Jaguars’ Trevor Lawrence and Foye Oluokun meet with media

On Tuesday, Jaguars team captains Trevor Lawrence and Foye Oluokun spoke with the media to open the team’s voluntary offseason program. Here’s everything you need to know.

With the NFL Draft fast approaching, the Jacksonville Jaguars’ voluntary offseason program officially kicked off on Monday, April 15th. This means increased access and interviews with returning players!

The majority of the current roster is now on site and working out at Miller Electric Center. Two team leaders, quarterback Trevor Lawrence and linebacker Foye Oluokun, met with the press on Tuesday to open the new year of action.

Here’s everything you need to know.

Full Presser:

Press Taylor calling plays this season?

While Lawrence avoided stating for sure who would be calling plays in 2024, he did seem to ever so gently shut the door on the conversation.

“Whichever way that goes, we’re going to make the most of it and it’s going to be great. I don’t know, I haven’t had any conversations about anything necessarily changing or staying the same. I don’t really know. I’m with you guys. I think we’ve had success with both guys calling plays in the past, even last year, we could’ve been better offensively, but we did have some success. I do like the continuity, the consistency that I have with Press, I know him really well. I think that’s a good thing, that we’re keeping that intact. It’s hard as a quarterback to change around and change systems, change play callers all of the time. That can be difficult. So, I like where we’re at, I think that we’ve made some really necessary changes this offseason already, now we’ve just got to implement them and get great at it. I think it’s about creating an identity and being really good at what we do. I think we have a clear vision and picture of what that is. I’m excited and I’m expecting it to be Press at this point because that’s kind of the direction we’ve been heading and what I expect. I’m not hearing anything. That’s where we’re going and I’m excited for it.”

In my opinion, it would have been a major surprise to hear anything other than the eventual decision that Press Taylor would be returning as play caller this season. While many within the fan base had issues with Taylor’s subpar 2023 offensive success, much of the vitriol could arguably be placed at the feet of turnovers, Luke Fortner-related deficiencies, or on-field opportunities by the players. It seems that 2024 will continue with Taylor running Doug Pederson’s offense and Pederson likely continuing to be heavily involved in game planning, implementation, and potentially calling isolated plays or series, as in the past.

Getting on the same page early

Lawrence, while discussing his excitement to finally get back to practice with his teammates, had this to say:

“We live here year-round. I’m going to be training anyways, so it’s nice to have all of the guys back into town. One, just friends with a lot of them so it’s nice to have my buddies back, then two, you actually get to workout together and do stuff and train and start to get your chemistry before training camp happens.”

He later continued:

“It’s April, we’ve got until end of July until training camp starts. You have all of this time to get ready for training camp, so when training camp comes, you feel pretty good. You don’t want to be trying to figure out timing when training camp comes. You want to feel sharp and crisp so you can use that time to just really get better at what we do, our concepts, our schemes, advancing all the stuff that we do whether that’s checks and communicating all of those things. That’s really what that’s more for, not trying to just time up routes with guys. You’re kind of behind the eightball if you’re at that point.”

This should be an expected response from Lawrence, based on how the last season ended. For those living under a rock, the 2023 season for the Jaguars passing game seemed to be riddled with QB/pass catcher miscommunications from early on. While many seemed to place the brunt of this issue solely on now-Tennessee Titans receiver Calvin Ridley, multiple of Lawrence’s 2023 interceptions, intended for other team receivers could have also been categorized as “miscommunications,” wrong routes, unseen audibles, etc. Lawrence will look to get in sync with this group of pass catchers earlier this year.

Players know that how you win matters

Early on in his media availability, Foye Oluokun was asked how long it took him to move past the 2023 collapse and he provided his honest thoughts in this gem of a reply.

“We started off winning, but we weren’t winning convincingly how maybe the score might’ve showed it. But we knew we weren’t playing our best football. I think a lot of those things caught up to us. Then, trying to right our wrongs a little too late in the season. Then, it’s a little more stressful when teams are hitting their stride and we’re trying to find out how to do things right. That hurt for sure, and I think that’ll fuel us, everybody is committed to doing things right this time around. We don’t want to get in that position again. It starts from the first game all the way to the last. Just keep improving every week, no matter what the scoreboard is. Keeping our standard every week, because sometimes you win games that you didn’t play your best, now you don’t learn from them if you’re not trying to get better. I think that kind of happened to us and we’re not going to do that this year.”

Earlier, Lawrence similarly touched on his takeaways from the team’s 2023 performance and what’s needed in 2024.

