Jacksonville Jaguars Camp Update — August 9: Walker Little Went Down on the First Play

In July we said the market was taxing Jacksonville for last season's overachievement and taxing it too steeply — because the case for the give-back being mild leaned on stability: the same play-caller in year two, the same quarterback finally in a system worth keeping, and a line that entered the offseason as the settled part of the roster. We wrote that the price was too steep precisely because the stable things looked like staying stable.

Camp is shredding the stable things, one offensive lineman at a time.

The chronology, because it compounds. Left tackle Cole Van Lanen — who took the job from Walker Little last season — opened camp on the physically-unable-to-perform list with a knee, alongside Garrett DiGiorgio's foot, per the team's own camp snapshots. Little, per Michael DiRocco's ESPN camp file, spent two practices back at left tackle and then moved to the right side, with Anton Harrison flipping left ("It's not really a big change, just something to get used to," Harrison offered). Then Friday's 90-minute mock game turned a depth problem into a crisis: Little was banged up on the first play from scrimmage and left early, Chuma Edoga went down when Travon Walker bulldozed him on the backup unit's first possession, and guards Patrick Mekari and Emmanuel Pregnon didn't participate at all — leaving combinations like Wyatt Milum, a guard by trade, at right tackle and backup center Jonah Monheim at right guard, per the Florida Times-Union's observations. Milum's shrug — "Wherever the team needs me, that's where I'm going to go play" — is admirable and also a sentence a contender's line shouldn't need in week two. Jaguars On SI counted the wreckage plainly: six linemen injured by Friday's end, five of them among the top 10 on the depth chart, "its worst point yet." And today brought no relief — Little, Edoga, Pregnon and Mekari all sat out Sunday's practice, per the team's Day 10 snapshot. No individual diagnosis in the reporting we can attribute is severe. Collectively, three of the five jobs that will protect Trevor Lawrence in September currently belong to nobody in particular.

The rest of camp keeps insisting the July thesis about the football itself was right. Brian Thomas Jr. has followed his spring with the camp the WR1 projection wanted — Monday's play of the day was a one-handed sideline grab through Montaric Brown's sticky coverage, per DiRocco, and Friday's mock game added two third-down conversions and a touchdown from Lawrence, after which Thomas' self-report was the kind you frame: "Mentally, I feel good; body-wise, I feel good; I feel like we have a strong team." Parker Washington made today's biggest play — tracking a Lawrence deep ball behind the third level on a design the two had worked on minutes earlier, per the team's snapshot, with Liam Coen's scouting report a two-word contract case: "consistent dude." Lawrence's own midpoint self-assessment ran honest — "It has been up and down; there are plays I want back, but I do know we're getting better every day" — which matches the beat's charting of a mock game with miscommunications alongside three touchdown throws. And the defense has quietly been the best unit on the property: the mock-game line swarmed Nick Mullens so relentlessly the evaluators couldn't see anything else, Arik Armstead was a nuisance, and today produced an Eric Murray interception and a Rayuan Lane III forced-and-recovered fumble, per the team's coverage. Travon Walker's own summary of his health — playing through injury last year, "just getting back in that defensive rhythm" — reads like a unit remembering itself.

One tracker worth its own paragraph, because nobody else will count it for you: Travis Hunter's two-way experiment has a lean now. DiRocco's running snap count through seven practices had him at 103 11-on-11 snaps — 64 on defense, 39 on offense. That's not a receiver who moonlights at corner; that's a cornerback with packages. Where the ball finds him in the preseason will say whether the split is camp logistics or the plan.

Does the July framing hold? Complicated. The half of the preview about the team — Coen's year-two offense, Thomas' ascent, a defense playing ahead of schedule — keeps checking out. The half the price argument actually rested on, stability, has taken structural damage at the exact position group where stability converts most directly into wins: nobody's projection of this offense included Lawrence operating behind a line improvising three of five spots. If the bodies return in two weeks, this was noise. If they don't, the give-back we called overpriced starts pricing itself.

What would change it: how many of the four sitting linemen practice this week ahead of Thursday's joint session with the Saints — the first external pass rush of the summer, arriving at the worst possible moment for this particular unit, and the same practice New Orleans' episode is watching from the other sideline. We'll check Sunday.

_Data via nflverse._