Jacksonville Jaguars coach Doug Marrone is shouldering the blame for the team’s four-game losing streak Gary Jennings Jr. Jersey , saying he “hasn’t done a good enough job for whatever reason to get everyone’s mind in the right place.”Marrone insists he’s not trying to be a “martyr, a shield or anything like that.”Truth is he’s protecting everyone: top executive Tom Coughlin, general manager Dave Caldwell, inconsistent quarterback Blake Bortles , unavailable running back Leonard Fournette and dozens more underperforming players on an underachieving team.More Jacksonville Jaguars newsJaguars expect DE Yannick Ngakoue’s holdout to be short-livedJaguars rookie safety Zedrick Woods submits retirement paperworkJalen Ramsey says Jaguars don’t plan to give him contract extension this seasonJaguars sign former UCF running back Taj McGowan for added depthJaguars QB Nick Foles to miss OTAs for undisclosed ‘personal reason’The Jaguars (3-5) have been one of the NFL’s biggest busts in 2018, especially last month when they went 0-for-October and looked nothing like the team that advanced to the AFC championship game nine months earlier.“There is a story out there about this team. It is an ugly story,” said Marrone, who is counting on his team to regroup during its Week 9 bye.“But the story hasn’t ended. We can still control how this story reads. When we get away, we have to think long and hard about it. We have to come back and we have to figure out what the story is going to be on the 2018 team.”Injuries are a big reason for the slide, especially with Fournette — the team’s offensive centerpiece — missing six games because of a strained right hamstring. But Coughlin, Caldwell and Bortles deserve criticism.Coughlin designed an old-school team to play in a pass-happy league, one in which running the ball is barely important and hiding a mediocre quarterback is next to impossible. The ground-and-pound Jags want to control the clock, limit Bortles’ throws and play stout defense. It can work, but it usually needs everything to go right.Turnovers, dropped passes, defensive lapses, the Jaguars have seen those too often and aren’t built to handle much adversity or overcome double-digit deficits.It doesn’t help that Jacksonville is getting so little from its rookie class and its free-agent crop.Coughlin and Caldwell were so confident they had a playoff team in place that they used the draft to prepare for 2019, adding several down-the-road replacements for veteran starters. First-round pick and defensive lineman Taven Bryan has nine tackles in eight games. Second-round receiver DJ Chark has 12 catches for 159 yards to go along with a fumble and several costly drops. Third-round safety Ronnie Harrison has been the best of the bunch while playing mostly in certain defensive packages.Right tackle Will Richardson (fourth) is on injured reserve. Quarterback Tanner Lee (fifth) remains on the practice squad. Linebacker Leon Jacobs (sixth) has barely played outside special teams. And punter Logan Cooke (seventh) has failed repeatedly to flip the field when needed.Free agents Andrew Norwell, Donte Moncrief, D.J. Hayden, Austin Seferian-Jenkins and Marqise Lee have been equally disappointing.Norwell, a 2017 All-Pro guard from Carolina, was expected to bolster the offensive line and help give the Jaguars one of the best running attacks in the league. Instead, he looks unworthy of his five-year, $66.5 million contract.Moncrief, who signed a one-year deal worth $9.6 million, was supposed to offset the loss of physical receiver Allen Robinson. He has 29 catches for 379 yards and two scores.Hayden (toe) has missed six consecutive games http://www.seahawkscheapshops.com/cheap-authentic-phil-haynes-jersey , and Seferian-Jenkins (core muscle) and Lee (knee) are on injured reserve.“Playing football is easy,” defensive tackle Malik Jackson said. “Staying healthy is the hard part.”A legitimate franchise quarterback might be able to make up for all of Jacksonville’s deficiencies. But Coughlin and Caldwell decided to give Bortles a three-year, $54 million contract in February, betting that the fifth-year starter would continue developing and adding to a growing list of turnover-free games.Neither has happened, and the Jaguars are seemingly stuck with Bortles because of his $21 million contract in 2019. He has 10 touchdown passes, eight interceptions and three lost fumbles to go along with 18 sacks.Throw in a training camp fight, two weeklong suspensions, a locker room scuffle last month, four players getting detained in London because of an unsettled nightclub tab, Jalen Ramsey‘s mouth and the ultra-confident defense failing to maintain its 2017 form, and the Jaguars have been more of a farce than a force in the AFC.“The most important thing as a team is we’ve got to keep our belief strong,” defensive end Calais Campbell said. “No matter what the outside noise says or does, we just got to keep our belief strong. Five losses in this league this early sucks, but five losses throughout the season, that’s not bad at all; that’s a heck of a year.