A Day of Jaguar Football
(http://photos.metrojacksonville.com/photos/740553736_b3iNj-M.jpg)
Metro Jacksonville shares the sights and scenes from the Jacksonville Jaguars/Miami Dolphins football game at Jacksonville Municipal Stadium on December 13th, 2009.
Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2009-dec-a-day-of-jaguar-football
I know Ennis enjoyed the game!
Are they painting the Hart Bridge silver or is that just a primer coat?
Oh yeah and go Jags!!!
The Hart Bridge is being painted green.
Nice shots!
And although Miami came out on top this time.... the Jags can still remind tham that they were the ones that retired Marino....
GO JAGS!!!! WOOOOOOOOOT!
62-7? or something like that.
Marino & JJ's last game......about 10 years ago now.
Don't make me get Mercury Morris on you all to tell you about history and flash a couple of Super Bowl rings to show how relevent a game a decade ago was to Sunday's outcome!
Mercury ran so well because he was all coked up during the games!
Quote from: thelakelander on December 16, 2009, 11:24:48 AM
Don't make me get Mercury Morris on you all to tell you about history and flash a couple of Super Bowl rings to show how relevent a game a decade ago was to Sunday's outcome!
Does Mercury even still have his rings?
His rings were turned into power and snorted long ago.
I remember him making the circuit in the 80's to all the local high schools giving speaches to the high school football players about living clean, don't do drugs and to stay in school. From remembering him on the football field, it was sad seeing him talk about how he f'ed up his life, and that was even from the eyes and mind of a teenager.
If both teams win out, the Dolphins take the East and there's the possibility of another meeting in the playoffs...
Did they ever get that parking issue ironed out around Jaguars Stadium? And...that game was not blacked out was it?
"HU"
^^What parking issue?
Game was blacked out.
^ but could be viewed on the web for free, which doesn't help out on resolving the ticket sales/black-out problems.
Yeah, I watch all of the Miami Dolphins and Heat games on the web, when they don't come on tv. Jaguar games are linked to those sites as well.
Quote from: JaxNative68 on December 16, 2009, 08:46:42 PM
^ but could be viewed on the web for free, which doesn't help out on resolving the ticket sales/black-out problems.
yes...because watching a game on a choppy computer feed is so much better than seeing it live!
Quote from: urbanlibertarian on December 16, 2009, 05:44:39 PM
^^What parking issue?
Game was blacked out.
So. There were still 60k people there.
There are no parking issues at the stadium... unless you mean some people cannot park within 1 block of the stadium and have to pay a few bucks to park. Then there is a huge issue. :)
Quote from: heights unknown on December 16, 2009, 05:05:13 PM
Did they ever get that parking issue ironed out around Jaguars Stadium? And...that game was not blacked out was it?
"HU"
I wish we had parking issues that would mean the games are sold out and a lot more people are tailgating. Most people show up 12 and go straight to their seats
From the 17-Dec-09 Washington Post:
Jaguars' show is one few people in Jacksonville can see
By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 17, 2009; D01
JACKSONVILLE, FLA. --John Peyton has a problem no mayor in an NFL city should ever want. Interest in his city's football team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, has waned the past few years. Ticket sales have plummeted. The Jaguars' games, which have been nowhere close to being sold out, have been kept -- by league rules -- from local television. And even though the Jaguars would make the playoffs if the season ended today, they hold more fascination nationally for the places they might end up someday, like Los Angeles or London, than for anything they've done on the field.
Then on Monday a rare piece of good news appeared. It turned out that after all kinds of pleading, wheedling and cajoling, civic leaders had managed to get enough seats sold to call Thursday night's game against the Indianapolis Colts a sellout and thus be shown on local television. Peyton rushed to the stadium for a news conference.
By the time he arrived, at just before noon, television cameras lined the plaza before the stadium's main entrance. In a city where only a few years before the Jaguars played important playoff games in front of huge throngs of fans desperate for tickets, the sellout announcement, that would normally be made with a drab press release, had instead become a very big deal. A Plexiglas lectern bearing the city's insignia was put in place, a nearly 7-foot-tall gold and teal team mascot named Jaxon de Ville lounged on an enormous statue of a jaguar and a quartet of cheerleaders stood like jubilant sentries beside the beaming Peyton.
