It's difficult to call 2023 anything other than a disappointment for the Jaguars. Sure, their 9-8 record was the same as what they managed in 2022, but this time there was no AFC South title or playoff victory involved. Rather, the team started 8-3 before losing five of their final six games, including a chance to win the division in Week 18 against the Titans … sheesh.

That said: New year, new Jaguars, and they've accordingly made a number of big-time decisions over the past six months meant to take this roster from good to great. A quick overview of all the Jaguars' fantasy-relevant coaching staff and major offseason moves (QB/RB/WR/TE) to this point:

The Jaguars invested heavily in PFF’s reigning 27th-ranked offensive line, bringing in former Bills C Mitch Morse and re-signing LG Ezra Cleveland and RG Brandon Sherff to big-money extensions. Here’s to hoping the Injury Gods chill out on OT Cam Robinson (8 missed games) in 2024 and beyond.

Of course, this team will ultimately go as far as "The Prince Who Was Promised" takes them.

Jacksonville Jaguars Fantasy Football Outlook: Position by Position

Quarterback

The 2021 NFL Draft’s No. 1 overall pick hasn’t lived up to the “generational” label during his short career. Lawrence’s magical 27-point Wild Card comeback against the Chargers was great and all; just realize his advanced metrics don’t exactly scream “highest-paid player in the sport.”

Lawrence among all QBs with 300-plus dropbacks:

  • 2021: -0.045 EPA per dropback (No. 26), -4.9% completion percentage over expected (No. 29)
  • 2022: +0.132 EPA (No. 9), +1.4% CPOE (No. 9)
  • 2023: +0.071 EPA (No. 17), +0.9% CPOE (No. 16)

The results in fantasy land, accordingly, haven’t been great. The QB29, QB11 and most recently QB15 in fantasy points per game, Lawrence simply hasn’t been a difference-maker in the box score during his first three seasons.

Of course, the Jaguars have hardly surrounded Lawrence with the world’s most QB-friendly environment. Specifically, Jacksonville has boasted the league’s 28th, 20th and 30th-ranked offenses in “Supporting Cast Rating” over the past three seasons. The near-miss TD mixtape from last season is particularly nauseating.

Overall, nobody lost more EPA to dropped passes than Lawrence last season. He was unironically a top-three QB in EPA per play when accounting for this and the Jaguars' porous pass blocking. Every QB faces adversity to some extent, but the eye test and advanced numbers agree that Lawrence was objectively unluckier than most last season.

Additionally, injuries didn’t help. T-Law is probably in an ice bath somewhere as you’re reading this:

  • Week 6: Bruised knee
  • Week 13: Grade 3 high-ankle sprain
  • Week 15: Concussion
  • Week 16: Sprained A/C joint

But guess what? Lawrence doesn’t turn 25 until October, and the Jaguars went out of their way to improve their aforementioned underwhelming environment during the offseason both at the line of scrimmage and on the perimeter. It’d make a lot of sense if Lawrence’s best football has yet to come. That’s at least what the Jaguars are hoping for, anyway.

Bottom line: The current QB14, pick 120.4 in ADP, Lawrence is being priced far closer to his floor than ceiling, unlike last season when he was a top-eight pick at the position regularly going off the board in the Round 5 range. There's more rushing upside here than the other purer-pocket passers that Lawrence is being priced around. While I'm not exactly basing my entire fantasy strategy around obtaining T-Law, he's shaping up as a more than affordable middle-round option on rosters that failed to come away with one of the elite dual-threat talents going in the earlier rounds. He's my sixth-most drafted QB through 30-plus offseason Underdog Drafts.

Running Back

On the one hand, Etienne racked up 1,484 total yards and 12 TDs in 2023, finishing as the RB7 in PPR points per game on the season.

On the other, the former 2021 first-round pick went from one of the league's most explosive and efficient ball carriers to, well, one of the least:

Etienne among 49 RBs with 100-plus carries in 2023:

  • PFF rushing grade: 78.4 (No. 20)
  • Yards per carry: 3.8 (No. 38)
  • Yards over expected per carry: -0.29 (No. 38)
  • Yards after contact per carry: 2.0 (tied for No. 26)
  • Missed tackles forced per carry: 0.24 (tied for No. 8)
  • Explosive run rate: 8.2% (No. 36)

ETN does deserve credit for posting solid marks as a receiver, but yeah: His path to success was far more due to volume than his own personal excellence (unlike in 2022).

