Jacksonville Won Thirteen Games. The Margin Says They Earned About Eleven.

The number that keeps pulling me back isn't the record. It's the seven-point gap between what Jacksonville actually did and what they deserved to do based on how many points they scored and allowed. Their Pythagorean win expectation — the cold arithmetic of point differential — projected a 69.3% win rate. They finished at 76.5%. That 7.1-percentage-point gap is not noise. It is the receipt for a season built partly on late-game variance, and it matters enormously as the Jaguars try to convince themselves the 2025 foundation is solid enough to build on.

I've been making this argument across two prior pieces now, and the response is always some version of: close games still count. True. But teams that consistently win more close games than their underlying margin predicts tend to regress — not because they suddenly forget how to play, but because the circumstances that produced those results don't replicate cleanly. Jacksonville went 1-2 in October with a minus-11 scoring differential per game, then caught fire and never really cooled down. The eight-game winning streak that ran from mid-November into January was genuinely impressive. It was also the stretch that inflated a record past what the full-season margin could justify.

Trevor Lawrence was real. The 4,214 passing yards and 32 touchdowns were real. Travis Etienne's dual-threat production — over 1,100 rushing yards, seven receiving touchdowns — was real. The offense gave this team a legitimate identity, and the front office has spent the offseason trying to preserve it: Strange locked in on a three-year extension, Travis Hunter finally healthy and cleared for camp after missing most of last season, the backfield deepened with Chris Rodriguez. If you squint at the offense, Jacksonville looks like a team that earned its wins. But football games are decided by both sides of the ball, and that's where the math starts to curdle.

The defense enters 2026 structurally thin in ways that won't show up on a highlight reel. DaVon Hamilton is the only defensive tackle who logged meaningful snaps last season — the depth behind him is untested in any real sense. The secondary lost Dane Jackson before he ever played a down in Jacksonville, a retirement that came barely a month after he signed, stripping away a depth piece the back end was counting on. Foyesade Oluokun's 148 tackles tell you someone was doing a lot of cleaning up behind the front seven. That's not a sustainable model if the line can't hold.

Add two offensive linemen still out — Cole Van Lanen and Garrett DiGiorgio both unavailable as camp opens — and the picture sharpens. The Jaguars aren't a bad team. They're a team whose 2025 record was a ceiling masquerading as a floor, and whose offseason has done more to shore up skill positions than the structural weaknesses the numbers have been pointing at all along. My read is that the gap between their actual record and their underlying performance isn't going to close on its own. At some point, the margin catches up.