Why Josh Allen and the Jaguars Always Knew They’d Be a Playoff Team
The AFC South title resides in Duval County following a thrilling Saturday night victory over the Tennessee Titans.
With the win, the Jaguars became only the second team in NFL history to start 3-7 and make the playoffs, joining the 2020 Washington Commanders, per ESPN.
A midseason turnaround of this magnitude qualifies as one of the bigger surprises. That is not the case for star edge rusher Josh Allen and this Jaguars squad.
“No,” Allen said. “We kind of knew back - - to be real, I think back in training camp we kind of had this type of swag, this type of aura that we were going to make it far. We knew those five games, that five-game stretch that we had, we had to find a way to win. I think we weren’t finding those ways to win at that moment. I think we were learning lessons.
"Like I said, man, when you lose, you find opportunities. You know, when we were put back in that situation again, we capitalized. So, we won it in overtime. We are 17 down, 10 down, you know, kept a lead. You have to find a way to win, and right now we’re finding multiple ways to win. And at the end of the day, you have to get the job done.”
This culmination of events would not have been possible without the building of a culture from Head Coach Doug Pederson and the Jaguars coaching staff. From the ground up, this team transformed from a laughing stock to a Cinderella story in less than a calendar year. Pederson made clear that this team needed to establish trust in each other to get to this point.
I think what we needed was trust,” Pederson said. “I think trust was broken with this team, you know, when I took the job, so I had to regain their trust as a coach. You know, it’s not an overnight. I said this way back then. It’s not an overnight fix. It’s going to take a process. It’s going to take a journey. I think they saw right away that they can trust in me, I can trust in them.
"You know, one of the things I’m always going to do is shoot them straight and be honest with them. The transparency is key. The communication is key. I think we just built over time that trust factor, and it began to show throughout the course of the year. I think that’s why we hung together, you know, in the middle part of our year, that month of October. You have five straight losses. It could go sideways in a hurry, and it didn’t. We just had to, you know, dig a little deeper. It’s not about coaching harder or playing harder or practicing harder. It’s none of that. It’s you just have to tighten a few things up and play a little bit better, you know, and eliminate the mistakes. We did that, and here we are.”
With a foundation set and wins stacking high, this Jacksonville team is special, one that will continue to draw sell-out crowds as the playoffs are set to begin later this week.
“Man, huge crowd,” Allen said. “It’s something when it’s a sold-out crowd, but it means something more when it’s a sold-out crowd of your people. You know, they did it one time, so now we expect it to happen.
"We expect them to come out every week. We expect them to be loud. When we put our hands in the air and tell them, ‘Let’s go,’ we expect them to be louder and go crazy. That’s the expectation they have for us. That’s the expectation we have for them, so let’s get this going.”
