Jacksonville Jaguars

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Jacksonville Jaguars arrived in the NFL not with a whimper but with a logo dispute. The day after the league awarded Jacksonville its expansion franchise, owner Wayne Weaver held up a silver helmet and a teal jersey at an NFL owners' meeting in Chicago. Ford Motor Company, then the parent of the automaker Jaguar, saw the design and objected. Their lawyers and the team's lawyers negotiated until an unlikely deal emerged: the automaker would be named the official car of the Jaguars, and the team would redesign its uniforms. It was a strange beginning. But the Jaguars were full of strange beginnings. They were founded alongside the Carolina Panthers in 1995, and by only their second season they had reached a conference championship game, faster than any NFL expansion team before them. Then came decades of struggle, a coaching hire that became a cautionary tale, a comeback for the ages, and the quiet persistence of a franchise still waiting for its first Super Bowl appearance. How did Jacksonville get a team? What drove those early years of surprise success? And what has made the Jaguars one of the most turbulent franchises in modern football? Those are the questions that shape the story ahead.

• 2. Winning the Franchise

  ›

  Touchdown Jacksonville! was the name of the prospective ownership group organized in 1989 with the explicit purpose of bringing an NFL team to the city. The NFL announced plans for two expansion teams in 1991, and in 1994 Touchdown Jacksonville! submitted its formal bid. Jacksonville made the list of five finalists alongside Charlotte, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Memphis. Charlotte was awarded the first franchise, which would become the Carolina Panthers, in October 1993. The second franchise was a harder fight. St. Louis was considered the favorite. When NFL owners voted, however, the result was 26 to 2 in favor of awarding the 30th franchise to Jacksonville. Tom Coughlin was hired as the first head coach on the 21st of February, 1994. The team's first NFL draft pick that year was the second overall selection, used on Tony Boselli, an offensive tackle out of USC who would eventually be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

• 3. The Surprise Years

  ›

  On the 3rd of September, 1995, the Jaguars played their first regular season game and lost 10-3 to the Houston Oilers. Week 2 brought the first touchdown in franchise history: a 71-yard reception by Randy Jordan from quarterback Steve Beuerlein against the Cincinnati Bengals. The team lost their first four games, suffered a seven-game losing streak, and finished 4-12. Nothing about that first season suggested what was coming. By 1996, with Mark Brunell firmly at quarterback and wide receivers Keenan McCardell and Jimmy Smith both surpassing 1,000 receiving yards, the Jaguars reeled off five consecutive wins after sitting at 4-7 to finish 9-7 and make the postseason. They beat the Buffalo Bills 30-27 in the Wild Card Round, then defeated the Denver Broncos 30-27 in the Divisional Round before falling to the New England Patriots 20-6 in the AFC Championship. It was only their second season of existence. The 1998 season brought the first division title at 11-5, and the 1999 campaign set the franchise record at 14-2. That season ended with a blowout of the Miami Dolphins 62-7 in the Divisional Round, which turned out to be the final career game for Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino. The Tennessee Titans, who had beaten Jacksonville all three times they met that year, ended the run with a 33-14 victory in the AFC Championship. By their fifth season, the Jaguars had clinched their conference's top seed, a record for an NFL expansion team.

• 4. The Long Slide

  ›

  Fred Taylor rushed for over 1,500 yards in 2003, which was a bright spot in a 5-11 season under new head coach Jack Del Rio. Del Rio had replaced Coughlin after consecutive 6-10 finishes drove Coughlin out after eight seasons. The team returned to the postseason in 2005 with a 12-4 record, only to lose 28-3 to the New England Patriots in the Wild Card Round. A 2007 season at 11-5 included a playoff win over Pittsburgh 31-29 before another loss to New England, 31-20. Then came a sequence of losing seasons, a series of quarterback experiments ranging from David Garrard to Blaine Gabbert, and a coaching change that did not help. Mike Mularkey's one season produced a 2-14 record, the worst in franchise history at the time. Gus Bradley followed and won just 14 games across 55 contests over four seasons. His winning percentage of .341 was identified as the worst head coach winning percentage in the modern era of the NFL at the time of his firing. Blake Bortles did set single-season franchise records in 2015 with 4,428 passing yards and 35 touchdown passes. But the team finished 5-11 that year, and Bradley was fired midway through the following season with a 2-12 mark.

