Jaguars fans beware: Blake Borltes is basically Mark Sanchez 2.0
By Josh Hill
Jacksonville stunned the NFL on Sunday, but don’t you dare take credit away from Leonard Fournette and give it to Blake Bortles.
A popular narrative (see also: crutch) in football is to build up the mythos of a team’s starting quarterback. It’s a trope that cost the Seahawks back-to-back Super Bowls and it’s something that we’re seeing again as the Jacksonville Jaguars march onto the AFC Championship Game.
Before we get into this, all credit is due to the Jaguars. No one saw the team doing much before the season and now they’re just 60-minutes away from the franchise’s first-ever Super Bowl berth.
Do not buy Blake Bortles stock, no matter how hard the sports stock brokers on television try to sell it to you.
Please don’t get it twisted. Jaguars fans should be elated that the team is in the AFC Championship game, and there’s more than an outside shot the team can upset New England. None of the reasons Jacksonville can win in Foxboro next Sunday involve Blake Bortles; considering he probably played his way into being the franchise quarterback of the future, that’s a problem.
Bortles finished with over 200 yards passing but like most of his stats this year that’s a padded number. It wasn’t until just past the 12-minute mark in the fourth quarter that Bortles eclipsed the 100-yard mark, and chased that with two huge passes that padded his final total.
Leonard Fournette, on the other hand, scored three of Jacksonville’s touchdowns and went well over 100-yards on the ground. Unlike Bortles, the numbers that Fournette put up propped up the offense’s impressive 42-point performance. When it came to extending drives, more often than not Fournette was leaned on and he came through in a big way. The biggest mistake Jacksonville can make is leaning into the franchise quarterback narrative and building its offense around Bortles instead of Fournette (or, ideally, a franchise quarterback not on the roster yet).
The problem with Jacksonville is Bortles — who is not good. He’s Mark Sanchez, expect he’ll end up making more money and probably be a starter longer. Sanchez took the New York Jets to back-to-back AFC Championship games, including a playoff run where Tom Brady and the Patriots were surprising victims. He’s also responsible for the ‘Butt Fumble’; no one is mistaking him for a franchise quarterback.
Bortles’ rise this postseason mirrors Sanchez’s, and it should alarm Jaguars fans looking to the future. The stats are there for Bortles in the same way that a kid who is tardy for class manages to slip in before the teacher notices he’s not there. He puts up the yardage but in the meantime makes throws that boggle the mind. He misses wide open receivers, air mails throws, and makes decisions that should give Jags fans cold sweats.
In his first Conference Championship game, Sanchez threw for nearly 300-yards and a pair of touchdowns. In his second, he totaled less than 200 and it was all downhill from there. None of this is to rag on Jaguars fans, rather it’s a cautionary tale that buying Borltes future stock is a risky proposition at best, no matter what snake oil sales pitch has been delivered this postseason.
Borltes Apologists will point to his passer rating (which was less than Roethlisberger) and his lack of interceptions. Jacksonville scored 42-points on six touchdowns on Sunday. Bortles contributed one of those and completed less than half his passes.
All of the credit for the Jaguars win on Sunday belongs to Fournette and the defense. That’s been the story all year long, and it’s as true as ever in the Jaguars biggest game of the season. Between the two, 28-points were produced, and every point mattered. Don’t buy into the idea that one of the best wins in franchise history had anything to do with Bortles — just ask Jets fans how that mirage ends up.