Photo:Shaun Brooks/Action Plus/Icon Sportswire

The Jacksonville Jaguars just spent two weeks of their short, fleeting human lives on a small, damp isle off the western coast of Europe, and, given that they’re 2-5, it’s doubtful that Trevor Lawrence and company have returned home to a hero’s welcome.

This is a precarious position to be in, and most certainly is not the breakthrough Jags fans had hoped for following consecutive 9-8 seasons. To make matters worse, the Jags’ second-half schedule is not an easy one, with the Texans, the Vikings, the Lions, and the Packers on it.

There are, of course, some matchups in which they should be favored: the Jets are a sinking ship captained by a quarterback who either checks it down or throws the vertical element in response to playcalls he doesn’t like; the Raiders are a cautionary tale about trying to exit quarterback purgatory; and two games against the Titans means two front-row tickets to watch Will Levis brutally struggle.

But, the final record of the Jaguars is not the central question. The central question is the assessment of Trevor Lawrence. My friend Diante Lee wrote an excellent, film-based piece on Lawrence for The Ringer a few weeks ago, and, now that Lawrence has broken out of his slump, I would like to discuss the matter with a statistical and systemic focus.

Let us begin with the formalities. At Sports Info Solutions, our player value discussions are almost always going to start with our proprietary player value metric, Total Points, and go from there. In this regard, we rather like Lawrence’s campaign thus far. He currently ranks seventh in passing Total Points on a per play basis and is on pace to have his best season as a pro in this category. The contradiction here is that the Jags’ passing attack is inept generally, and this deserves further examination.

Jaguars Passing Offense – Ranks

That is to say, they are not matriculating the ball, they are not generating big plays, and they are finding disaster on about a fifth of their dropbacks. This is all made worse by the fact that their passing success rate in the red zone is even worse.

It is still possible to nitpick Lawrence, though. His pressure-to-sack ratio, which is a proxy for pocket management, is a bit worse than league average, and he’s good, but not great in expected on-target rate plus-minus (67th percentile) and turnover-worthy throw rate (61st percentile). So, while he’s not a perfect, little angel, he’s still playing reasonably well. Who, then, is to blame for the offensive problems? 

One problem is that the Jags are not getting much juice out of their under-center play action game right now.  Here are the numbers.

Lawrence also proved during those years that he was capable of executing it, ranking sixth in Total Points/play among quarterbacks with at least 100 such reps from 2022-2023. This season, he ranks just 18th out of 19 signal-callers with 25+ under center play action snaps. This is nearly 1 in every 6 dropbacks, and it’s dragging him down in the aggregate. 

On the other hand, he’s fared much better with play action out of shotgun and ranks first in Passing Total Points/play in that bucket (minimum 15 snaps). And in pure shotgun dropback game, he ranks fifth behind Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow, Josh Allen, and Patrick Mahomes, in that order. That’s pretty good company!

There are more granular offensive design issues that could be critiqued generally. For instance, they are extremely siloed under center, even relative to the NFL average, and their 3×1 gun strong (back to the 3-receiver side) looks are just a mechanism for read option bubble stuff. They also have too many curl routes in their diet – over a fifth of their routes are curls! – largely due to spamming concepts like spacing. But a more thorough treatment of these issues is outside the scope of this article, so let us move to personnel.

The offensive line is 2nd in pass blocking Total Points, and they share, with Lawrence, the 8th-best pressure rate allowed in the NFL at 28%. The receivers, on the other hand, rank 27th in Total Points/play, 28th in on-target catch rate, and 31st in broken/missed tackles per reception. 

On top of that, Lawrence has thrown the most catchable passes into the end zone this season, and just half of them have been caught, whereas the NFL average is above 60 percent. Other than rookie Brian Thomas Jr., this is a group that needs to be liquidated following 2024.

Lawrence just signed a 5-year, $275M contract in June, but there shouldn’t be any feeling of buyer’s remorse. Total Points seeks to identify an individual player’s contribution, and Lawrence is playing well in spite of his lack of receiving talent and problems with the offensive design. Half-hearted efforts to address personnel issues and doubling down on the systemic problems has led us to this point. 

It seems unlikely that the Jaguars will go above .500 this year, and maybe that’s for the best. The protagonist, while perhaps not as far along in his development as one would like, is beset by those who aren’t helping get the best out of him. The optimistic position is not that Lawrence can and will improve; this would be nice, but is not necessary per se. The optimistic position is that management will be toppled after 2024, at which point the phenomenon of Lawrence playing well in and of himself will be perceived more clearly in a different context.