Of course, a bit of context helps show that ETN maybe wasn't quite as bad as some of these numbers make him out to be. The Jaguars ranked dead last in rushing yards before contact per attempt (0.7) last season, far removed from their fourth-place finish in 2022 (1.9). That 1.2-yard difference was easily the largest dropoff in the league and nearly makes up for Etienne's total difference in yards per carry between 2022 (5.1) and 2023 (3.8).

Dec 31, 2023; Jacksonville, Florida, USA; Jacksonville Jaguars running back Travis Etienne Jr. (1) runs the ball against Carolina Panthers linebacker Kamu Grugier-Hill (54) in the fourth quarter at EverBank Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jeremy Reper-USA TODAY Sports

It becomes even easier to conclude that the Jaguars' 25-year-old talent isn't suddenly washed when considering, you know, the team's other primary RBs in Tank Bigsby (2.6 YPC) and D'Ernest Johnson (2.6) were somehow significantly worse. Bigsby's receiving work in particular was a f*cking horror movie.

Now, head coach Doug Pederson did give an interesting quote in May surrounding his ideal RB usage:

"It’s hard to put necessarily a rep count on it, but you do want to keep him as healthy as you can throughout the season, and that’s why we’ve talked about this, too — as a staff and myself — making sure Tank [Bigsby] gets opportunities to get out there and take some of the pounding off of Travis.”

This does go at least a little bit hand in hand with ETN's first- and second-half splits from last season:

Etienne 2023 usage splits:

  • Weeks 1-8: 81% snaps, 72% rush attempts, 64% routes
  • Weeks 10-18: 66% snaps, 63% rush attempts, 53% routes

Overall, Etienne ranked first in touches (178) and second among all RBs in PPR points (163.9) during the first eight weeks of 2023 compared to 14th (147) and 15th (118.5) during his final nine games. Not a horrific dropoff, but also not quite the finish that many fantasy managers were hoping for after the blistering hot start.

Bottom line: Fantasy Life Projections aren't buying the Year 2 Bigsby hype and have Etienne racking up the position's eighth-most combined carries and targets. A mini-leap from Lawrence and improved performance at the line of scrimmage could make Etienne's 2023 first-half performance the norm in 2024 — I struggled to see THAT big of a difference between his outlook compared to Round 2 backs like Jonathan Taylor and Saquon Barkley. Sign me up for ETN in Round 4, while Bigsby is a fine enough final two-round dart simply as a perspective handcuff option despite last season's repulsive performance.

Wide Receiver

Kirk turned in a rather awesome 84-1,108-8 debut campaign in Jacksonville before actually supplying better efficiency numbers in terms of yards per route run (2.07 vs. 1.79) and targets per route run (21.1% vs. 19.8%) in his injury-riddled encore. While the WR33 finish in PPR points per game wasn't ideal, this improves to WR28 status if we exclude his one-snap Week 13 performance.

The main difference for Kirk was simply TD regression, particularly in the red zone. Overall, Kirk caught seven scores on a whopping 22 targets inside the 20-yard line in 2022 before failing to convert on any of his *five* red zone targets in 2023. The difference was primarily due to the newfound presence of Calvin Ridley, who racked up a whopping 26 red zone targets last season — the third-highest mark in the NFL.

Oct 15, 2023; Jacksonville, Florida, USA; Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver Christian Kirk (13) scores a touchdown against the Indianapolis Colts during the second quarter at EverBank Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Morgan Tencza-USA TODAY Sports

Now, Kirk's 2022 campaign still only produced WR18 results in PPR points per game, and it's far from a guarantee that his red zone usage booms after the team decided to add a pair of skyscraper-sized WRs to the equation:

