Blake Bortles is Tom Brady 2.0. At least he is when there’s nothing on the line.
If you weren’t already scratching your head when the Jacksonville Jaguars picked up the quarterback’s 2018 contract option this May, then you will be once you read what FiveThirtyEight discovered in an analysis of garbage-time numbers. Because as it turns out, Bortles is only good when his team has no chance of winning.
“In garbage time — which we define as the last five minutes of the fourth quarter, when a team is down multiple scores (9 or more points) — Bortles transforms into the franchise quarterback Jacksonville envisioned when they made him the No. 3 overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft,” Michael Salfino wrote. “In these scenarios in the past two seasons, Bortles has completed 78 of 118 for 964 yards with 12 touchdowns. He’s tossed only four picks. His passer rating in these instances is 111. To get a sense of how good that is, Tom Brady’s rating across all of last season was 112.”
FiveThirtyEight found that since 2015, Bortles has thrown a whopping 20.7 percent of his touchdown passes in garbage time — nearly four times greater than the NFL average. Not to mention, Bortles is the reason the Jags always are so behind in the first place.
“The only thing Bortles is as good at as posting garbage-time numbers is creating garbage time with his lackluster play in meaningful time,” Salfino wrote. “According to ESPN data, last year when a team was within one score (8 or fewer points) in the first half of games … Bortles was the worst quarterback in football. He completed 96 of 158 passes (60.8 percent) last year for 963 yards and just five touchdowns versus eight picks. His rating in these situations was just 67.6. What’s more, in the past two years, Bortles has thrown only half as many touchdown passes in the first quarter of all games (six) as he threw in the last five minutes of games he had already lost.”
Ouch.
Plenty of pundits have predicted that 2017 will be the Jaguars’ year, but they might be changing their minds now.
Thumbnail photo via Reinhold Matay/USA TODAY Sports Images
