Ex-Jaguars CB A.J. Bouye Reflects on Jacksonville's Stormy 2019 Season
Following the 2017 season in which the Jacksonville Jaguars were one quarter away from making the first Super Bowl appearance in team history, it seemed as if the Jaguars finally had the bright future they had been building toward for years.
But two years later, the roster has been overturned, team executives have been fired and the question of "what if?" rings throughout the walls of TIAA Bank Field. Simply put, everything that could have gone wrong for Jacksonville since 2017, has gone wrong.
2019 was an especially stormy year for the Jaguars, who were no strangers to drama in 2018 either. They saw a Pro Bowl linebacker in Telvin Smith retire in his prime, executive vice president of football operations Tom Coughlin rule with an iron fist and enact policies which ran counter to what the NFL Players Association allows, quarterback controversy and, of course, the Jalen Ramsey fiasco.
When the team's best player, an All-Pro cornerback nonetheless, demands a trade after two games due to dysfunction and his own personal disgruntlement, then it is clear something is wrong.
In another chapter to the story of what went wrong in Jacksonville, former Jaguars cornerback A.J. Bouye, who the Jaguars traded to Denver for a 2020 fourth-round pick in March, went on SirusXM NFL Radio this week and spoke about the turbulence that was Jacksonville's franchise in recent years.
“The play wasn’t where it needed to be. I don’t think there was much that was changed scheme-wise on our end. We just couldn’t stop certain things. So I felt we were becoming a little too predictable,” Bouye told SirusXM.
“On top of that we had a lot of distractions going into the last year and then certain players with the injuries and certain players wanting to get out of there, it was just a lot going on, and you just couldn’t point the finger at one thing.”
"Certain players" is almost assuredly referring to the drama surrounding Ramsey, who stayed on the team for several weeks after his trade request but forced his way off of the field by claiming he had a back injury. Add in Smith's retirement, Coughlin turning the locker room against the organization and injuries to quarterback Nick Foles and other key players and it is clear Jacksonville went through a season in which most teams would rather never experience.
But the dysfunction in Jacksonville was something the veteran Bouye had admittedly never seen in his career. Bouye, to his credit, was never the cause of drama inside Jacksonville's locker room and the perception of him inside the building at TIAA Bank Field has always been a positive one. But it is clear the turbulence that was the Jaguars had an impact on him, likely making him a happy to be a Bronco.
“It was so many things - fighting in a locker room and disagreements, to people wanting to be gone like, I’ve just never seen that before," Bouye said on SiriusXM Blitz.
Jacksonville has stated all offseason that they want to move past the dramatic antics which plagued the team last year. Head coach Doug Marrone in particular has mentioned the desire to find players who won't bring drama into Jacksonville, something that would be quite the change from the last two years.
“We want to be a big, strong, tough and smart football team. I think we want players that really enjoy playing, that love the game. We don’t want a lot of drama," Marrone said in April. "We want people to be on the same page, as far as everything we’re doing is all about just trying to win. All the individual things will come if we win football games."
