LONDON — On Friday morning, about three hours after the Jaguars touched down in England, their home away from home, Doug Marrone stood in the stands at Allianz Park and glanced out over the rugby field where his team had just wrapped up its final practice before facing the Philadelphia Eagles at Wembley Stadium.
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The Jacksonville head coach was answering a question about his offense’s identity, which has been tweaked and skewed and shifted, mostly unsuccessfully, in the absence of Leonard Fournette, the young running back and rising star around whom the Jags front office built the unit.
Minutes earlier, the team had announced that Fournette would miss his fourth straight game and sixth of the season because of a hamstring strain. And Marrone, in this particularly honest moment, was detailing the difficulties of overcoming Fournette’s injury. Of course, the former No. 4 overall pick was supposed to be a focal point of the Jaguars offense.
“One of the things that we wanted to build our identity around is being able to run the football,” Marrone said. “From where you guys are standing, from where I’m standing, I think we all know what type of identity we wanted as a football team, and we’ve talked about it and we’ve practiced that way. And then when you have multiple injuries on the field, then it gets difficult because you can’t force something that you may not have.”
Marrone was optimistic, though. A week prior, the Jaguars had traded a future fifth-round pick to the Browns for Carlos Hyde, a physical, bruising runner who was acquired to help the offense rediscover its ground-and-pound approach. “(He’s) going to be able to help us do some of the things that we feel like we need to do,” Marrone said of Hyde.
Only he did not.
The Jaguars lost to the Eagles 24-18 on Sunday, their fourth straight loss and fifth in six games, and the running game was nowhere to be found. Hyde carried the ball just six times for 11 yards. Jacksonville running backs combined for just eight total carries in the game, including just two in the entire second half.
It marks the first time in Marrone’s tenure as head coach that Jaguars running backs finished with eight or fewer rushing attempts in a game. The last time it happened for the franchise was Oct. 27, 2016, when Gus Bradley was the head coach and Greg Olson was calling plays. The Jags fired Olson two days after that game, a 36-22 loss to the Titans.
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On this brisk, sunny day in North West London, offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett abandoned the run. There’s no way around that fact.
Yes, the Jaguars trailed for the entire second half. But the deficit was in single digits for all but four minutes of the final two quarters. The game was in reach. The Jags still could have tried to establish the run.
They did not.
And perhaps the most concerning part of it all is how Marrone explained the strategy after the loss: “A lot of it’s the confidence, and you have to have confidence with the guys up front being able to do it, and we just felt at times that (throwing) it was our best chance to make a play.”
It seems Marrone no longer trusts his offensive line, a group that’s been crushed by injuries this season. First, the Jags lost starting left tackle Cam Robinson to a torn ACL in Week 1. Then they lost backup left tackle Josh Wells to a groin injury in Week 5. In the meantime, left guard Andrew Norwell (foot), right guard A.J. Cann (triceps), right tackle Jermey Parnell (knee) and center Brandon Linder (knee/back) have all been dealing with nagging injuries of varying severities.
It’s far from a healthy unit, and that certainly plays into Marrone’s lost confidence.
Still, there was one sequence late in the game where Hackett’s play-calling was bordering on disrespectful.
On the Jaguars’ final offensive possession, trailing by six points, they ran eight plays. On six of those plays, they had either one or two yards to gain for a first down — a second-and-1, a third-and-1, a fourth-and-1, a second-and-2, a third-and-2 and a fourth-and-2.
Hackett did not call a single run play.
Offensive linemen want the game on their shoulders in those situations. In this case, they didn’t even get an opportunity to win their individual battles and push their opponents off the line of scrimmage.
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“We just block any play they call the best way we can,” Cann said after the game when asked about the puzzling play-calling sequence.
Earlier in the game, in the first quarter, the Jaguars faced a third-and-1 from the Philly 32-yard line. Hackett called a run up the middle for Hyde, who was stuffed by a loaded Eagles box and dropped for a one-yard loss. The Jags were forced to settle for a field goal.
Marrone said that early failure was a factor in those calls at the end of the game.
But Hyde felt like there could have been opportunities later in the afternoon to run the ball against a more worn-down Eagles front.
“It would have been nice to run the ball in some of those situations,” Hyde said. “We definitely should have focused more on it. I think we would have got it going, though, if we would have stuck to it.”
“Don’t take anything away from Philly. They played good run defense,” Hyde added. “But I just didn’t think we stuck to it, though. We went away from it quick.”
The Jags hung around in this one thanks to a solid performance from Blake Bortles, who completed 24 of 41 passes for 286 yards and a touchdown.
But the Jacksonville quarterback had no help from the run game, rendering play-action fakes virtually useless. There was no threat of the Jaguars even calling a run play, let alone actually gaining yards on the ground, outside of Bortles scrambling.
“We really could never get that thing going, really get it established. And that’s what you need,” Marrone said. “You need to start establishing it. Sometimes people will question whether you had a chance to establish it or not, or whether you stuck with it or not. But it didn’t look like we were able to establish anything early.”
The Jags are hoping the bye week will allow several key offensive pieces to get healthy, starting with Fournette. A healthier offensive line is also crucial.
One thing is clear, though: This offense is a far cry from last year’s physical, run-it-down-your-throat group.
The Jags were one-dimensional offensively Sunday, and ultimately that falls on the coaching staff.
(Top photo of Doug Marrone: Steve Flynn / USA TODAY Sports)