in the afternoon. Teammates Steve Sciullo and Steve Perretta carried him down the field after a fourth-quarter completion in one of the most memorable moments in college football history.

After the early-game injury, Leftwich tried to return to the field but was ordered to seek treatment by coach Bob Pruett. When Leftwich found out that the ambulance tasked with taking him to the local medical center might not take him back, he opted for a rental van instead. He received x-rays, then returned; it appears that he did not bother waiting for results.

For the record, Marshall lost 24-14 to Akron that day. Leftwich, unable to move after the injury without an obvious hobble (or a lift from his linemen), threw a late rally-crushing interception. But he threw for over 200 yards on one leg after the injury.

“Forget the Heisman,” his center Jeff Edwards said, per Anthony Hanshew of the Huntington Herald-Dispatch. “Forget New York. Forget all that stuff. He just proved to me what kind of player he is. He’s not in it for himself. If he were in it for himself, if he were in it for the Heisman he wouldn’t have been out there at the end of the game.”

The Jaguars drafted Leftwich seventh overall in 2003. Carson Palmer went first that year. Kyle Boller and Rex Grossman were selected later in the first round. It was a relatively weak quarterback class, yet we’ve met three of those quarterbacks in our top five series, and Grossman might crack the Bears list. 

Leftwich took over for injured Mark Brunell in Week 4 of his rookie season and finished 2003 ranked 13th in DYAR. He slipped to 15th in DYAR in 2004 but climbed back to 13th in 2005. He was playing well before spraining an ankle in 2005, forcing David Garrard into the lineup for the final five games of the year. Leftwich returned to start for the Jaguars in the Wild Card game. They lost 28-3 to the Patriots.

If you remember Leftwich as a player at all, you probably remember his Marshall linemen carrying him downfield and his elongated throwing motion, which looked like this:

Oops, sorry. You can see it a bunch of times in this highlight reel: his arm goes down toward his knees and up behind his back before he cocks to throw. It’s more exaggerated on some throws than others:

Ron Jaworski pointed out the odd motion on ESPN, noting that it slowed the release of the football and led to sacks and ill-timed throws. Once Jaws pointed it out, Leftwich’s delivery became both a fatal flaw and a go-to talking point about him on every pregame show and game telecast.

"My throwing motion is going to be my motion," a defiant Leftwich said in the 2006 offseason. "That's the way it is. My throwing motion won't change." He was forced to restate the point several times in one press conference, which gives an indicator of the types of questions he was fielding.

As for Jaws’ criticism: "He had a different release, plus, he was scared of L.T. [Lawrence Taylor]. I do respect his opinion," Leftwich said.

Leftwich started the first five games of the 2006 season before suffering an ankle injury. Ever in character, Leftwich convinced coaches to let him play in Week 6 despite the injury. Or so the story goes. He was ineffective in a 27-7 loss. Jack Del Rio benched him for Garrard, touching off several weeks of controversy about just how injured Leftwich really was. Del Rio, Great Communicator that he was, appeared to be using the injury as an excuse to bench Leftwich without checking Leftwich’s comfort level with the way the arrangement was being presented to both him and the public. Garrard played adequately through the second half of the season; his mobility, compared to Leftwich, was refreshing.

"Byron is our starting quarterback," Del Rio said at the Combine before the 2007 season. "We're not making it an open competition. The bottom line is we spent time and we've done our due diligence . . . [The whole organization has] looked at it, and what we really have is a confirmation that Byron Leftwich is our quarterback."

Garrard outperformed Leftwich in training camp. The Jaguars released Leftwich on September 1st, 2007.

3. David Garrard

Tom Coughlin’s Jaguars drafted Garrard in the fourth round out of East Carolina in 2002. Byron Leftwich leapt over Garrard in 2003 by virtue of being a first-round pick by the new administration. Garrard was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease in 2004 and had a portion of his intestine removed in the offseason. He performed reasonably well in a pair of midseason spot starts in relief of Leftwich that year, throwing an overtime touchdown to beat the Lions in the first of them.

