In the Jacksonville Jaguars' Blake Bortles, the Patriots will be facing a quarterback who has been terribly inconsistent throughout a season that has taken the Jaguars to Sunday's AFC Championship game.
FOXBORO – Forrest Gump’s mom would put it this way: “Quarterback life is like a box of chocolates for the Jacksonville Jaguars. They never know what they’re gonna get.”
Consider:
From Weeks 13-15 of the regular season, nobody did it better than Blake Bortles, his 65 completions in 91 attempts (71.4 percent) for 903 yards and seven touchdowns without a single interception computing to a 128.6 passer rating, tops in the NFL during that time.
Over the next three weeks, including the Jaguars’ ugly 10-3 wild-card playoff win over Buffalo, a game in which he ran for more yards (88) than he threw (87), Bortles completed only 59-of-107 passes (55.1 percent) for 627 yards and three TDs with five interceptions for a passer rating of 62.3.
Bortles rebounded to play efficiently in last Sunday’s divisional playoff game at Pittsburgh, completing 14-of-26 passes (53.8 percent) for 214 yards and a touchdown with no interceptions and saving his best throws for last (his play fake and 14-yard touchdown toss to fullback Tommy Bohanon with 4:19 left was a thing of beauty) in compiling a passer rating of 94.1 in the Jaguars’ stunning 45-42 upset victory.
“I think you can throw out stats and you can do all that stuff, but at the end of the day the only thing anybody cares about is winning and obviously his team is playing in the AFC Championship,” Patriots safety Devin McCourty said on Wednesday. “They’ve won a lot of games this year.”
The ultimate game manager (the Jaguars are 10-0 in games in which he hasn’t thrown an interception during the regular season and postseason; 2-6 in games in which he’s thrown one or more), Bortles is in a position where he’s preparing to play Tom Brady and the Patriots in Sunday’s conference championship game at Gillette Stadium, just one win away from a trip to Super Bowl LII.
“I would say that the thing I know I appreciate from a coaching standpoint is the amount of work that he’s put in, the way he comes to work everyday, all the other outside noise – whether it be, obviously, there’s all the negative stuff, but there’s some positive stuff, but he’s still the same person and that’s what I appreciate,” Jaguars head coach Doug Marrone said in a conference call with the New England media. “His teammates rally around him, they have a lot of respect for him and that’s all that really matters is how our team feels about him. I don’t really worry about what everyone else on the outside feels.”
Truth be told, though, Bortles is nothing if not inconsistent.
In his fourth year in the league, Bortles finished the regular season having failed to finish in the top 10 in any of the major passing categories, his 60.2 completion percentage 24th, his 84.7 passer rating 20th, his 21 touchdown passes (he threw 13 interceptions) 16th and his 3,687 yards passing 11th. All of this while having the benefit of the league’s top-ranked rushing attack during the regular season, one that averaged 141.4 yards per game, at his disposal.
Not exactly what the Jaguars had to believe they were getting when they invested the third overall pick in the 2014 draft in the University of Central Florida product.
Naturally, nary a bad word is to be heard about Bortles in Foxboro, a football locale that would try to make the 2017 Cleveland Browns sound like the second coming of the 1972 Miami Dolphins.
“He’s the triggerman,” Patriots head coach Bill Belichick said. “He makes it all happen.”
Not much was happening in Bortles’ one appearance to this point in his career against the Patriots: He completed 17-of-33 passes (51.5 percent) for 242 yards and two TDs with one interception for a passer rating of 83.1 in a 51-17 loss in Foxboro on Sept. 27, 2015.