How Trevor Lawrence quietly revived the Jaguars: ‘We can beat whoever lines up across from us’

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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — It’s early August in north Florida, a week into training camp, and I’ve been warned: 10 minutes, tops. Already loathe to talk about himself in any setting, Trevor Lawrence has a workout he has to get to. This interview needs to be quick.

The Jaguars’ third-year quarterback is lugging his helmet and shoulder pads off the practice field, wiping sweat from his forehead, on his way to the weight room. It’s 93 degrees but feels like 103. A team staffer offers to carry his equipment.

“No, no, no, you don’t have to do that,” he says. “That stuff probably smells terrible. Let me carry it.”

As we step inside the team’s sparkling new $120 million facility, I roll the dice: Instead of peppering Lawrence with the same questions he’s been hearing all preseason — questions about the Jags’ stunning turnaround last winter, about their ballooning expectations for 2023, about his own MVP candidacy — I ask him about an entirely different sport.

His eyes light up. He starts talking. He doesn’t stop.

Ten minutes? We might be here for an hour.

“Man, you’d think I’d be better,” he says, shaking his head, the disappointment etched across his face. “Most quarterbacks I know are better than me.”

His teammate and close friend, Christian Kirk, let the secret slip a day earlier: The two played a lot of golf together during the offseason. Lawrence got hooked.

And he’s being humble. He’s a pretty dang good golfer, especially when you consider the demands of his day job: Live up to the impossible hype that’s trailed him since he was a teenager, hype that only intensified after he torched Alabama in the national title game as a 19-year-old freshman, finished 38-2 as a starter at Clemson and was tapped the most pro-ready prospect since Andrew Luck. All he’s had to do since landing in Jacksonville in 2021 is lift a fledgling franchise from the depths of one of the worst coaching stints in NFL history.

Which, of course, he did.

In 12 months.

On the golf course this summer, Lawrence knocked his handicap down from a 21 to a 13.5, regularly shooting in the 80s. He’s proud of that. He put his clubs away a week before training camp — “might sneak in a round or two during the bye week, that’s it,” he sighs. But knows if he does, the rust will show. It’s already eating at him. He won’t beat Kirk if he’s blading and chunking chip shots around the green.

His short game needs work. That’ll be the first order of business when he gets the clubs back out for good.

Maybe that comes in late January.

“Hopefully February,” he points out.

During his lone season as the Colts’ senior offensive assistant, in 2021, Press Taylor would game-plan alone in his office each week with YouTube on in the background. He’d pull up interviews from that week’s opponent and listen for crumbs.

Twice that year he watched Lawrence, then a rookie, face a barrage of questions about the team’s tumultuous season and the rocky start to his career. From its outset, the Urban Meyer experiment was a debacle, marred by the coach’s ego and incompetence, his belittling of players and staff, viral videos and a 2-11 start. “The most toxic environment I’ve ever been a part of,” one Jaguars staffer later told The Athletic.

That was Lawrence’s first five months in the NFL.

“Terrible season, right?” Taylor says now. “Trevor’s the No. 1 pick. He’s not playing well. I wasn’t here, but you hear the rumors. The media would ask him about it, and he’d just stand up there and own every last thing. He never blamed anyone. And he was a rookie.

“That stayed in my mind,” the coach continues. “I told myself, this dude is pretty cool.”

Only twice that season did Lawrence finish a game with more touchdowns than interceptions, the latter of which arrived in Week 18, a month after Meyer was fired. Though it wasn’t a surprise to Taylor that Lawrence earned “Media Good Guy” honors from Jacksonville reporters after the season, he did find it notable. Across the league, that award almost always goes to a veteran.

By mid-February, a new era was underway. Doug Pederson had been hired to clean up Meyer’s mess, and he’d lured Taylor from Indianapolis to be his offensive coordinator. A few weeks after accepting the job, Taylor welcomed his young QB into his office. To that point, the two had never met.

“Tell me about your first season …” the coach began.

They spoke for an hour. As Taylor recalls, Lawrence never once complained, never once made an excuse, never once blamed Meyer or anyone else for the team’s struggles — or his own.

But internally, 2021 wore on Lawrence far more than he let on. It wasn’t just the losses, but the chaos, the utter ineptitude. All he’d ever known as a starting quarterback was unbridled success — his teams went 91-5 from the start of his freshman year of high school through his final game at Clemson. Now he was on a league laughingstock, leading the NFL in interceptions, getting routed almost every week.

“I’ll tell you this, it was not fun to come to work, for Trevor or any of us,” says Jags running back Travis Etienne, a teammate of Lawrence’s going back to Clemson. “Coaching trickles down. You can’t fake it. People are gonna find out who you are.”

