– by Adesina O. Koiki
A Lot of Sports Talk editor-in-chief
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EAST RUTHERFORD, NEW JERSEY — Soon after being humbled in the Motor City by 26 points, Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Doug Pederson saw what his team staring at after the Lions derailed Jacksonville’s momentum in winning two of three before that horrid early December afternoon.
Three games compressed into 12 days, all against teams with legitimate playoff aspirations. While still clinging onto the old saw of taking one game at a time, Pederson let his team know the importance of the troika of games in terms of staying in the playoff race, as well as taking care of themselves while trying to claw back into National Football League relevance.
Less than two weeks later, the Jaguars have gone from humbled to hungry, and now their playoff fate is in their hands.
Trevor Lawrence engineered another efficient game under center while providing the only touchdown of the game with a quarterback sneak while the defense pitched a shutout for the final 56 minutes as the Jaguars squeezed the life out of the listless New York Jets, 19-3, on a cold, rainy evening at MetLife Stadium on Thursday night.
To a number of outsiders, it might be hard to believe this is the same team that, just less than a year ago, dealt with the turmoil that marked the ill-fated regime of erstwhile head coach Urban Meyer, axed during the middle of last season after equal parts losing, dissension and a lack of trust between coach and players.
Now the locker room, after tonight’s victory, was filled with players wearing Santa hats and, more importantly, a lot of belief after a tough stretch yielded three wins in three games in less than two weeks.
“I’m proud of the guys. We set out two and half weeks ago, we had three games in less than three weeks, and we just had to take them one at a time,” a hoarse Pederson said in the postgame press conference. “I think that’s what you’ve seen from this group. There’s no quit in them. They stick together. They hang together. They encourage one another. That’s what it takes.”
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