Doug Pederson Has Broken Trevor Lawrence and Will Not Last the Season
What an exercise in duality Monday Night Football was this week. Four teams, all with highly-drafted quarterbacks of differing levels of experience. All four franchises completely dependent on the success of those quarterbacks. And between them, bearing witness to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. The entire gamut. The Alpha and Omega. The very best and the very worst of what can happen when you try to develop a young QB.
Jayden Daniels had a performance for the ages in just his third start. Joe Burrow continues to play at an elite level, but his team fell to 0-3 and their playoff hopes could be dead already. Josh Allen has been the best player in the league so far, and last night he was very definition of unstoppable. Both through the air and running with the ball.
Then there was the other extreme. Personified by the "Generational" No. 1 overall pick from four drafts ago. Trevor Lawrence's career has been in free fall for a while now. And last night he hit terminal velocity:
I mean, just look at what he was looking at and explain how that interception was possible:
Strike that. Never mind. You can't. The Jaguars just signed Lawrence to a 5-year, $275 million extension. Continuing his upward trajectory and building off the promise he showed just two years ago is mission critical in Jacksonville. This, after all, is the guy who lead his team to the playoffs and then pulled off a win after trailing 27-0. That victory should've been his Debutante Ball. His Coming Out Party. The moment he was announced into the polite society of elite signal callers.
Instead, he's regressing before our eyes. Check out this Tale of the Tape:
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As we sit here today, Lawrence is ranked:
--30th in Completion %, at 52.8%
--26th in TD %, at 2.2%
--28th in Success %, at 36.0%
--23rd in Yards per Attempt, with 6.8
--26th in Yards per Game, with 186.7
--26th in Passer Rating, with 75.1
And he's lost his last 8 starts.
Maybe if this was a Bryce Young situation, where Andy Dalton stepped in and lit it up like the entire Carolina offense had been custom built just for him, you could pin the blame on Lawrence. But that wasn't the case last night when Lawrence was pulled. Not even close:
All of which is just a build-up to the point where all the blame goes to Doug Pederson.
It might be very First Take of me to start talking about the temperature of a coach's chair when we still haven't gotten to the last weekend in September. And it might sound like I'm making excuses for Lawrence. But how can you not hold the coach accountable when every aspect of the team is a Bruckheimerian disaster? When Buffalo opens the game with five consecutive touchdown drives:
… how can you do anything but blame the coach?
In fact, this is the perfect time to start questioning whether Pederson was ever a good head coach. Yes, he has a Lombardi Trophy that looks just as authentic as the other LVII Lombardis that have been awarded. But it's looking more and more like he just timed it right. That he went to an RPO scheme that he neither invented nor perfected; he just relied on it heavily before the league had adapted to it. Think Mike Ditka winning a ring thanks to Buddy Ryan's 46 Defense, before opposing coaches went to the Spread and rendered it obsolete.
The novelty wore off what Pederson was doing in 2017 years ago. The magic has worn off. And now that he finds himself unable to pull quarters out of people's ears, he's just another coach with no new ideas. And the player that was supposed to save the Jaguars from obscurity forever, just finds himself trailing 34-3 at the half. Faced with yet another impossible task yet another week. With no solution to be had anywhere.
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Given the stakes, I can't imagine Pederson making it through to the end of the season. Lawrence's first coach Urban Meyer made it to Week 13 before he was fired. Right now, I'd be shocked if his current coach lasts half that long.