Garrard led the Jaguars to a 4-1 record down the stretch in 2005; Leftwich, as we saw earlier, returned for the playoffs and was ineffective. Garrard replaced the semi-injured Leftwich in 2006 and led the Jaguars to a 5-5 record. He finished 21st in DYAR in 2006; his DVOA was lower than Leftwich’s figures for 2003-05, though he added a bit of rushing value. (DVOA can be a more useful measure of the quality of a player’s performance than DYAR for partial seasons.)

Garrard won the Jaguars starting job in camp in 2007. He enjoyed his finest season, finishing seventh in the NFL in DYAR, with the Jaguars going 9-3 when he was the starter. Garrard led the Jaguars to a playoff victory before doing what everyone did against the Patriots in the playoffs during that era.

At this point in the story, Garrard appears to be a better quarterback than Leftwich, having outperformed him off the bench and seized the starting job from him twice. Garrard looked better at the time, as well. He was more mobile, certainly, and by 2006 it was impossible to watch Leftwich without noticing his Fernando Valenzuela windup and realizing how much it limited the Jaguars passing game.

Garrard would never repeat 2007’s success, however. His DYAR fell to 15th, 19th and 20th over the next three seasons. Granted, the Jaguars were falling apart around Garrard, but he began taking too many sacks and grew reluctant to challenge opponents downfield. Garrard’s raw numbers rebounded in 2010, but he was hot-and-cold throughout the season and ended the year with two losses and a finger injury. Del Rio was rarely shy about criticizing Garrard publicly when he played poorly.

The Jaguars drafted Blaine Gabbert in 2011. Del Rio insisted over and over again throughout the offseason that Garrard was his starter, just as he did for Leftwich before cutting him in favor of Garrard. Sure enough, the Jaguars cut Garrard suddenly at the end of 2011 training camp in a cap-justified move. “He just couldn’t get it going,” Del Rio said. Luke McCown was named the custodial starter until Gabbert was ready. Gabbert never would be, but he soon took over anyway.  

One story that reached me through the grapevine in the early 2010s was that Garrard was focused to a fault on his efficiency rating. In other words, he would check down or take sacks knowing that a high completion rate made his stats look spiffy and no one paid much attention to a quarterback’s sack totals. 

I don’t believe that Garrard calculated his efficiency rating in his head before making on-field decisions. I do believe that Del Rio would float such a story behind the scenes to express dissatisfaction with his quarterback. Del Rio is exactly the sort of coach who would blame his quarterback, at the podium and behind the scenes, while his defenses ranked 28th in the NFL in yards allowed. As alluded to in the Leftwich segment, I think the story of Leftwich insisting that he play through an injury was also at least exaggerated by Del Rio as cover for playing a clearly-limited starter.

Ultimately, Leftwich over Garrard is a judgment call between two briefly-above-average quarterbacks who got hosed by the same coaching regime. When in doubt, proceed chronologically.

4. Trevor Lawrence

I don’t know exactly how we got here, but the “Trevor Lawrence is overrated” takes on the app formerly known as Twitter are starting to separate the people who watch games from those who look at the stat sheet and argue with people who watched the games.

People forget that Lawrence had the Jaguars as the No. 1 seed in the AFC after 11 games. They were 8-3 and getting into a groove offensively after a big road win against the Texans. From Weeks 1-12, Lawrence ranked 10th in the NFL in EPA per play, had the 10th most passing yards in the league, and was PFF’s eighth rated quarterback. He was also completing over 67 percent of his passes, a number that would have been inpressive even if Jacksonville wasn’t fifth in the league in drops.

Then he got injured. Lawrence suffered a high ankle sprain against the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 13. After that, his season fell off the rails as he played through the pain while constantly being under pressure. From Weeks 14-18, Lawrence had the eighth most dropbacks under pressure in the NFL. – Jarrett Bailey, USA Today’s Touchdown Wire, May 20th, 2024.

That’s right: I’m block-quoting stories from two weeks ago, by writers I hang out with on the road. Try to stop me! Muahahahahahaha!

