Liam Coen’s bold streak finally hit the one spot where the Jaguars needed a little more recklessness.
In Jacksonville’s 34-31 loss to the Houston Texans in Week 6, the call that stood out most came with 1:55 left and the Jaguars trailing by three at the Texans’ 42-yard line. Facing 4th-and-4, Coen chose to send out his kicker for a 60-yard try instead of keeping the offense on the field. It was the kind of decision that can look defensible on paper and painful on the scoreboard, especially after Houston turned around and walked off with the win.
That choice mattered because Coen had already shown a willingness to push it on fourth down since taking over. He had done it earlier in the same game, too, passing up a field goal chance in the first half and going for it on fourth down, only for the play to fall incomplete. So when the Jaguars got another big late-game chance, the safer route was the one that raised eyebrows.
The situation was simple enough. Make the kick, and Houston would get the ball back with three timeouts and almost two minutes to work with.
Miss it, and the Jaguars were cooked. Go for it and come up short, same result.
Go for it and convert, though, and Jacksonville would have had at least a real shot at winning - and likely overtime at worst.
Instead, Coen trusted the leg.
Cam Little drilled the 60-yarder, but the Texans answered with a six-play drive and finished it with a 49-yard field goal as time expired. The result was exactly what Jacksonville had hoped to avoid: a situation where making the kick still left the opponent enough time to win it anyway.
Coen pointed to the reasoning behind the call on Monday, acknowledging the hindsight that always comes with these moments. “Look, every decision like that, it's a coach's decision.
I ended up doing that and there's always hindsight. And you look, alright, if we don't get it, we're going to need a stop either way,” Coen said on Monday.
“If we go down and you're down by six points, now we have got to go score a touchdown. I felt like we had just got the turnover, maybe we put a little pressure on them on the other side of the ball.”
Even so, Little’s presence clearly shaped the decision. His range gave the Jaguars a real reason to believe the kick was there, and he backed it up. Coen made that part clear as well.
“But he gives you so much confidence to be able to be in those moments regardless of end of game, end of half, you feel like he got a shot and that's why we were able to be aggressive at the end of the half was to try to put us in a position to get points and he's such a weapon," Coen said. "Sometimes it makes some of these decisions challenging when you have a guy that's so dynamic that he can make kicks from so many different spots on the field, but very proud of Cam in the last few weeks that he's had, just continues to give us a chance to win.”
The kicker did his part. The problem was everything after that.
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For a team trying to become more efficient in close games, it is a revealing list of fixes. The Jaguars are treating the bye as a chance to clean up the self-inflicted errors that have made game management harder than it should be, and the next stretch of the season will show whether the reset actually translates once the pressure comes back. [Read more 🡒]