Why Blake Bortles and the Jaguars are a real Super Bowl threat (yes, really)

The NFL is focused this week on Sunday afternoon’s Steelers-Patriots matchup set for Heinz Field in Pittsburgh. The 11-2 Steelers versus the 10-3 Patriots, the winner likely earning home-field advantage throughout the AFC play-offs, where many think the two sides will inevitably meet again in the conference championship game. But amid the hype over Pittsburgh and New England, there is one team being completely overlooked, a team that in fact went through both the Steelers and Patriots to reach the Super Bowl two years ago: the Denver Broncos.

No, not the woeful 2017 Denver Broncos, a team that has hopelessly lost its way and is tied for the fifth-worst record in all of football. The 2015 Denver Broncos. The Super Bowl championship team that had the best defense in all of football, a defense that was so good it was able to paper over its suspect play at the quarterback position. That Broncos team may have been reincarnated in the form of the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars.

The Jaguars franchise has long been the NFL’s preferred choice to pawn off to the UK for London games, the message being that their presence would not be missed stateside and that Jaguars football can pass for real NFL football to international fans who squint their eyes or simply don’t know any better. But this year’s Jaguars are 9-4, in first place in the AFC South and nipping at the heels of the Steelers and Patriots. While it’s long been assumed that Pittsburgh and New England will be the No1 and No2 seeds in the conference, thereby earning first-round byes, a loss by either team puts them at risk of being passed by Jacksonville. A Patriots loss would give them the same amount as Jacksonville on the season, and if Pittsburgh loses, they’d be only one loss better – with the Jaguars holding the tiebreaker by virtue of their 30-9 stomping of the Steelers in Pittsburgh back in Week 5. Jacksonville is for real and the NFL is struggling to come to grips with that fact.

“Teams aren’t used to getting beat by the Jags,” Jacksonville quarterback Blake Bortles said after Sunday’s win over the Seattle Seahawks got chippy late. “We beat the crap out of them for 60 minutes.”

It is football sacrilege to compare Peyton Manning to Blake Bortles. And over their full careers, sure. May the football gods hit anyone who does so with a super-charged lightning bolt or two. But while 2015 Manning was still able to pitch Bud Light and Papa John’s like in his prime, he had significant trouble throwing the football around due to age and injury. By every metric that matters – completion percentage, touchdown-to-interception ratio, quarterback rating, QBR, average yards per attempt, average yards per completion, you name it – Bortles is better or equal to the numbers posted two years ago by Manning in his final season. Manning also had two top-tier receivers in Demaryius Thomas and Emmanuel Sanders; Bortles is getting by with the likes of Marqise Lee, Allen Hurns and Keelan Cole after Allen Robinson, Jacksonville’s No1 receiver, was lost in the pre-season to a knee injury. And while in the past the Jaguars have usually won in spite of Bortles, he’s been a big part of their success the last two weeks, hitting on 70% of his passes and throwing for four touchdowns and zero interceptions in wins over the Colts and Seahawks.

“These last couple of games he’s playing amazing,” Jaguars defensive end Calais Campbell said after Sunday’s. “He looks like Tom Brady these last couple games.”

OK, so that’s insane. We can all agree that Bortles is not Brady. Jaguars head coach Doug Marrone would be the first to say so. He famously said in the offseason that his ideal gameplan would feature a heavy dose of Leonard Fournette and “zero” pass attempts from Bortles. But we also can agree the Jaguars’ signal-caller is at least better than Brock Osweiler, right? The 2015 Broncos managed to go 5-2 in seven late-season Osweiler starts thanks to that dominant defense. Which brings us to the Jacksonville D.

The 2017 Jaguars defense is every bit the equal of that 2015 Denver unit and it might just be better. The Broncos gave up an average of 283 yards per game; the Jaguars yield 291. Denver allowed 18.5 points per game; Jacksonville has an average of 15.5. Denver had a signature regular-season victory over Tom Brady and a 10-0 Patriots team, harassing Brady into hitting on just 23 of 42 attempts; the Jaguars have that blowout victory over the Steelers in Pittsburgh, luring Ben Roethlisberger into a career-high five interceptions. The Jaguars also lead the NFL in sacks and takeaways.

While an angry Earl Thomas said after Seattle’s loss on Sunday that the Seahawks fell to a “subpar quarterback,” head coach Pete Carroll – no stranger to winning a Super Bowl behind a dominant defense – talked about what really matters: that stout Jaguars D.

“They are the best in the NFL, by a pretty good margin,” Carroll said. “They’ve got a big rotation of guys who come after you, linebackers who can fly, a secondary with a bunch of ballhawks back there. They cause a lot of problems.”

The Steelers and Patriots cause teams a lot of problems with their prolific offenses, but their defenses are an issue for few. The saying “defense wins championships” long ago became cliche. It also happens to be true quite often. The 2015 Broncos, the 2013 Seahawks and 2012 Ravens as just the most recent examples. If defense wins a championship this season, it’s not going to be the defenses of the Steelers or the Patriots. It will be won by the Jacksonville Jaguars.