One of the things I’ve noticed, now that I have escaped the rat race with the ongoing support of premium subscribers like so many of you (And my wife. My wife is REALLY supporting me.) is just how weird the NFL offseason news cycle has become. As recently as six or seven years ago, Bleacher Report would move me to features and/or give me time off, other outlets would do what we are doing right now (32 Teams, 32 Mount Rushmores, or whatever) and we’d hand the hot-take baton off to the NBA, MLB and PGA until August. Now, the sportsbook networks and SEO aggregators churn nonsense around the clock. The folks at ESPN and The Athletic may be on reduced schedules, and beat writers are doing the Lord’s work at minicamps, but there’s someone who has never smelled practice-facility grass with a blue checkmark on TwiXter screaming at top volume about the Jaguars right now, regardless if anyone is screaming back.

About 95% of post-draft, pre-training camp NFL conversation has been little more than engagement whoring since I started doing it. But we used to be coquettish about it: hey big boy, wanna talk about Trevor Lawrence on a Tuesday in June? Now, the BroFart Sportsbook schedules social posts like, “Is Trevor Lawrence an MVP candidate?” in an almost braindead effort to increase ad impressions, while content farms string together keywords in an effort to get to the top of search lists. 

I’m glad Bailey is pushing back against “Trevor Lawrence is Overrated” as a take, but I worry that he is pushing back against a fog. No one of substance actually thinks Lawrence is “overrated.” It’s a piece of AI artwork cobbled together from existing assets and machine logic. 

Anyway …

Lawrence, of course, was terrible as a rookie in 2021, thanks to Urban Meyer. Lawrence’s 2022 season was the third-best in Jaguars history according to DYAR, behind Mark Brunell in 1997 and David Garrard in 2007. His DYAR dipped to 11th in the NFL in 2023. Eleventh is pretty darn good, considering his raw numbers. The advanced metrics don’t know that Lawrence was playing through injuries late in the season. DYAR does, however, know when a quarterback is constantly playing tough opponents from behind, as Lawrence was, and of course it evaluates quarterbacks according to established NFL norms, not the expectations of some fantasy podcaster who is mad that his preseason predictions looked silly.

Lawrence could be two seasons like 2022 away from passing Mark Brunell and becoming the greatest quarterback in Jaguars history. He could also be one season away from succumbing to the hopeless incompetence of the Jaguars organization. He’s more talented than Leftwich or Garrard, but I am not ready to push Lawrence past them until I see him push past last year’s mini-slump and deliver another Pro Bowl-caliber season.

5. Blake Bortles

The following is taken from a September, 2018 edition of Monday Morning Digest at Bleacher Report. I didn’t use block quotes or italics because of the length of the piece and because, well, it was my work in the first place:

The Secrets (and Spoilers!) of TV's Most Famous Jaguars Superfan

Critically acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place returns for its third season Thursday. The show follows a quartet of misfits, including Blake Bortles-obsessed Jaguars mega-fan Jason Mendoza, through a twisted afterlife in which neither "the Good Place" nor "the Bad Place" are quite what they seem.

Manny Jacinto, who played Jason on The Good Place. Photo by Dominique Redfearn.

The bumbling Jason's infatuation with the Jaguars—he shouts "Bortles!" the way a paratrooper might shout "Geronimo!"—has become one of the show's funniest gags. But will the success of Bortles and the Jaguars impact either Jason or the universe of The Good Place in Season 3?

Writer Joe Mande spent a few minutes with Digest dishing the dirt.

Digest: How big a part of The Good Place will Jason's Jaguars fandom be this season?

Mande: I've been told not to reveal any spoilers. But I can say that they are back on earth—that's common knowledge from the Season 2 finale. So we're going to see his fandom in real time. It does play a role. It becomes an issue for him, personally: trying to juggle his life and trying to catch the Jaguars game.

Digest: Bringing the characters back to life at the end of Season 2 must have rebooted earth's timeline. That's not what made our real-world Jaguars suddenly good, is it?

