The Jaguars may have walked out of Week 5 with a late win over the Philadelphia Eagles, but the bigger question in Jacksonville is whether they also walked into a tackle problem.
Anton Harrison was carted off in the third quarter and never returned, and head coach Liam Coen didn’t have much clarity Monday beyond the fact that the team is waiting on the MRI.
“Yeah, I mean, we'll have to see. He just got an MRI, just now, so we don't have the results back yet.
We're kind of at the mercy of that and to see what that looks like and how he feels. He's a little stiff," Jaguars head coach Liam Coen said Monday.
"I have a lot of belief in [Jeff Ferguson, Vice President of Player Health and Performance] and our group downstairs to be able to…If anybody's going to get him ready to play, it'll be them, and we'll have to be patient with, obviously, if he's not able to, you know, practice what that looks like and go from there. But, you know, it was a weird play.
He was trying to block on the turnback, and it just tweaked on him a little bit. We'll have to see what the MRI looks like.
We're at the mercy of it right now.”
If Harrison ends up missing real time, Jacksonville has a few paths it can take. The cleanest one is also the simplest: plug Walker Little in at left tackle and move on.
That’s the easy case to make. Little is a legitimate starting tackle in this league, the kind of player plenty of teams would love to have as their backup plan.
He handled his half of the game against the Eagles well, and the Jaguars have been building this kind of tackle insurance for years. If Harrison is out, Little looks like the most natural answer.
In that setup, Wyatt Milum would likely serve as the swing tackle, with Daniel Faalele also in the picture. The Jaguars could also get Patrick Mekari back from injured reserve at some point, which would add another layer of depth. It’s a good problem to have compared with what most teams face when a starting tackle goes down, and it gives Jacksonville a real chance to absorb the loss without scrambling.
There’s also a more creative route: reshuffling the tackles and trying to find the best five bodies, even if that means moving people around. Cole Van Lanen has already shown he can handle left tackle, while Little has experience on the right side. Faalele and Milum also profile better as right tackles than left tackles, which could push the Jaguars toward a full shuffle if they want to maximize the group.
But that idea comes with baggage. Van Lanen has taken every snap at right tackle this season, and the Jaguars made it clear before Week 1 that right tackle is where he feels most at home.
He did a strong job at left tackle last year, but he’s only five games removed from a serious knee injury in January. Asking him to switch spots on top of everything else is no small ask.
Then there’s the outside-the-building option, and it’s the one that feels most extreme. Jacksonville could explore a trade for a starting-caliber tackle if Harrison is expected to be sidelined for a while. That kind of player isn’t easy to find, but James Gladstone has the kind of draft capital to work with that could let him get aggressive if the right deal appears.
It’s not the most likely path, mostly because those kinds of tackles rarely become available. Still, the Jaguars have shown they can move quickly when they need to address a hole, and it would be hard to rule out Gladstone and the front office if the injury outlook turns ugly.
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Jacksonville, though, left England with the kind of finish that makes the odd stuff easier to shrug off. Ameer Abdullahs kickoff return helped set up Cam Little for a game-winning 57-yard field goal, and the 19-17 victory gave the Jaguars a result sturdy enough to turn Stranges awkward sequence into little more than a footnote. [Read more 🡒]