You know when you are watching little kids do their musical at school, and they are so small that you only expect them to be so professional in their performance? You are there because you know it will be cute, and you see them mess up a bunch of times even though it is still really nice. You know that that is the best they could do, and they would never get on Broadway like that. You know that they are simply not on that level yet, but you also do not expect them to be. That is where Blake Bortles is. He is not the answer in Jacksonville, and saying that this is the best he has been really is troubling.
He is likely not good enough for this offense
The offense that is run in Jacksonville could be explosive. They have the players to make it work, and they have rookie Leonard Fournette now. They have everything they could ever need to make this offense explosive, but they have a quarterback who is playing below the level of the rest of the team. That is not only troubling, but it will also drag down the better players on the team. Who will want to play in Jacksonville if they do not have someone to run their offense? Perhaps we can call David Garrard out of retirement?
The team needs hope
Fournette is a fantastic player, but running backs are not guaranteed to be stars in a passing league. Bortles could hand off to Fournette for 200 yards each game this year, but that does not mean their team will be any good.
It only means that they had to ask Bortles to hand off that much to make their team decent. They will miss the playoffs, and they will need to make decisions about how they will manage their future. They have Chad Henne on the roster, and maybe he is the player who will step in when Bortles fails.
The Jags are repeating old mistakes
The Jaguars are repeating mistakes of the past by simply allowing the wrong players to stay with the team. They have not given deference to players who should have remained, and they are not giving any consideration to their own errors. They drafted Bortles too high, and it was a reach that many people didn't like at the time.
The NFL has a habit of forcing teams to review their decisions after the fact, and they miss more often than you might think. The Jags missed on Bortles, and they are sitting around hoping it will finally work.
Blake Bortles is likely a nice guy, and he is a serviceable talent for some other team, but he is dragging down the Jaguars because they have not yet moved on from the incorrect draft pick.