As a miserable 3-14 campaign crawled to a close, Lawrence wasn’t just embarrassed, he was ashamed. He became a homebody, not wanting to leave the house unless it was for practice or a game. “When you did go out, you wouldn’t see people in Jags gear,” he says, and he understands why.

“You’re not proud of what you’re putting on the field.”

A lot needed to change.

A lot would.

Before they ripped off five consecutive wins to close the 2022 regular season and earn their first AFC South title in five years; before Lawrence came into his own, playing the best football of his young career in late December and early January; and before the Jags staged a wild, 27-point rally in their playoff opener, the season was nearly lost on the final play of the first half of a 40-14 beatdown in Detroit.

Since Week 14 last season, inc. playoffs

QB	Win-Loss	Pass Yds	TD-INT	WR drops
11-1	3,151	26-8	13	103.3
11-1	2,686	19-2	10	115.6
9-1	2,299	10-6	14	89.0
8-2	2,541	22-10	15	97.4
8-3	2,727	17-9	20	90.5

It was Week 13, early December. The Jags were 3-7, trailing the Lions 23-6 with a few seconds left in the second quarter. “Getting our butts kicked,” is how Kirk puts it. On a second down, Detroit edge rusher James Houston whupped Jags left tackle Cam Robinson off the edge, then crashed into Lawrence, hurling him to the field. As the QB fell, his left leg got twisted, his cleat sticking to the turf while his knee spun around. Lawrence screamed, writhing in obvious and agonizing pain.

The Jags held their breath.

“A nasty hit,” Kirk says. “I thought he was done for the day, probably longer.”

And when Lawrence wasn’t on the field to start the second half 20 minutes later, everyone assumed the same. Backup C.J. Beathard started warming up.

It looked bleak.

But as the Lions’ offense marched down the field, No. 16 emerged from the tunnel, jogging gingerly, trainer by his side. Then he started doing high knees on the sideline. His teammates were stunned.

“You’re just gonna chill the rest of the day, right?” Kirk asked him. “We’ll just ride with C.J.”

It would have made sense. It probably would have been the smart decision. The QB was clearly in pain, and after Lions running back D’Andre Swift found the end zone from a yard out, the Lions pushed their lead to 30-7.

The game was all but over.

“No, I’m going,” Lawrence told Kirk. “Be ready.”

Kirk was speechless. Seven months later, revisiting that conversation, he still is.

“There have been a lot of little moments with Trevor, but to me, that was the one,” he says after a long pause. “That’s the one where I was like, ‘Damn, he just gets it.’”

With his knee still bothering him, Lawrence led a 16-play, 80-yard touchdown drive, the Jags’ only of the game, a forgotten sequence amid a forgettable loss that few remember, save the players on the field that day, players who left Ford Field a few hours later more convinced than ever that they had a real one under center. That goes a long way in a locker room.

Things were going to turn.

Eventually, they had to.

Lawrence’s ability to play hurt is another aspect that has endeared him to teammates. (Julio Aguilar/Getty Images)

Still, the Jags lost by 26. Fell to 4-8 on the year. After the team’s flight home from Detroit, Kirk asked his young quarterback and a few others — wideout Zay Jones, tight end Evan Engram — to swing by his house that night. He had some things he wanted to get off his chest. He started with the QB.

“The losing was eating us alive,” Kirk remembers. “I was just brutally honest with him. Trevor’s still so young. He’s like 22, 23, right? And we have all these massive expectations for him. I told myself, ‘You gotta coach him up in this moment.’”

So he did, urging Lawrence to be more vocal with the coaching staff and his teammates.

“You’re the guy,” Kirk remembers telling him. “They’ll listen to you. Nobody’s gonna get their feelings hurt.”

All these months later, Lawrence admits he needed to hear that.

“Do or die,” he calls the moment.

From there, the four of them pulled out their phones and scanned the rest of their schedule, game by game.

Then they pulled up the Titans’ slate, thumbing all the way through Week 18.

At that point, Tennessee led the division by three games. Five weeks remained.

“This isn’t over,” Lawrence told his teammates. “They’ve gotta play us twice. And we’ve gotta win every game we have left.”

That’s what they did. They won five in a row, beating the Titans twice, including in a winner-take-all Week 18 tilt that decided the division title.

Then, 19 minutes into their playoff opener against the Chargers, the Jags looked up and the score was 27-0.

At halftime, it was 27-7. Four of Jacksonville’s first six possessions ended with an interception. In the locker room, Lawrence was despondent.

So Kirk lightened the mood.

“Well, that’s officially the worst half of football you can possibly play,” the wideout said. “If you throw four more picks, we’re in the exact same spot.”

Lawrence shrugged, his eyes down, his frustration simmering.

