What Happens When DaVon Hamilton Can't Play?

Every team has a position group it quietly hopes never gets tested. For Jacksonville, it's defensive tackle — and "quietly hoping" is doing a lot of work when the depth chart shows exactly one player who logged meaningful snaps at the position all of last season.

That player is DaVon Hamilton. He is, by the numbers, the entirety of Jacksonville's interior defensive line rotation. Ruke Orhorhoro and Albert Regis appear behind him on the depth chart, but neither registered the kind of playing time last season that would give you confidence in a handoff. The front office has spent this offseason trading for offensive linemen, extending tight ends, and drafting receivers. The DT room has received none of that attention. That's a choice, and choices have consequences.

Here's why it matters beyond the obvious. Jacksonville's 13-win season was genuinely impressive — and also, by the underlying numbers, slightly borrowed. Their actual win percentage outpaced what their point differential would predict by roughly seven percentage points. That gap doesn't mean the season was a mirage, but it does mean the margin for structural error heading into 2026 is thinner than the record suggests. A team that won eleven games worth of football by the numbers needs to be airtight going into next season. The DT situation is the opposite of airtight.

Interior defensive line depth isn't glamorous, but it's load-bearing in a specific way: it determines how long your edge rushers stay fresh, how well you hold the line of scrimmage on early downs, and whether opposing offenses can simply run at you when they need four yards. Travon Walker leads the linebacker group, and the edge depth exists on paper. But if opposing offenses identify Hamilton as a single point of failure and scheme to neutralize him — or if he misses time to injury — Jacksonville has no established answer behind him. That's not a depth concern. That's a structural exposure.

My read is that the front office made a reasonable triage decision this offseason: the offensive line was visibly on fire, and they fought that fire first. The Faalele trade, Van Lanen's return, the Strange extension — all of it signals a front office that understands where Lawrence's protection comes from. I've written about that repeatedly. But triage implies you come back for the next patient. The DT room is still waiting. Camp is nearly over. The window to address this before Week 1 is closing, and there's been no visible move in that direction. At some point "we'll get to it" becomes "we didn't get to it." For a team whose 2025 margin was already thinner than the scoreboard showed, that's a risk worth naming out loud.