• 5. Urban Meyer and the Chaos Year

  ›

  Urban Meyer's hiring prior to the 2021 season was described by observers as one of the most ill-fated coaching decisions in NFL history. The Jaguars had the top overall pick in the 2021 draft and used it on Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence. Meyer was fired after the team started 2-11, making him only the fourth head coach since the AFL-NFL merger to not finish a full season. Darrell Bevell took over as interim and finished 1-3. The season before Meyer arrived had been the worst in franchise history, a 1-15 campaign in 2020 during which injuries to Gardner Minshew's throwing hand forced Mike Glennon and Jake Luton into starts at quarterback. The stretch from 2020 through 2021 left Jacksonville with a combined record of 4-28 across two seasons.

• 6. The Comeback and Beyond

  ›

  Doug Pederson, who had won Super Bowl LII as a head coach, arrived before the 2022 season and produced immediate results. The Jaguars went 9-8 and won the AFC South. Their Wild Card victory over the Los Angeles Chargers on a 31-30 final score featured the third-largest comeback in NFL postseason history: the Jaguars had trailed 27-0 at one point. A 27-20 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in the Divisional Round ended the season. Pederson was fired on the 6th of January, 2025, after a three-season run of 22-29 with one playoff appearance. On the 24th of January, 2025, Liam Coen, former offensive coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was hired as the next head coach. In his first season, the Jaguars went 13-4, won the AFC South, and earned the third seed in the AFC playoffs. Coen became the first rookie head coach to take a team from a 4-13 record the prior year to a 13-4 finish. The Jaguars lost to the Buffalo Bills 27-24 in the Wild Card Round, extending their streak as one of four NFL franchises that have never appeared in a Super Bowl, alongside the Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, and Houston Texans.

• 7. Identity in Teal and Black

  ›

  The original Jaguars logo dispute with Ford's Jaguar automaker led to more than just a uniform redesign. The replacement logo was a snarling jaguar head with a teal tongue, which Weaver credited to his wife. He himself joked that the teal tongue came from "feeding Panthers to our Jaguars." At the team's first preseason game, teal-colored candies were handed out to fans in attendance, turning their tongues the same shade as the logo. The Jaguars were the first NFL team to feature two-tone borders on jersey numbers, and the first to place a complex logo, the crawling jaguar, on jersey sleeves. The 2013 uniforms unveiled by Nike introduced a helmet unique in the NFL: a glossy gold finish in the back that fades to matte black in the front via a color gradient. In 2014, EverBank Stadium received upgraded scoreboards measuring 60 feet high and 362 feet long, identified as the world's largest video boards at the time. The renovation also added two 25-foot by 12-foot pools in the north end zone. The full stadium renovation cost $63 million, of which owner Shahid Khan personally financed $20 million. The stadium is scheduled to close after the 2026 season for dome construction, with the Jaguars playing at Camping World Stadium in Orlando during the 2027 season before returning for 2028.

• 8. People and Honor

  ›

  Tony Boselli, the Jaguars' first-ever draft pick, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2022. On the 9th of October, 2022, the Jaguars retired his number 71 at a halftime ceremony against the Houston Texans, making it the first number retired in franchise history. The team's ring of honor, named "Pride of the Jaguars" in a 2006 fan vote where the name captured 36% of the ballots, was unveiled on the 8th of October, 2006. Boselli was its first inductee. Wayne Weaver and his wife Delores were added on the 1st of January, 2012, their final game before selling the team to Shahid Khan. Fred Taylor, whose 1998 season marked the first time a Jaguars player rushed for over 1,000 yards, was inducted on the 30th of September, 2012. Mark Brunell followed in December 2013, Jimmy Smith in 2016, and Tom Coughlin was formally inducted during a Week 5 halftime ceremony against the Indianapolis Colts during the 2024 season. The mascot Jaxson de Ville, introduced in 1996 and played by Curtis Dvorak through June 2015, established a tradition of bungee jumping off stadium lights and parachuting into the field. His antics in 1998 prompted a change to the NFL's mascot rules. The Jacksonville Jaguars Foundation, established in 1994, has distributed over $20 million to community improvement efforts since its founding, and grants more than $1 million annually to organizations serving disadvantaged youth and families.