Melina Vastola-USA TODAY Sports
The Jacksonville Jaguars get a bad rap nationally because right now they are a bad football team, but the absurd segment that ESPN ran on Sports Center on Thursday calling them the “most hopeless” franchise in the NFL is an absurd exercise in pointless exposition which seems to have become ESPN’s specialty recently.
The truth is no NFL franchise is hopeless and for a major media organization to suggest otherwise is an absolute insult to intelligence. No matter how bad a team is, in this era of the NFL we have seen that they are only one franchise quarterback away from being playoff contenders. It happens every year, a bad team gets a quarterback and immediately turns it around. Last year it was the Indianapolis Colts with Andrew Luck, this year it appears to be the Kansas City Chiefs with Alex Smith.
Not even the most optimistic of Jaguars fans believed this team was going to be good this year and we have seen over the first two weeks how bad this team actually is, but this is essentially an expansion franchise with a new owner, new coach, new front office and even new uniforms. The Jaguars are going to be in prime position this offseason to draft a franchise quarterback and from there anything can happen.
Are the Jaguars hopeless in 2013? Probably, but to suggest that there is absolutely no hope for this franchise moving forward suggests that through two games of the Dave Caldwell regime he is going to fail miserably and this team is going to continue to get worse moving forward. This is an absurd notion, but again it appears the ESPN is only capable of operating in the absurd.
The truth is that there should be a great deal of optimism surrounding the Jaguars fan base. We finally have an owner in Shad Khan that seems to be committed to winning at all cost and has not been afraid to get rid of people who he does not believe can get the job done. He went out and hired arguably the hottest general manager candidate this offseason to help build a contender out of the absolute dumpster fire the previous regime left.
The mess was so big that the results were not going to change overnight, most people understand this. The NFL “experts” at ESPN are unable to take their Tebow-tinted glasses off for one second to actually pay attention to what is happening in Jacksonville, because that does not fit into their narrow, misinformed narrative.
So, while the national media trips over itself to get in line to poke fun at the Jaguars just remember that they are not a hopeless franchise because they are just one quarterback away from being relevant again.
You can follow Joey on twitter @joeyfarbo.
