Looking for detailed insights about the Jacksonville Jaguars players, coaches, and philosophies?

This excerpt from Warren Sharp’s ‘2021 Football Preview’ book gets you prepared for the NFL season by delivering the smartest information & analysis in the fastest, most direct way possible.

You may think quarterback Gardner Minshew is a gimmick. The mullet, varying degrees of facial hair, the jorts. Combine them and you have a fun-loving backup quarterback.

You would be wrong.

Before we dig into the numbers, imagine that the first two years of your career started like this:

Playing for one of the most talent barren rosters that has been mismanaged for years, you’re drafted as an afterthought in the sixth round.

You take third-string snaps your rookie year, before injury allows you to take second-string snaps. You play in an offense commanded by John DeFilippo, his first year with the Jaguars, who was fired the year before from the same job in Minnesota.

Injury to your starter in week 1 forces you into the game and you become your team’s starter for much of your rookie season.

The team disliked DeFilippo so they fired him after that one year. They hired Jay Gruden, who was fired from his prior job. But it’s in the midst of the pandemic, so you’re learning the offense from Gruden over zoom.

How is that for a start to a career?  Buried on the depth chart, moving up due to injuries, two different OCs in two different years.

Couldn’t be easy.

What did we see from Minshew in 2020?  Something that you won’t see if you look at the records and see he was just 1-7 in his starts on a 1-15 team.

That’s because of Gruden’s offense and the Jags defense.

I’m not sure what Gruden studied before taking over the play-calling of the 2020 Jaguars, but it certainly wasn’t their first down run/pass splits, balance, or performance.

The 2020 Jaguars saw the following splits on first down play calls in the first three quarters:

Runs: 47% success, 4.2 YPC, -0.02 EPA/att
Minshew passes: 53% success, 7.0 YPA, 0.11 EPA/att

And yet the Jaguars ran the ball on 55% of these plays. Even more running than in 2019, despite the fact the team was losing these games by a larger margin.

How high is a 55% run rate on these plays? Only seven teams ran the ball more often, and these teams all were both better at running and were leading in more of these games.

The Jaguars ran the ball on first down in the first quarter at an insane 69% rate. The only two teams that ran the ball more often were teams that had a running quarterback with a rushing offense built around him: the Ravens with Lamar Jackson (70% run) and the Patriots with Cam Newton (70% run). No other team was above 65% run, not even the Derrick Henry-led Titans, except for the Jaguars. Examine those splits:

Runs: 52% success, 5.0 YPC, 0.04 EPA/att
Minshew passes: 56% success, 8.9 YPA, 0.24 EPA/att

These runs weren’t terrible, but each additional run over a typical balance (NFL average was 55%, Jags were 69%) was another pass that wasn’t thrown. And Minshew was dangerously good when passing on first downs, just like he was in 2019.

In 2020, of 40 quarterbacks that threw at least 50 first down passes, Minshew (on 132 attempts) ranked eighth in EPA/att. This was an improvement over 2019, but he was still very solid as a rookie in 2019 on these passes and ranked sixth in success rate.

Another completely puzzling element of this offense was the extreme lack of play-action. Once again, this would take one day of watching film or 30 seconds looking at the statistics to see that Gardner Minshew absolutely thrived using play-action. Examine his splits in 2019, which Gruden could have done as well:

2019 with play-action: 10.2 YPA, 58% success, 0.38 EPA/att
2019 without play-action: 6.1 YPA, 39% success, -0.15 EPA/att

But incredibly, DeFilippo used play-action on just 20% of Minshew’s early down passes, well below the NFL average. It would have provided massive improvement for the Jaguars offense, but went largely untapped. Keep in mind, the NFL average for early down play-action was 33%.

So now Gruden takes over, and what does he do?

He uses play-action at the second-lowest rate in the NFL despite massive pro-play-action splits. Minshew with Gruden:

2020 with play-action: 8.8 YPA, 58% success, 0.20 EPA/att
2020 without play-action: 6.3 YPA, 49% success, 0.02 EPA/att

It made no sense to use play-action so infrequently when it provided such a boost in efficiency. The team as a whole (all quarterbacks throughout the 2020 season) improved drastically on early downs when using play-action: an increase of 2.8 YPA (from 5.8 without to 8.6 with), an increase of seven percentage points in success rate (from 48% without to 55% with), and an increase of 0.27 EPA/att (from -0.10 without to 0.17 with).

Gruden didn’t study 2019’s failed season, didn’t care to make adjustments to optimize the 2020 offense, and like DeFilippo, lost his own job after just one season.

Back to the ever-improving Minshew…

Minshew showed improvement from his rookie year in terms of consistency downfield. Minshew spiked on efficiency in the 25-30 yard range in 2019, and while that regressed some, he was far more consistent in the 5-20 yard range in 2020. He took strides in delivering a more accurate ball when clean, but also when he was pressured. His on-target rate improved from 56% when pressured in 2019 to 68% in 2020.

He was also solid when the defense blitzed. He was substantially better at diagnosing and delivering an accurate ball compared to his rookie season. His on-target rate improved from 66% in 2019 to 76% in 2020, with his EPA skyrocketing from 0.07 to 0.22.

Lastly, Minshew showed tremendous improvement on third downs as well, from accuracy (63% in 2019 to 76% in 2020) to first down conversion rate (32% in 2019 to 45% in 2020) to EPA/att.

Minshew also showed tremendous improvement in completion percentage over expectation (CPOE), which uses player tracking data such as receiver separation from the nearest defender, where the receiver is on the field, and the separation the passer had at time of throw from the nearest pass rusher to determine the probability of completion.

In 2019, he ranked 38th (second-worst) in the NFL, with a completion percentage 5.2% below expectation. Only David Blough was worse.

In 2020, Minshew ranked eighth, with a completion percentage 2.9% above expectation.

Minshew also showed dramatic improvement in Air Yards to the Sticks, which measures the Air Yards ahead or behind the first down marker on all attempts for a passer. The metric indicates if the passer is attempting his passes past the first down marker, or if he is relying on his skill position players to make yards after catch. In 2019, Minshew ranked 29th of 39 quarterbacks.

In 2020, Minshew ranked 16th of 41.

I think there is more to Minshew than what we’ve seen so far in the NFL. Time will tell if he actually can have a career beyond a backup QB, but think about his context for a bit:

  • He’s played on the worst team in the NFL over the last two years with poor talent and poor coaching.
  • He was a sixth-round rookie in 2019, was buried on the depth chart most of the offseason, and got third string reps. But he was inserted Week 1 after Nick Foles broke his clavicle and that was how his career started.
  • His second year in the NFL was a COVID offseason spent learning a new offense from Jay Gruden via Zoom meetings.

Two far less than ideal seasons with two playcallers who are no longer calling plays anywhere on any level. He’s played on a team with terrible defenses that always force him to play from behind. He’s played behind below average offensive lines with bad schemes, bad play calling and below average surrounding talent.

I think the improvements we have seen from Minshew and his general efficiency which was overlooked on a terrible Jags team are well worth a look from a team with better coaching and better strategies.

For the complete Jacksonville Jaguars chapter, including a dozen more visuals & info-graphics, defensive breakdown, and detailed Fantasy football implication — plus the other 31 team chapters — pick up a copy of Warren Sharp’s new ‘2021 Football Preview’ book