Tag: 2017 afc championship

AFC Championship loss to Patriots still haunts Leonard Fournette

Leonard Fournette still disagrees with a call from the 2017 AFC Championship Game against the Patriots.

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The 2017 AFC Championship Game was a highly-contested battle former Jacksonville Jaguars running back Leonard Fournette will never forget.

Neither will Patriots fans considering New England won the game by a 24-20 margin on a game-winning touchdown catch from former receiver Danny Amendola.

For his part, Fournette had a big hand in the game. He finished with 24 carries for 76 yards and a touchdown. The touchdown gave Jacksonville a 14-3 lead at the time.

However, it was one particular play that went New England’s way that still haunts Fournette. New England ran a trick play in the fourth quarter, where Amendola was the recipient of a screen pass. He threw it to the other side of the field to Dion Lewis.

Lewis ran into open space, and Jaguars linebacker Myles Jack came up from behind Lewis and stripped him on the play. Jack recovered the fumble but the play was blown dead once he was ruled down on the field.

Fournette appeared on Good Morning Football and said he still disagreed with that ruling to this day.

“Myles Jack was not down,” Fournette said. “That’s the famous quote we always say. He was not down. It just brings back so many memories. I know for a fact if we would have won that game, that franchise team still would have been together. You never know what would have happened, how many we could have won. We were still young at the time. We had a lot of vets.”

New England would end up winning the game. However, one has to wonder what things would’ve been like had Jack been ruled up, and the Patriots’ big comeback was stifled.

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PFF: Jags’ 2017 defense lands third-best WAR rate of decade

The Jags’ 2017 defense wasn’t only one of the best in team history but it was also one of the best of the last decade.

The defense the Jacksonville Jaguar built in 2017 will always be remembered as arguably the best in team history. When looking at NFL history, they’ve also received favorable rankings as the unit nearly propelled them to the Super Bowl.

Pro Football Focus recently added to that praise by declaring the Jags’ 2017 defense the third-best (by Wins Above Replacement metrics) when looking at the 2010s. In a nutshell, the WAR metric uses PFF ratings to dictate the value of a group (or sometimes a player) in comparison to replacement-level victories.

The only teams that ranked higher were the 2015 Denver Broncos and 2018 Chicago Bears, who were ranked first and second, respectively. The 2013 Seattle Seahawks’ defense also made the list, coming in at the No. 4 spot.

(Note: For a full explanation of PFF’s war metric, click here.)

The Jags’ 2017 defense had it all and each level of the field consisted of stars from the defensive line (Calais Campbell and Yannick Ngakoue), to the linebacking corps (Myles Jack and Paul Posluszny), to the secondary (A.J. Bouye and Jalen Ramsey).

The unit led the league in several key categories, as their passing defense allowed the fewest yards through the air (2,718) and the lowest passing yard average (169.9). They were also second in sacks that year and propelled the Jags to a +10 turnover margin.

Unfortunately, things fell apart after that season and the group had to be dismantled to reallocate money. However, for the time that the group was together it was an awesome thing to watch as offenses had an extremely difficult time scoring.