Jaguars To Hold Joint Practice With In-State Opponent

Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Liam Coen announced on Monday that his team will be performing in a joint practice with the Miami Dolphins.

While many Jaguars fans would have preferred the Tampa Bay Buccaneers due to the animosity Jacksonville and Tampa Bay share over Coen's hiring, the practice against Miami will serve as the team's first opportunity to witness Travis Hunter compete against another opponent in practice while Coen will reveal the early effectiveness of his offensive system with Trevor Lawrence.

The Miami Dolphins and the Jaguars share several connections, most notably, Jaguars' defensive coordinator Anthony Campanile served as the Dolphins' linebacker coach from 2020-2023, working as a member of both Brian Flores' and Mike McDonald's staffs in South Beach.

Back on May 10th, Coen spoke about the idea of scheduling joint practices.

“I hope so. We’ll see. It all kind of depends on the schedule and the league and all that. We haven’t been able to get that information quite yet. We’ll continue to utilize any asset we can to make that work, but we’ve had some communication.”

Having practices against Miami serves as a great way to figure out some of the bigger questions surrounding the Jaguars heading into preseason.

The first is if Trevor Lawrence has an understanding of Coen's complex offense. The next is figuring out how Hunter is going to be deployed on the field, both on offense and defense.

Expect several highly competitive periods of work, something Coen has expressed a belief in recently.

“We call that an alignment assignment period where we’ve installed plays on both sides of the ball, concepts, formations, motions, shifts, defensively calls, adjustments to these formations and motions and shifts, so it’s a just a good op(tic) to kind of get out there, get the huddle."

"It’s wild. When you poll these guys on how many have been in the huddle recently and how many have heard a verbal cadence recently, it’s very minimal. So we are actually teaching this is the huddle, this is where you line up in the huddle, this is how we break the huddle and this is a verbal cadence, so that is like starting at ground zero in a lot of ways. Didn’t really feel like it was fully necessary to come do true, competitive 11-on-11, but at the end of the day I think we got something out of it.”

Perhaps this is the first big step to unlocking Lawrence.

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