Culture
The Jaguars overestimated themselves. Did they overestimate Trevor Lawrence, too?
The NFL’s biggest surprise teams through Week 4 reside at opposite ends of the standings.
The Minnesota Vikings are 4-0 after losing their highly drafted rookie quarterback and substituting the well-traveled Sam Darnold in his place.
GO DEEPER
Assessing 4-0 teams, from Vikings’ shocking start to Chiefs’ WR setback: Sando’s Pick Six
The Jacksonville Jaguars are 0-4 less than four months after rewarding their quarterback, Trevor Lawrence, with a $275 million extension.
Here’s another surprise: Lawrence’s statistical production through his 54 career starts mirrors the production for Darnold to the same point in his career (Darnold has made starts No. 57-60 this season).
It’s early for a Jaguars autopsy, but so far, Jacksonville fits the profile of a team that overestimated itself, symbolized most resoundingly when paying its quarterback. The team is facing tough questions earlier than anticipated because winnable games slipped away, leaving the Jaguars 0-4 for the second time in four seasons with Lawrence, and for the fourth time in 13 seasons with owner Shad Khan.
The schedule delivers beatable opponents over the next three weeks in the Indianapolis Colts (2-2), Chicago Bears (2-2) and New England Patriots (1-3), but enough has gone wrong through the Jaguars’ first four games to examine the evidence. Including that Darnold-Lawrence comp.
“It will not end well”
The Jaguars are not the only team to invest market-setting dollars in a quarterback carrying question marks long before there was a deadline for making a decision. The Miami Dolphins acted similarly with Tua Tagovailoa, as did the Arizona Cardinals with Kyler Murray. Both Lawrence and Murray signed extensions with two years remaining on their rookie contracts.
Shortly after the Jaguars extended Lawrence’s deal for $55 million annually, 50 coaches and executives voting in my 2024 Quarterback Tiers survey combined to place Lawrence in Tier 3. Lawrence ranked 16th. Tagovailoa was one spot higher. Murray was one spot lower. (Those three quarterbacks’ teams are a combined 2-10 this season.)
GO DEEPER
NFL QB Tiers 2024: Only 2 join Mahomes in Tier 1; Rodgers, Herbert drop out
The deal for Lawrence came after the Jaguars lost five of their final six games last season, with the only victory coming against Carolina, when Lawrence was unavailable because of injury.
“They have a quarterback they think is a superstar, and he is not a superstar,” a QB Tiers voter said over the summer. “Ownership thinks he is a superstar. It will not end well.”
The implication was that Lawrence can be good, but not great, and that he isn’t good enough consistently enough to meet sky-high expectations.
“Make no mistake, this is the best team assembled by the Jacksonville Jaguars, ever,” Khan told fans in late August. “Best players, best coaches. But most importantly, let’s prove it by winning now.”
The Darnold comp
Through 54 starts, Darnold and Lawrence had identical won-lost records (20-34), the same yards per pass attempt (6.7) and nearly the same average air yards per attempt. Their passer ratings lagged. Darnold took more sacks. Lawrence suffered from more dropped passes.
Lawrence had the better expected points added (EPA) per pass play, but in looking at the table below, we would never conclude that one of these quarterbacks deserved a market-setting extension, while the other was an abject failure.
Darnold and Lawrence, first 54 starts
| QB | Darnold | Lawrence |
|---|---|---|
|
W-L |
20-34 (.370) |
20-34 (.370) |
|
Cmp % |
60.2% |
63.1% |
|
Yds/att |
6.7 |
6.7 |
|
TD-INT |
61-53 |
62-40 |
|
Rating |
79.2 |
84.6 |
|
Sack % |
7.4% |
5.4% |
|
Explosive pass % |
15.8% |
14.0% |
|
Rush TD |
12 |
11 |
|
Avg air yds |
8.1 |
8.0 |
|
Fumbles (lost) |
32 (13) |
35 (21) |
|
Passes dropped (%) |
63 (3.7%) |
106 (5.5%) |
|
EPA/pass play |
-0.07 |
-0.01 |
Both players experienced terrible team situations early in their careers — Darnold with the New York Jets in the NFL’s largest media market, Lawrence with Jacksonville in its smallest.
GO DEEPER
Inside Urban Meyer’s disastrous year with Jaguars
“Good players can be in bad situations, bad players can be in good situations and it takes a little while to figure out the true merit sometimes,” a veteran coach said.
Lawrence badly missed two open receivers, Christian Kirk and rookie Brian Thomas Jr., for what would have been long touchdown passes during the Jaguars’ 24-20 defeat at Houston in Week 4.
With those throws presumably in mind, coach Doug Pederson pushed back when asked after the game about possibly taking over play-calling duties from offensive coordinator Press Taylor.
“For what?” Pederson replied. “I thought he called a great game. As coaches, we can’t go out there and make the plays. It’s a two-way street.”
Lawrence missed Thomas along the right sideline for what would have been another big gain. Receivers made diving catches to secure two shorter throws. Other passes were imprecise enough to limit yards after the catch. Most of the misses were overthrows.
“When someone is so consistently spraying the ball and they are a guy who was a No. 1 overall (draft choice), I almost always feel like there is some element of, I don’t want to say the yips, but some sort of mechanical, fundamental thing,” NFL quarterback-turned-analyst J.T. O’Sullivan said while breaking down every Jaguars offensive play from Week 4 for his Patreon subscribers.