Mande: All I will say is that we had to figure out, time-wise, if after he got rebooted the Jaguars were bad or good. One of the hardest things was trying to place the reboot into the real life of the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Way too much time was spent in the writer's room trying to figure that exact problem out. It gave everyone a headache. It came down to: for that to happen, it had to take place on a Sunday, but they played Monday night that week. It got really intense. That's when we had to pull back and say, "It's just a show."

Digest: What was your contingency plan if the Jaguars won the Super Bowl last year? It would have been hard to have a running Bortles gag if Bortles was the Super Bowl MVP.

Mande: The Jaguars were very cool. They let me and Manny Jacinto come to their home playoff game. NBC gave me an HD camera, and I was madly trying to get footage. We took a water taxi to the stadium. We had Manny eat a blue cheeseburger. I had him propose to a cheerleader on the field before the game started. It was really funny stuff. I can't say whether or not we'll use it.

After they won that game, it's all me and Manny were talking about: What if we get to go to the Super Bowl with the Jaguars? I would have been Kevin Hart trying to talk my way on to the podium.

Digest: How early in the creation of Jason did he become a Jacksonville native and a Jaguars fan?

Mande: Developing Season 1, all that we knew was that he was an imposter pretending to be a Buddhist monk. So we discussed what would be the opposite of a Buddhist monk. Obviously, the opposite would be someone from Florida. So we pitched a wannabe Steve Aoki from Florida. I had just done stand-up in Jacksonville and was fascinated by how weird Jacksonville is, so I said, "This guy has to be from Jacksonville."

I'm a huge Minnesota Timberwolves fan, so I know what it's like to be super-optimistic about a doomed franchise. I'm still a huge Ricky Rubio head, so my Ricky Rubio fandom is the precursor to Jason's Bortles obsession.

Digest: But you can't make a rallying cry out of "Rubio!" the way you can with "Bortles!"

Mande: Bortles is a perfect comedy word: the combination of clunky consonants and long O's. There's something about the B's and R's and T's. It's just a ridiculous word.

Digest: Series creator Michael Schur said in Rolling Stone that Jason's fandom is a commentary on human nature: how we become fiercely loyal to whoever is wearing the right jersey.

Mande: I think if you look closely at the chart [used to score moral points on the show], being a Browns fan lost points. [Correction: Loyalty to the Browns is worth +53.83 points.] We talk a lot about tribalism on the show. Being a fan of any sports team is just overt tribalism. There's no real sense to it.

Digest: That doesn't mean that all diehard football fans are headed to the Bad Place, does it?

Mande: There is something about sports that makes you hopeful but is almost never rewarded unless you're a Patriots fan. Being a devoted sports fan is like a version of the Bad Place.

For those questioning Bortles’ ranking: the Jaguars have won eight playoff games in franchise history. Bortles was the quarterback of record for two of them. He is second on the franchise’s all-time passing yardage and touchdown lists, and Trevor Lawrence is over a year away from catching him. Bortles was bad, and he wasn’t the most with-the-program guy, but he was talented and sometimes strung together some thrilling moments. 

Also, Mande figured out who to adjust for the Jaguars’ success.

6. Gardner Minshew

Minshew is also bad but still strings together some thrilling moments. Minshew’s 2019 season (21 touchdowns, 6 interceptions in relief of Nick Foles) looks great on the stat sheet, but it ranked 22nd in DVOA that year. Aaron Schatz’s analytics know when a quarterback is padding his stats in blowout losses and hiding his mistakes in the “fumbles” category.

7. Blaine Gabbert

Overdrafted size-arm guy, dysfunctional organization.

8. Chad Henne

Gabbert’s mop-up man.

9. Quinn Gray

Gray started a few games for the injured David Garrard in 2007 and threw four touchdown passes in the season finale. 

10. Steve Beuerlein

Beuerlein started the first-ever Jaguars game, giving way to Mark Brunell two weeks later. Your other choices include Mike Glennon and Nick Foles. At least the Jaguars had an excuse for going with Beuerlein in 1995.

Later This Week …

The Texans/Oilers Top 5 QBs: Dante’s Angels.