Gardner Minshew's no Tom Brady, but he gives Jaguars a shot at playoffs

When Nick Foles went down for the season in the first quarter of the opening game, it seemed like fate was playing another cruel trick on the Jaguars. Jacksonville brought on the MVP of Super Bowl LII this past off-season in a last-ditch effort to take advantage of what it believes is its championship window.

Coupled with an ongoing drama with Jalen Ramsey, the team’s star cornerback and cornerstone for years, demanding a trade, these seem like conditions for a team-wide implosion, putting a definitive end to an era and likely touching off a rebuild. 

And yet the Jaguars are not headed for a Dolphins-like dismantling. In fact, following Sunday’s last-second win in Denver, they are arguably set up well for a postseason run. And a big part of that is their out-of-nowhere and belovedly wacky rookie quarterback Gardner Minshew.

It’s very early to make these kind of bold pronouncements, yet some comparisons have been made to Tom Brady. After all, both were selected in the sixth round. Minshew, who played at Washington State for Mike Leach, was picked 178th, Brady 199th. And they both got their shot early in their career when the established starter went down with injury.

For now, that’s about where the comparisons end. Time will tell if Minshew achieves even a fraction of the career success of Brady. In the meantime, he’s convinced Jaguars fans and the football world at large that Jacksonville’s season may not be a lost cause after all. In an AFC South without a clear dominant team, a division with .500 records top to bottom, Jacksonville isn’t in bad shape.

One could reasonably make the case that the two toughest games on Jacksonville’s schedule are behind it -- games against the Chiefs and on the road against the Texans. Both resulted in losses, though in the Jaguars’ defense, they happened during a time of great upheaval on the team. The Week 2 loss in Houston was only by one point. 

The only team the Jags face the rest of the season currently with a winning record is the Saints, and that game is in two weeks, before they’ll get Drew Brees back under center, and it’s in Jacksonville. As Sunday night proved, New Orleans can still be formidable without Brees, but offensively it is deeply limited. The same could have been said about Jacksonville for a while -- it was the case for almost all of the Blake Bortles era. But after years of casting around for a franchise quarterback, one seems to have fallen into their lap almost by accident.

The early returns on Minshew are excellent. Given that Daniel Jones came back to earth somewhat in his second game, it’s fair to say that Minshew is the best of the 2019 rookie quarterbacks so far. He has led a winning fourth-quarter drive after bringing his team back from down multiple scores on the road. He has seven touchdowns to just one interception, the lone pick coming in his emergency relief appearance following Foles’ injury in Week 1. Minshew, whose passer rating is 106.9, is the first quarterback since 1990 to post a rating over 95 in his first four career games. Heck, he’s even having fun out there like Brett Favre at times.