“We talked about and addressed some of the things that happened, maybe some things that we didn’t do well, some things that we might’ve done okay and need to improve on, just really everything. We’ve done that the last two days and from Coach Pederson’s [Head Coach Doug Pederson] perspective, from Press’ [Offensive Coordinator Press Taylor] perspective, and then players, some stuff too. It’s been really good, I think we’re heading in the right direction and we know what we need to do. We got to attack this offseason and be really intentional, there’s very tangible things that we need to get better at, obviously I’m not going into all of the details right now, but there’s things we need to get better at for myself, for us as an offense, as a team. We just put all of those out there and now we’re all on the same page of where we’re heading, where we’re going, what we need to work on.”

This is interesting to me as this issue is something that Jaguar fans and media often argued about in real-time throughout the team’s 8-3 start to the 2023 season: do we celebrate the team record (disregarding the quality of play) or do we evaluate the performance against the expected standard of play? I appreciated Foye’s frankness in acknowledging that even though the team was 8-3 at the time, they were a flawed team, with uncorrected opportunities.

At the time of the 2023 Week 7 kickoff versus the New Orleans Saints, the Jaguars had already forced 15 turnovers, the most in the NFL, while ranking second in turnover differential at +7. By the Week 16 kickoff, the team had only forced an additional 10 turnovers (which still placed them second overall in the NFL, based heavily on those first six games). However, their turnover differential was then at -3 on the season.

All this to say, celebrate the wins as they come, as it’s hard to win in the NFL. Turnovers can cause you to win games you should lose, lose games you should win, and may hide truly fatal flaws. But, as the players know, the standard is the standard, and quality of play matters. A regression to the mean is always on the horizon and those opportunity areas usually show up later. I love that Foye, and the coaching staff, I’m sure, are setting that expectation for the locker room early on. As Foye succinctly wrapped it up,

“…if we do what we did last year, then we will be exactly where we were last season. It’s no joke the AFC South got better, so we got who we got in the locker room right now and that’s who we’re going to take to war with us. If we want to be able to come out on top in the AFC South, all of us are going to have to get better. We can’t squeak by in games we’re not playing well. The team that plays the best in the conference is going to be able to win these games. I don’t really care what the roster looks like, when you go in on Sundays, you play better than the other team and you win, that’s got to be us playing better.”

Contract talks

Lawrence provided an update on his contract negotiations, confirming multiple offseason reports.

“There’s definitely been some conversations as far as where that’s at now. It’s not really my focus, I’d love to obviously be a Jag for as long as possible. We love it here and I love where we’re headed as an organization and feel like I’m just getting better. My best ball is definitely ahead of me. From that standpoint, obviously yeah, that would be great. But like I said, going into my fourth year, it’s not like this is necessarily going to be my last season. There’s a lot that could happen. It’s not really my focus right now, at the end of the day, my job isn’t going to change whether I get extended or not before this season. My job is to go win games and to be the best I can be for this team so we can have a chance to win the Super Bowl. Even if I get the contract extension, that’s still my job even more so, there’s even more expectation and pressure on that. For me, I have the same focus and the same mindset. I can’t lie, obviously it would be nice to have that done and feel good about it, but no, it’s not really the focus right now. I know where we’re at, I know where we’re heading and I know what I have to do. I know there’s some improvements that I have to move going forward.”

Foye, fresh off his recent three-year, 45 million-dollar contract extension, made it clear that the money is secondary. Winning comes first.

“I think it’s kind of just felt, and then when you get a third contract for me, what keeps you going is not money anymore. My financial advisor will call me about how much and the contract, he’s probably going to hear this the first time, I didn’t even crack a smile for real. I was kind of drab in my response, like yeah, we got the deal done, but what am I here to do? You signed me here to win more games. I think everybody around me is going to feel that, I’m attacking this offseason trying to do that. I’ll be happy when we make the playoffs and win these games, that’s what I’m here for.”

Important Offseason Dates:

• First day of Jaguars’ (voluntary) offseason program: April 15th
• NFL Draft Dates: Round 1 – Thursday, April 25th at 8 p.m. (EST); Rounds 2-3 – Friday, April 26th at 7 p.m. (EST); Rounds 4-7 – Saturday, April 27th at noon (EST)
• Rookie Minicamp: May 12th-13th
• OTA Offseason Workouts: May 20th-21st, May 23rd, May 28th-29th, June 3rd-6th
• Mandatory Minicamp: June 10th-12th

Jaguars fans, let us know your thoughts in the comments!