The Jacksonville Jaguars were able to file their roster down to 53 players before the NFL’s Saturday deadline, which means it’s now time for the staff to predominantly turn their attention to the regular season.
Many fans have been quick to voice their opinions in their lack of confidence in the young group, however, general manager Dave Caldwell believes in the group, which does have notable veterans sprinkled through it.
“I love this team. I love the energy this team brings. I love some of the veteran leadership we brought in with Joe Schobert [and] Tyler Eifert. We’re not that young on offense. You have a guy like Chris Conley. The offensive line has all played a lot of games together. Keelan Cole, Dede Westbrook, we have guys. DJ Chark Jr. So, don’t count this team out yet and I think they’ll tell you the same thing,” Caldwell said.
“We can’t afford a rebuilding year and that’s not our mindset. Our mindset is to put the best team out there to play, to compete, and to win.”
Of course, the speculations of the team rebuilding caught momentum this week after the team released running back Leonard Fournette and traded Yannick Ngakoue almost a week ago. Before that, they traded several veterans like A.J. Bouye, Calais Campbell, and Nick Foles, subtracting a lot of experience and leadership from the team.
On the surface, it’s easy to see why fans would believe that’s the case but Caldwell shared some key info that may have revealed the Jags’ true intentions. In a nutshell, he stated that the Jags had two key objectives to complete heading into the season.
“[Jaguars Owner] Shad [Khan] gave us a directive to put the best team out there and we feel like we did that with the players that we have,” Caldwell said. “So, we had to do two things in this season and [that was] put the best team out there and get our salary cap under control. Those are two tough things to do initially, at the same time, but we feel like we did a pretty good job and we’ll just see where we stand.”
Well, they did get the salary cap under control with a projected amount of $34,830,165, per Over the Cap. The reason for that is because a lo of the aforementioned names had cap hits of over $10 million. That said, rellocating their salary cap clearly came at the cost of experience, but at the same time, it appears that’s a risk Caldwell was willing to take.