Blake Bortles always a threat to sink Jaguars by, well, being Blake Bortles

It was a matter of time before the Jaguars' No. 1 defense couldn't hold up Blake Bortles any longer. But he's all Jacksonville has, and so it will sink or swim with him.

If any NFL season was going to produce a playoff team quarterbacked by a Blake Bortles, it would be this season. Games like Sunday's in Glendale, Ariz., which pitted Bortles and the Jaguars against Blaine Gabbert and the Cardinals, have long since stopped being the exception.

The problem for the Jaguars is, Gabbert's Cardinals won, even though Gabbert got strip-sacked for a touchdown and threw an interception, both in the fourth quarter. Gabbert also threw a touchdown pass in the final quarter, and got his team in position to win 27-24 on … a 57-yard field goal by one of the league's last remaining players from the 1990s.

You can't pin this loss on the league's top-ranked defense, which has carried the load throughout what is now a 7-4 season, and what was a four-game winning streak that had the Jags in first in the AFC South.

The defense has no margin for error. That's in large part because of Bortles, for whom that defense has been one of the most powerful deodorants ever created.

It's just an unavoidable fact that when an NFL quarterback plays objectively and quantitatively poorly but still wins, he still earns the perception of having played well, done the right things, contributed just enough, not hurt the team too much … even been a "game manager."
Thus, Bortles has avoided the vitriol he'd received as recently as this preseason, when fans were in agony over the disaster that seemed inevitable. That hasn't happened, so games like the one two weeks ago against the Chargers can be shrugged off, as Bortles' parade of mistakes were covered up by the Jaguars' overtime win.

On Sunday, Bortles was effective with his mobility, his two big touchdown runs and the ways he capitalized on that defense (the Jaguars' only lead, 17-16, came on the strip-sack by Yannick Ngakoue and touchdown return by Calais Campbell).

Bortles also threw a backbreaking interception in Cardinals territory in the final minutes, with the score tied, on the very next drive after Gabbert had thrown his.

The defense has been so dominant, the Jaguars haven't been life-and-death down the stretch nearly as much as they could be. They've even worked their way around running back Leonard Fournette's wear-and-tear injuries and the absence of wide receiver Allen Robinson all season. Campbell's touchdown was the defense's fifth this season. Bortles, then, hasn't had to be good. And he hasn't.

It's fairly easy to break it down by the numbers. The Jaguars have won all five games in which he has not thrown an interception. He has now thrown one in each of their four losses. Twice this season he has been picked twice in a game … the win over the Chargers, and a 37-16 Week 2 beating by the Titans at home (when he had three total turnovers), the game that now has Tennessee in first in the division because of the tiebreaker.
And the signature win of the season (arguably), the 30-9 rout of the Steelers in Week 5, when the Jaguars picked off Ben Roethlisberger five times? Bortles only threw 14 passes.

So as the Jaguars started to establish their identity over the past month, the perception grew that Bortles was handling his business well, staying out of the way, moving the chains, not wasting that defensive effort.

That perception didn't exactly get blown up in Arizona. Things just returned more to normal. Bortles avoided being a liability, until he couldn't avoid it anymore.

If it takes 57-yard field goals to beat the Jaguars, they probably can accept that. Knowing what Bortles can and can't do, they don't have much choice in the matter.