Have several takeaways from this weekend after being at that shitshow of a game. Some contrarian takes here. Not sorry.

1. The crowd

The thing that annoyed me above all else is the crowd complaints. We’re geographically in a location that’s good for opposing fans to show up, so that’s part of it, but the crowd wasn’t even that bad. Maybe a 60/40 to 65/35 split. The east side of the stadium - the one that showed up on the broadcast - was probably 70/30 niners, but the west side was easily 90/10 jags and packed to the brim. I sit in the north end zone so I can see all of this, there were a LOT of jags fans. I know the turnout is annoying, but prices were also pretty high, probably driven up by all the niners fans, and that discourages people from coming to games. Certain teams travel well and the niners are definitely one of them, but it really wasn’t that bad.

2. Ridley

Ridley is being COMPLETELY misutilized right now, and it’s sad. His route tree currently consists of speed outs, comebacks, and gos. That’s about it. We ran one slant with him the whole game and it was a 10 yard completion basically for free. Ridley has a very similar skillset to a guy like Stefon Diggs. He’s a route running technician, not a physical guy. Consequently, he struggles against press man, like Diggs does. The Bills move Diggs all over the formation, using motion and bunches to help free his release, and give him all kinds of inside releases that help him beat press man. Why do we do none of this with Ridley? It baffles me that we’re asking him to play into his weaknesses instead of his strengths. That being said, Ridley is not blameless either and does himself no favors. He frequently releases too far outside and gives himself almost no room towards the sideline on his routes.

3. Trevor

I know a lot of people don’t want to blame Trevor, but frankly, he had by far his worst game as a jag so far. Earlier this year he was playing too fast, often not giving plays a chance. His clock was moving too fast. This past sunday, for whatever reason, he was playing WAY TOO SLOW. He missed multiple open receivers early in the game and on several occasions held on to the ball way too long. As much as yall want to blame Tank for that pick, trevor has to be smarter than putting tank in a position to fail. Throwing a hard ball above tanks head when he’s not ready for it from 5 yards away is silly. You can say tank should’ve caught it until you’re blue in the face, but trevor has to be better about knowing his guy’s skillsets. I blame trevor solely for that pick; he knows tank’s skillset and set him up for failure.

4. Offensive play design

This is the one I think this entire sub can agree upon. We ran a ton of short stuff last year and it was productive and completely normal. The difference this year is the choice in short passing. Last year, our bread and butter was mesh. Underneath crossing mesh concepts were ran 5-10 times per game last year, and this year, we’ve ran it maybe once the entire season. Why? Remembering that one of our favorite plays was the play action rollout swing passes, and we barely run it this year. Why? Outside backfield swing passes, basically glorified screens? well this year we seem to only run misdirection screens. Why? I don’t even know if I can blame Press at this point, it’s not like we changed our system; i just don’t understand why so many concepts we ran for such success last year are seemingly not even in the playbook this year. This isn’t even to mention how stale our running game is.

5. Focus

I don’t think I was in a small but silented/shamed subset of Jags fans when i said before the bye “we can’t keep getting away with it”. Well, we didn’t. We were winning in spite of ourselves on a weekly basis; overcoming often multiple turnovers in plus territory and units falling asleep for quarters at a time. The Bills, Saints, and Steelers game should’ve all been multi-score blowouts; there was no excuse for any of those games to be one score games. These issues finally caught up to us. We had multiple opportunities to get back into this game and every time, we gave it up. Not finding the end zone in the second quarter hurt. Turning the ball over 3 times in plus territory while moving the ball was RIDICULOUS. This has to stop.

I said early in the season that if this team can focus and get its act together, they’re a super bowl contender. If we keep making the same mental mistakes over and over, we are no more than a fringe playoff team. Even with the issues of Press Taylor, this team, had they not repeatedly shot themselves in the foot in all 3 of their losses, could easily be 7-2 or even 8-1. I don’t pretend to know what the fix is for these mental mistakes we have made for the first 9 games, but if we don’t fix it, we’re going to be in deep trouble for the rest of this season and going forward.

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And stop the reactionary “don’t re-sign anybody” takes. They’re just stupid takes. JA41 is an impact player and we should resign him. Calvin hasn’t been great, but we can most certainly get him cheaper; keep him here because unless we somehow get a Randy Moss clone in here there’s nobody who’s going to be successful doing what we ask him to do.