Jacksonville Won 13 Games. The Numbers Say They Earned About 11.

Everyone saw the eight-game win streak. Everyone saw the 13-4 finish and the dominant late-season margins. What fewer people are sitting with is the quieter number underneath all of it: Jacksonville's point differential across the full season predicted a 69.3% win rate. They actually won at 76.5%. That 7.1-percentage-point gap doesn't erase what the Jaguars accomplished — it asks whether they can do it again.

This is not a small discrepancy. Teams that win significantly above their underlying efficiency tend to regress, not because they get worse, but because the moments that produced those extra wins — the close games broken open by execution, the late-game sequences where everything clicked — don't repeat at the same rate. Jacksonville's final ten games went 9-1 with a +14.7 scoring margin, which looks like a machine hitting its stride. It might also look, in retrospect, like variance peaking at exactly the right time. The honest answer is that both things can be true simultaneously, and the 2026 season will be the tiebreaker.

What makes the question worth taking seriously is that the structural concerns entering this offseason are real and compounding. The offensive core is genuinely locked in — Trevor Lawrence threw for 4,214 yards and 32 touchdowns last season, and Travis Etienne Jr. was a dual-threat weapon the defense had to account for on every snap. Brenton Strange is extended and healthy. That group is built to sustain. But the margin for error elsewhere has narrowed considerably. Cole Van Lanen and Garrett DiGiorgio are both out heading into camp, which is two offensive line depth pieces gone before a single padded practice. Travis Hunter, who played only seven games last season, remains questionable. And then there's the secondary.

The Dane Jackson retirement on July 28 is the kind of move that barely registers in the national conversation and matters enormously at the position level. Jacksonville signed him in June specifically to shore up cornerback depth, and now that piece doesn't exist. Jourdan Lewis is questionable. The secondary was already operating thin, and the front office now has to solve a problem it thought it had addressed. My read is that this is the position where the 2026 season is most likely to be decided — not by the offense, which has the personnel to be elite again, but by whether the defense can hold leads that the offense builds.

Here's the thing about a 7.1-point execution gap: it's not a scandal, and it's not a fluke by definition. Some teams genuinely execute better in close moments because they have the quarterback and the coaching to do it. Lawrence is that kind of quarterback. But the defense needs to be a participant in that equation, not just a passenger. A secondary missing depth pieces, a defensive tackle rotation that was already thin last season, and two offensive linemen out — these aren't catastrophic, but they are the exact conditions under which a team stops winning the close ones at the rate it did the year before. Jacksonville's 13-4 record was real. Whether the infrastructure beneath it is equally real is the question training camp needs to start answering.