Tom Coughlin was never going to be a long-term fixture with the Jaguars in his second go-round with the franchise and, based off the flurry of signings the team executed in the past week, I'd estimate he's not looking beyond two years in the future. The league tends to work that way, and Coughlin's moves since taking over the team's football operations point to a finite opportunity to win with this current cast of players.
The Jaguars have maneuvered this offseason like a team with a two-year opportunity to pounce for glory, trying to build off their surprising playoff run from a year ago. Everything they have done through the early stages of this offseason – going back to the way they structured their extension with quarterback Blake Bortles well before the 2018 league year began – screams out that this team, as presently compromised, has a two-year shelf life. Coughlin has long been closer to retirement than not, and it's pretty clear that if he is to bolster his Hall of Fame credentials as a coach/team builder with another Lombardi Trophy, it's most likely to come within the next 23 months.
Because by that time this roster stands to look markedly different. Which, of course, shouldn't be a newsflash given the fact that most teams turn over the bulk of their rosters every three years or so, but given the recent construction of things in Jacksonville it appears overwhelmingly likely that the Jags have through 2019 to win with this group before significant changes come. Coughlin, obviously, came to Jacksonville nearing the end of his career, and he quickly put his fingerprints on the organization. Within the next two years the Jaguars will be waving goodbye to many of the top free-agents who were brought in to bolster the defense in the past two offseasons, and they could easily move on from Bortles by then. And come 2020, Jacksonville will be tied up trying to extend a bevy of recent top draft picks, while the players they have paid huge money to this month on the offensive side of the ball could be jettisoned to retain the likes of Jalen Ramsey, Myles Jack, Dante Fowler and Yannick Ngakoue, who could be in line for monster contracts by then.
The time is now for the Jaguars, and they certainly seem to know it.
If they hit on this year's crop of free agents the way they have in the past, then perhaps they can go deeper into the playoffs than they did this year, despite having re-invested in a quarterback who leads the NFL in interceptions since he entered the league. Regardless, the Bortles move was the first indication of how the Jaguars would operate, opting for the known commodity, warts and all, on a pay-as-you go deal that could be scrapped after the 2018 season (instead of jumping into the Drew Brees/Kirk Cousins/Case Keenum/Tyrod Taylor/Teddy Bridgewater/Sam Bradford/AJ McCarron/Josh McCown quarterback derby that just went down). The likelihood of Bortles remaining in Jacksonville beyond two years, unless the team does win it all or unless he drastically raises his level of play, are slim.
The Jaguars followed that up by signing guard Andrew Norwell to a record-setting contract, paying him like a top-end left tackle rather than an interior lineman. He gets $30M fully guaranteed in the first two years of his deal, front loading it, but allowing them to move on come 2020 should they need to redirect funds and cap space, without any dead cap hit. They gave receiver Donte Moncrief $9.6M for 2018, with the chance to earn millions more in modestly-set incentives. They kept receiver Marqise Lee by essentially guaranteeing him $18M in salary over the next two years with a structure that, you guessed it, allows them to walk away in 2020 without any cap lag. Like Norwell's deal, there is a minimal signing bonus that avoids having future proration handcuff the team. Tight end Austin Seferian-Jenkins? Two-year deal, $10M, plenty of flexibility.
Two-year window.
The Jaguars overpaid as well, in the minds of many, for cornerback D.J. Hayden, but the reality of this "three-year deal" is that it is really a one-year pact worth $9.4M that the Jags can walk away from after the season. When you go back and consider some of the other big-ticket items Jacksonville has added in the past few years – defensive linemen Calais Campbell, Malik Jackson and Marcel Dareus – things come further into focus. That trio, come 2020, will account for roughly $48M against the cap alone, and about $45M in cap at a time when Campbell would be 34, Jackson would be 30 and Dareus would be 30. Seems unlikely they could still have that much cash and cap in that group and still afford to pay top dollar to keep their emerging young talent.
Two-year window.
The Jags amassed the cap space by years of poor records and suspect drafting (meaning few young players worthy of big-money extensions) to be able to go crazy in free agency, essentially, for each of the last three offseasons. They have a committed owner, Shad Khan, who is certainly not afraid to overspend by market terms in order to get his man. It has served the team well and finally has them into contention … but the NFL system is parity on steroids, and no team can continue to throw cash around like that for too long. The restrictions of the cap come calling.
Jacksonville already has the most money in the NFL committed to the 2019 payroll in actual dollars, according to spotrac.com, at $176M, $20M more than the champion Eagles. (Of course, shedding Bortles alone saves $20M, but then again someone else is going to have to be paid to throw passes for them under that scenario, too, and what are the odds he comes cheaper than that?) Spin it forward to 2020, and the Jags again project to have the highest payroll in the NFL. Oh yeah, they also project to have the highest cap number in the NFL both of those years, including nearly $30M over spotrac.com's projected cap for 2019.
That can't last forever in this league, and I'd dare say the Jags are shooting their shot right now and that this latest free-agent splurge will be the last like this in a while. This is designed to put them over the top, right now, and those credit card bills always come due down the line, eventually. Khan is committed to spending over $207M on payroll this year alone – over $30M more than any other team, including the 49ers, who put a ton of money into the first year of Jimmy Garoppolo's contract extension – at a time when the cap is under $180M. He's fully committed. The time has to be now.
As teams amass a roster as star studded as Jacksonville's has become – at least on the defensive side of the ball – the question quickly changes from, "Who else are we going to add this year?" to, "Who are we going to have to release to create cap space?" And if this isn't the year that Bortles truly turns the corner, well, given the composition of this team and the bills that will be coming due, I'd expect Coughlin, knowing he won't be doing this forever, to quickly pivot to a quarterback they believe can win it all in 2019.
Because after that, there will be change and there will be cuts and there will be a changing of the guard. That's not to say the Jaguars won't still be able to compete, or that they'll fall down the standings, but if they are still winning it will be with a reconfigured core, without many of the additions of the past 12 months, and maybe with someone other than Coughlin charting the course for the franchise in the next decade.
