The Jaguars’ Marqise Lee won’t play in 2018 after a serious knee injury in the preseason. (Sam Greenwood/Getty Images)
The 2018 NFL season was set up so nicely for Jaguars wide receiver Marqise Lee. Jacksonville had let fellow wideouts Allen Robinson and Allen Hurns walk away in free agency and had given Lee a four-year, $34 million contract, with $16.5 million guaranteed, after his 56-catch performance in 2017. He was to be the pass-catching focal point for the suddenly resurgent Jaguars, who were a fourth-quarter collapse against the Patriots away from making last season’s Super Bowl.
And then Saturday happened (please heed the graphic warning in this tweet):
On Monday, the Jaguars confirmed what was apparent to anyone who watched Lee get carted off after that hit in Saturday’s game against the Falcons: They placed him on injured reserve because of knee ligament damage, ending his season before it even began.
Had the Jaguars followed what’s become an increasingly popular preseason plan, this likely would not have happened. More and more teams this year eschewed the usual Week 3 preseason “dress rehearsal” rhetoric, resting key starters to keep them upright for the regular season.
Aaron Rodgers didn’t play for the Packers on Friday night against Oakland, though he never has logged much time in the preseason, so that was hardly unusual. But the Ravens’ Joe Flacco, Cowboys’ Dak Prescott and Rams’ Jared Goff also stayed on the sideline — Goff hasn’t played a single snap this preseason — as teams sought to keep their passers upright.
“We’re at almost 2,000 snaps in practice,” Bears Coach Matt Nagy said after Saturday’s game against the Chiefs, one in which quarterback Mitch Trubisky and most of Chicago’s other starters did not play. “For somebody telling me 25-30 reps is going to make [Trubisky] better Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, it’s not going to happen.”
The number of stars who sat out what conventional NFL wisdom says is the most important preseason week hasn’t reached critical mass, obviously. As compiled by Boilard, the same number of starting quarterbacks — Patrick Mahomes II (Chiefs), Jimmy Garoppolo (49ers), Russell Wilson (Seahawks), Matthew Stafford (Lions) and Blake Bortles (Jaguars) — not only played but played into the second half of their Week 3 preseason games, and another 11 played the entire first half. Even an injury couldn’t keep one quarterback from playing: the Browns’ Tyrod Taylor got hurt in the first quarter against the Eagles on Thursday, went to the locker room to get the injury checked out and then returned to the game, so adamant was Coach Hue Jackson that his starters play the entire first half.
But any trend toward sitting starters in the preseason will undoubtedly lead to even more observers questioning the point of staging so many exhibition games. It certainly doesn’t help fill the stands. Matt Eurich of 247 Sports reports that 17,456 tickets went unused for Saturday’s Bears-Chiefs game in Chicago (28.8 percent of the 60,511 tickets that were distributed) after Nagy announced Friday night that the starters would sit. The Goff-less Rams had wide swaths of empty seats, as well, though filling the massive L.A. Coliseum for a game that doesn’t count would be a challenge even with all the starters playing.
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