O’Sullivan noted that Lawrence in this game hopped backward unnecessarily while throwing. Bad habits can set in when quarterbacks do not trust their pass protection. Lawrence took a punishing hit early in the Houston game as the Texans’ physical defensive front asserted itself.
The Jaguars rank 16th in ESPN’s pass-block win rate metric and 23rd in Pro Football Focus’ pass-block grading, which doesn’t seem so bad. Reviews from within the league have been harsher.
“They play up front like they can’t wait until the play is over — tough to watch,” a personnel executive said before the Houston game. “The quarterback is missing easy throws. There’s bad body language. Just in general, offensively, a downtrodden group.”
Considering a potential Wentz parallel
The Philadelphia Eagles ranked 18th in offensive EPA per play during Pederson’s Super Bowl-winning tenure as their coach from 2016 to 2020. That period encompassed the rise and fall of Carson Wentz. Is Lawrence following a similar arc on a smaller scale?
The chart above compares the cumulative pass EPA for Wentz and Lawrence when both were with Pederson, pegged to career start number. The line for Wentz begins at career start No. 1, while the line for Lawrence begins at career start No. 18. There’s nothing definitive here, but this could be worth revisiting as the 2024 season progresses.
Pederson benched Wentz late in their fifth and final season together. Lawrence remains early in his fourth NFL season and third with Pederson. His five-year contract extension begins in 2026. He’s likely going to be in Jacksonville for years to come, no matter who is coaching.
Nine consecutive defeats for Lawrence
Lawrence’s current nine-game losing streak as a starter moves him one away from matching Carson Palmer (2010) and Jared Goff (2020-21) for the longest such streaks since 2000 for quarterbacks drafted No. 1.
Ten would also match the Jaguars’ franchise record, held by Chad Henne and Blake Bortles.
Darnold has been there before, once losing nine straight with the Jets. But his recent team and individual production far outpaces that of Lawrence, as the table below shows.
Darnold and Lawrence, last 9 starts
| QB | Darnold | Lawrence |
|---|---|---|
|
W-L |
6-3 (.667) |
0-9 (.000) |
|
Cmp % |
63.8% |
58.9% |
|
Yds/att |
8.6 |
6.3 |
|
TD-INT |
17-6 |
13-8 |
|
Rating |
105.1 |
80.7 |
|
Sack % |
8.4% |
6.5% |
|
Explosive pass % |
21.4% |
13.7% |
|
Rush TD |
2 |
1 |
|
Avg air yds |
8.5 |
10.1 |
|
Fumbles (lost) |
11 (4) |
7 (3) |
|
Passes dropped (%) |
5 (2.2%) |
17 (5.4%) |
|
EPA/pass play |
+0.16 |
-0.08 |
The decision to extend Lawrence’s contract at such an expensive price does not stand alone among choices inviting scrutiny for Jacksonville. They used the first pick in the 2022 draft for Travon Walker instead of Aidan Hutchinson. Bigger-picture defensive changes also stand out.
Last season, the Jaguars ranked 23rd on offense and 11th on defense as measured by EPA per play. They fired defensive coordinator Mike Caldwell and seven defensive assistants.
The offense ranks about the same this season (24th), but the defense ranks much worse (30th) while transitioning to a new style. Under coordinator Ryan Nielsen, Jacksonville is playing man coverage at the second-highest rate (42 percent) after having the third-lowest rate (15 percent) last season.
Darnold, backed by the NFL’s top-ranked defense by EPA per play, has attempted only two passes while trailing this season. The Jaguars’ record and Lawrence’s role in it would likely be footnotes if Jacksonville were getting that kind of production from its defense this season.
The defensive changes could still pay off. Lawrence and the offense could still hit stride.
The Jaguars were close to breaking open their season-opening game at Miami, but running back Travis Etienne fumbled as he neared the goal line. The Dolphins scored an 80-yard touchdown two plays later. Jacksonville led Houston 20-17 late in the third quarter when Tank Bigsby’s 58-yard run gave the Jaguars first-and-goal from the 4. Jacksonville turned over the ball on downs.
The 24-20 defeat to Houston dropped the Jaguars to 1-4 since the start of last season in games decided by four or fewer points. Such things tend to even out. The evening out cannot happen fast enough for a team set to induct its only winning coach, Tom Coughlin, into its Ring of Honor in Week 5.
(Photo of Trevor Lawrence, right, and Doug Pederson: Bryan Bennett / Getty Images)
Free, daily NFL updates direct to your inbox.
Free, daily NFL updates direct to your inbox.
Sign Up
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
-
Augusta, GA2 minutes agoAttention, shoppers: Augusta-area Walmarts to be remodeled in 2026
-
Washington, D.C8 minutes ago11 hurt after work vehicle collides with Silver Line train at Metro Center
-
Cleveland, OH14 minutes agoHouston Astros at Cleveland Guardians prediction, pick for Tuesday 4/21/26
-
Austin, TX20 minutes agoAppeals court rules Texas can require public schools to display Ten Commandments in class
-
Alabama26 minutes agoAlabama Defeated By Birmingham
-
Alaska32 minutes agoHawaiian, Alaska reservation systems merge: Big changes for travelers start April 22
-
Arizona38 minutes agoMichigan defenseman Hunter Hady transfers to Arizona State
-
Arkansas44 minutes ago
#24 Arkansas Explodes for Eight Runs in Eighth to Race past Missouri State in Midweek Rematch