“Might as well just rip it at this point,” Kirk told him.

Lawrence nodded. Then he relaxed. Then he heated up. The Jags scored every time they touched the ball in the second half.

“Honestly, if we let doubt creep in during those moments, why are we even out here?” Etienne says, looking back on that night.

Scoring margin since Week 14, incl. playoffs

The Jags’ sideline knew it was over after Lawrence drilled Jones for a 39-yard touchdown late in the third quarter. Before the snap, the QB audibled, barking new instructions to his teammates from the line of scrimmage. Then he held the deep safety with his eyes, just long enough so Jones could find a sliver of space up the seam. The throw was perfect.

The score made it 30-21, but the Jags could feel it. Etienne jogged off the field with a grin on his face. This was the Lawrence he knew from Clemson.

“Dude’s on fire,” the running back told himself. “They can’t stop him.”

The sideline stayed silent. Confidence oozed. Kirk caught the final touchdown. The Jags won, 31-30.

“We all just knew, man, strange as that sounds,” Etienne says. “There was nothing he needed to say. Trevor just had us.”

This year, in a word, is about ownership. Taylor is calling plays for the first time, but he wants his third-year quarterback to be the one dictating the offense, picking the spots where they want to attack, speaking up when he doesn’t like a call or a look or a check.

“You have the football, you make the decisions,” Taylor often tells him.

An example: If Taylor dials up a deep shot off play-action, he doesn’t want Lawrence married to it. “I don’t want him telling himself, ‘Oh, they called a shot, I gotta throw it down the field,’” the coach says. “I want him to remind himself that, hey, it’s a great thing to be in second and 2.”

It’s similar to Kirk’s challenge to him late last season: Stop doing what you think you should do and start doing what the team needs, whether people like it or not. The veteran receiver knows accountability with Lawrence will never be the issue. He finds himself laughing after practice sometimes, reliving an incompletion he knows was his fault, not the quarterback’s.

“Man, that’s my bad, that was a terrible ball,” Lawrence will tell him.

“Are you kidding me?” Kirk will reply. “I ran a shitty route. That ball was literally perfect.”

“I’ve never seen him yell at a teammate, ever,” Press Taylor says. “The way he wins people over is how he treats them.” (Peter van den Berg / USA TODAY Sports)

Taylor knows that while Lawrence’s words might change, his demeanor won’t. “I’ve never seen him yell at a teammate, ever,” the coach says. “The way he wins people over is how he treats them.”

“He’s one of those guys,” Pederson said of Lawrence during training camp, comparing him to the best he’s been around at this stage of his career. “He’s not demanding or pounding his fists on the table, nothing like that.”

That sentiment has spread throughout the locker room, and a roster beaten down by Meyer’s belittling in 2021 has been reinvigorated by Pederson’s belief and Lawrence’s leadership. The Jags are 2-2 after rolling the Falcons in London last Sunday, 23-7, but have a stern test awaiting them this week in their second consecutive game across the pond: Josh Allen and the Bills.

Win that one, and Jacksonville will be impossible to ignore in the conversation of AFC contenders.

“Last year taught us that no matter what happens, we can find a way to win the game,” Lawerence says. “We can beat whoever lines up across from us. We have that belief now. And I think that’s something you have to have to be a championship team.”

More than that, Lawrence believes, the league is taking notice. Jacksonville is becoming an NFL destination, a city free agents seek out. For years, even decades, that wasn’t the case.

“This is a place people wanna be,” the quarterback says proudly. “Guys have told me that. We’re building something special, and I can feel that. I don’t have any doubts about where we’re going.”

A half-hour after their season-opening win against the Colts, Engram is asked why he re-upped with the Jags in the offseason. His response illustrates so much of what’s changed.

“You know why? Because I’m having fun again,” Engram says. A former first-round pick of the Giants whose run soured in New York, Engram was a part of the Jags’ 2022 free-agent haul that helped transform the franchise’s fortunes.

“Honestly, I was losing that a little bit before I came here,” he adds. “This team helped me find it.”

Then Engram shifts his gaze toward the corner of the locker room, where his quarterback is quietly slipping off his shoulder pads. The game felt like a continuation of the Jags’ 2022 season: trailing by four entering the final quarter, they scored the game’s last 14 points to win going away.

Engram singles out a 26-yard grab he caught amid the comeback.

“That dude right there, he’s a gamer,” he says, staring at Lawrence. “Confident. Humble. Accountable. That go-ball he threw me, we didn’t even run that play in practice this week. Not once. And in the game, in a big moment, he just let it rip.

“Now that’s why I’m here, to play with a guy like that.”

(Photo: Bradley Collyer / PA Images via Getty Images)

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