“We’ve got a lot of ball left to play. We made it real hard on ourselves, but I truly believe the guys that we have here are built to be able to do something special, even considering our current circumstance.”Marrone hopes to get Fournette, Hayden and cornerback A.J. Bouye (calf) back after the bye week. He also wouldn’t rule out staff and lineup changes.Already saddled with two division losses at home, the Jaguars have little room for error after the break if they’re able to write a feel-good ending to their “ugly story.”“When no one picks you to win and everyone thinks you are going to stink, it’s, ‘Let’s go out there and prove everybody wrong and play with a chip on our shoulder and go,'” Marrone said. “Then all of a sudden, when everybody is on the bandwagon, it’s the opposite. ‘Let’s prove everybody right.’ Either way, you are trying to prove right or wrong what is going on.“We just haven’t lived up to the expectations to this day.” ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Pro Bowl center Alex Mack rattled off all he does before the snap: Checks for blitzes, keeps an eye on the play clock Ugo Amadi Jersey , makes blocking adjustments and communicates all the changes to everyone else.All that happens in seconds — with 300-pound defenders a few inches away and ready to pounce.“It’s unlike anything else in football,” the Atlanta Falcons standout said.Some might argue the center is the most indispensable player on the roster — the player who mans the only position guaranteed to touch the ball on every play. He calls the shots for the offensive line and begins each play.But an Associated Press analysis revealed that despite their unique skill set, it was centers — not running backs, linebackers or defensive backs — who were becoming more endangered more quickly than players at any other position . In 2009, the average center had six years in the league. This season, the average center had four years of experience.“Really? That’s shocking,” Mack said. “I guess, technically, it’s the last spot for the O-line. If you’re a tackle who can’t play in space, they move you to guard. If you’re a guard that’s having trouble, they move you to center. Oftentimes center is the position that can get the most help. A lot of the blocks are double-teams, so you’re not put on an island nearly as much, so it’s always a position that you can try to improve.”Most teams have in recent years, too.Thirty-eight centers have been drafted over the last five years, and none of them has made a Pro Bowl. Sixteen of those have been taken in the first three rounds of the NFL draft.It helps explain why the experience of the average center has fallen. While every position outside of quarterback, kicker and punter has seen a decline, no position sees this sharp a drop-off in the AP survey.“It’s one of those tough, nasty, gritty positions that you have to just keep fighting at, and kids nowadays just aren’t quite the same,” said retired NFL center Brad Meester, a 14-year starter for the Jacksonville Jaguars. “Even at the high school level, those kids are getting harder and harder to find anymore.“They’re just not the same as they were years ago. I don’t know if that’s been part of the reason play has gone down and we’re seeing this dip in longevity, but it could be.”Since centers are typically the smallest offensive linemen in college, Mack and Meester believe some undersized guys have trouble making the NFL jump — especially with defensive linemen getting bigger, faster and stronger each year.“In college, if you have a guy who’s big enough to play in the NFL http://www.bengalsauthorizedshops.com/authentic-drew-sample-jersey , he’s probably playing tackle or guard,” Meester said. “He might get moved to center at the next level, and then you end up with centers that are a little raw going into the NFL.”That’s exactly what happened to Chicago Bears Pro Bowl center Cody Whitehair, who started his college career as a guard and moved to left tackle as a senior at Kansas State. The Bears drafted him in the second round in 2016 and then moved him to center a week before his rookie year.“It’s hard to transition into the NFL,” Whitehair said. “It definitely takes a special breed to come in out of college and be ready to start on the offensive line, especially at center.”Still, Whitehair was surprised to learn that the longevity of centers isn’t what is used to be. He said it could be that centers are asked to do so much more in the NFL than in college, where more prevalent spread systems often take their cues from the sideline inside of adjusting on the fly.But Whitehair pointed to Mack (10th season), New Orleans’ Max Unger (10th), Philadelphia’s Jason Kelce (8th) and the Pouncey twins (8th and 7th, respectively) as long-term starters he thought would be enough to make a difference in the changing landscape.“We just got to get the younger generation to follow in those footsteps,” Whitehair said.For every success story such as Whitehair, it seems there’s a recently drafted center who’s already out of the league — guys like David Molk, Philip Blake, Peter Konz, Khaled Holmes, Bryan Stork and Hroniss Grasu to name a few.“A center really is your quarterback of the offensive line, the guy who right along with the quarterback is reading defenses, reading stunts, blitzes, secondaries,” Meester said. “If you get a guy in there that can do that, you keep him.”