  • Give Gabe Davis credit for his TD-scoring ability. Including playoffs, Davis has caught a whopping 33 TDs since entering the NFL back in 2020 — tied with CeeDee Lamb (!) for the 10th-highest mark in the league. That said, he ranks 58th in yards per route run (1.51) and 82nd in targets per route run (15.5%) among 95 qualified WRs since 2020. His contract certainly implies he'll have a home in three WR sets; just realize the list of WRs signing big-money deals with new teams in free agency isn't great.
  • BrIan Thomas scored a TD every four catches during his final season at LSU. His 17 scores on the season were the most by a Power 5 receiver since DeVonta Smith (23, lol) back in 2020. Humans standing 6-foot-3 and weighing 209 pounds shouldn’t be able to run a 40-yard dash in 4.33 seconds, but Thomas isn’t like most mortals. Overall, his 122.2 speed score ranks in the 99th percentile at the position; the man’s 10-yard split (1.5) was a mere 0.01 second removed from NFL Combine 40-yard champ Xavier Worthy (1.49) for crying out loud. Throw in a 38.5-inch vertical, and Thomas stands out as a freak among freaks: His 9.97 out of 10.00 RAS score ranks 10th out of 3,063 WRs from 1987 to 2024.

Ultimately, Fantasy Life Projections have Kirk (116 targets) leading the way, followed by Thomas (95) and Davis (80). Those latter numbers could boom should the offense not prioritize its TE and RBs in the passing game as much, but that's hardly a guarantee.

Bottom line: Kirk feels appropriately priced at his current WR30 ADP over at Underdog Fantasy, although I've tended to buy into Tee Higgins, Terry McLaurin and Marquise Brown a bit more often at their similar valuation due to the former and latter WRs' enhanced QB situation and the middle option's gaudier best-case target ceiling. Thomas (WR43, pick 74.3 ADP) feels like a "better in best ball" boom-or-bust WR4 type, while Davis (WR64, pick 133.8) isn't someone I'm overly inclined to target unless building out a Jaguars stack. I do prefer Thomas relative to ADP neighbors Ladd McConkey and Keon Coleman — he's a high-upside WR4/5 on rosters that invested in the position early and often already.

Tight End

Engram caught 114 of 143 (!) targets last season for 963 yards and four scores. If anything, the 29-year-old talent was a bit unlucky in the scoring department, something that he could be leaned on more in 2024 after Ridley took his talents to Nashville.

There simply isn’t much of a history of Doug Pederson doing anything other than enabling high-end fantasy TEs. During his seven years as a head coach:

Overall, Pederson's offenses have ranked first, second, first, first, second, ninth and most recently fifth in total targets to the position. Some might call that a trend.

However, Engram's half-PPR points per game with Kirk: (7.7, 11 games) paled in comparison to what he managed without Kirk (15.5, 5 games). No TE had more screen targets than Engram (21) last season, and his five-yard average target depth was the third-lowest mark among 24 TEs with at least 50 targets last season. The same ranking holds in terms of the highest percentage of targets to come within five yards of the line of scrimmage (69%) last season.

It makes sense that the presence of Kirk would reduce the team's desire to get Engram as involved in the underneath areas of the field. Then again, the man doesn't trail only Travis Kelce and T.J. Hockenson in targets over the past two seasons by accident.

Bottom line: Essentially a WR in this offense, Engram deserves to be the first TE drafted after the "Elite Seven" are off the board. That said, his YAC-heavy role is very similar to David Njoku, who is going a full two rounds later than him in current Underdog Drafts. I'm a much bigger fan of investing in Engram in full-PPR formats; his seven total targets inside the 10-yard line over the past two seasons reflect the reality that this offense doesn't go out of its way to feed him fantasy-friendly scoring opportunities.

Jaguars 2024 Season Prediction

The Jaguars used two of their three top-100 picks on defense and bolstered their defensive line by extending stud EDGE Josh Allen as well as by signing Arik Armstead to a big-money deal. Here's to hoping that will be enough to fix a group that allowed at least 28 points in five of their final nine games last season.

I understand the Texans being favored to win the AFC South, but the Jaguars are coming off back-to-back nine-win seasons and have done enough this offseason to believe the roster is in a better place overall. I'll take over 8.5 wins as a leap of faith in Lawrence finally playing up to his (wait for it) generational billing inside of what looks to be his best overall offense yet.

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