2017 IDP Projection Marking: Jacksonville Jaguars

Tom Kislingbury Posted On January 25, 2018

Hi everyone and welcome to the fantasy off-season. It was a wild ride in 2017 and I’m still recovering, but there’s no real off-season in the dynasty world. In the summer I made projections for every IDP in the league I thought would be relevant. You can go back and read all of the 2017 IDP Projections here.

I was right in some places. I was wrong in some places. But either way, it’s important to be accountable and honest so I can figure out why and make adjustments in the future. I’ll be going through every team and noting where I was right and where I was wrong. To do that I’ll show what my projections were, how players actually performed, and how big the discrepancies were.

A confession: I was staunchly against the possibility of the Jags being a good team this season. I knew they had talent on the team but given how many times we’d seen them fail to capitalize on that before, I just couldn’t see it happening. I was wrong clearly as they tore the season up all the way to the AFC Championship game. Let’s see how wrong I was on an individual basis, shall we?

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jax team

Defensive Tackle

I’m off to a good start here at least. Malik Jackson was clearly the top interior option and I was pretty close to perfect with him. I was out just one solo, two assists, a sack and single batted pass. Any time your stats are out by five total, you’re doing okay.

Backing him up was Abry Jones, who I was also pretty good with, projecting just one solo and two assists out.

Of course I didn’t include Marcell Dareus here. As a friend of mine says, “I’m not a flipping thaumaturge!”

Defensive End

Here’s when the inaccuracy kicks in. I predicted 14 sacks between the top four options here. In reality, they combined for 35. I didn’t see the huge seasons as a pass rusher for any of Calais Campbell, Yannick Ngakoue or Dante Fowler. None of them.

Calais Campbell was a monster. For my money, he was one of the top defensive players in the sport this season. He simply destroyed my numbers across the board. He had 19 more solos, nine more assists, and seven more sacks than I thought. Hats off to the man.

I had Fowler in as the second option ahead of Ngakoue. That was wrong. Fowler was a distant third in playing time. I had them both down pretty accurately for tackling numbers but again I was way out on the sack potential here.

Linebacker

The total of solo tackle volume was an issue here. I was 23 over for Telvin Smith and seven over for Myles Jack. I think this is a result of the line being so good. They managed 20 more solos than I thought as a unit whilst the top three LBs managed 24 fewer solos. We’ve seen this happen before with other elite DE teams. J.J. Watt, in particular, tends to hoover up tackles with his linebackers struggling. That’s entirely predictable if you manage to get the line’s performance right, so again it’s on me for not believing in Campbell, Ngakoue, and Fowler.

Aside from that, I was perfectly good with assists, sacks, passes defended and interceptions across the board and my overall stat line for Posluszny was excellent. But the failure to see the impact on solos of that line was a major error.

Cornerback

Only three players managed to play significant snaps here. And by significant I mean barely any at all. It really is amazing that A.J. Bouye, Jalen Ramsey, and Aaron Colvin managed to stay fit and excellent for the whole season. As a result, I was quite under in solo tackles for all three players. I assumed that the tackles would be split out across more than three players because that’s how it works for almost every team almost every season. The same thing is true for passes defended and INTs – although both of those categories also reflect the sheer excellence of Bouye and Ramsey in particular.

Safety

Barry Church was a big disappointment here. I was hoping he could slide straight into Johnathan Cyprien’s old role and put up big tackle numbers. He managed just 56 solos and 16 assists which were well below my predictions. Although the fact he recorded eight PDs and four INTs also show how differently he was used.

On the other side, Tashaun Gipson was excellent. I thought he’d play a classic deep safety role but he and Church played far more similarly which equalized their numbers out.

In summary

There were clearly some major errors here and I was way off with many players. A tackle and third choice linebacker being uncannily accurate does not make me feel better.

And yet… I’m loath to put too much stock in this season. The football world is falling over itself to declare love for this defense but we’ve seen top defenses fade quickly in just a few months before. In fact, it happens most seasons. The 2016 Texans were awesome and they were pretty bad this year.

Yes – injuries play a part in that but that’s a real worry for this Jags team. All three pass rushers, the corners, the safeties and Myles Jack stayed healthy all season. That’s very unusual. I don’t want to bet on it but it seems extremely possible that in 2018 not all of those players can stay fit and maintain the excellent form they did this season.

Thanks for reading.

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Tom Kislingbury

Contributor at Dynasty League Football

Being from England Tom only discovered American Football in the late 90s. From there he's gone from casual defender to devoted obsessive and likes to delve into deep data primarily about defensive players. He spends his days trying to pretend the spreadsheets and graphs he makes about football are actually work for his day job. No-one is fooled.

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