"This is an indication that this movement is gaining traction," Peyton gushed.
"What better way to silence our critics," added Carl Cannon, a former newspaper publisher who helped lead the original surge to bring the NFL to town in the early 1990s.
From atop the jaguar statue, the mascot nodded and the cheerleaders shook their pompons.
But there are critics. Plenty of critics. People who say that no matter how many games the Jaguars win the franchise is fighting an inevitable reality that professional football can not last here much longer, that the lack of sellouts are not simply an anomaly in a bad economy but a sign of something far worse: a market that just isn't strong enough to support the NFL long term.
"It's a young team in a young city and there are just not great demographics," said Michael Cramer, the former president of the Texas Rangers and an assistant professor in the sports business department at New York University, who has studied the Jacksonville market. "No one has established the brand. Someone has to be at the bottom [of the NFL] and it's Jacksonville.
"Most cities have -- when a number of people stop going to the games -- another layer who will at least go to one or two games a year, which can keep the franchise going until more people buy tickets. Jacksonville is missing that next layer. They don't have much in the way of reserves. They don't have a strong bench."
Ultimately, the feeling around the NFL goes, the Jaguars will have to leave.
There are other franchises in danger, teams in bad stadiums, unable to keep up with the teams from the larger markets. Yet none of them -- Minnesota, Oakland, St. Louis and Buffalo -- seems to be in the kind of danger that looms over Jacksonville.
Still, a dedicated group of people like Peyton and Cannon pound away at the threat. Only 15 years ago, when the NFL awarded an expansion franchise to the city in Florida's farthest upper-right corner, this seemed a certain success. The Jaguars, in their first season, soared to the top of the league in revenues and played in the AFC championship game twice before they were a decade old.
But then came the steady decline of ticket sales as well as the playoff games that had become an expectation. The model franchise of small-market success quickly spiraled into irrelevance. Then the talk of moving began, even with a stadium lease that is supposed to keep the Jaguars here until 2030.
On Monday, former offensive lineman Tony Boselli, the franchise's most important player and the only one to be lauded in its ring of honor, stood near the news conference, shaking his head at another set of questions he has grown tired of hearing.
"Because of one year when we have blackouts we aren't an NFL market? That's ridiculous," he said. "Because Tampa had blackouts for years they aren't an NFL market? What about Seattle?"
He chuckled as he thought of Los Angeles, a place where he played college football, and the most often mentioned destination of the Jaguars. The vision of a half-empty L.A. Coliseum on Sunday afternoons, when the Raiders played there, seemed to amuse him.
"You want to talk about blackouts? What about L.A.?" he said. "And now you want to say that's the savior?"
He scoffed. If anything, he said, the problem in Jacksonville is that the team had too much success too early.
"People got spoiled," he said.
Then, when the team started to lose on the field in the middle part of this decade, the fans lost interest. Winning them back has been hard.
A few years ago, the team made the decision to place tarps over eight entire seating sections and pieces of others, cutting the stadium's attendance from 76,877 to 67,164. The idea was to make the remaining tickets more desirable and hopefully head off blackouts. But recovery was slow. Then, last year, everything collapsed.
The fall of the economy hit Jacksonville hard. Peyton boasts of his city's port, converging interstates and three rail lines, but the boom years were fed by a thriving real-estate market. When the economy crumbled last year, new construction dried up. Local contractors and their subsidiaries were a big part of the team's season ticket base, the team's senior vice president and chief financial officer Bill Prescott said. When they lost work, Jaguars tickets were the first things to go. Season ticket sales fell from 47,000 last year to just above 27,000 this year, Prescott said.
With a base of 47,000 season tickets it is possible to sometimes sell out a stadium the size of Jacksonville's. But a base of 27,000 makes sellouts almost impossible. The fact that the Jaguars were 5-11 last season didn't help.
But slowly a good team is emerging. A strong draft this year gave the Jaguars several players around which to build. And running back Maurice Jones-Drew, at just 24, has turned into one of the league's most gifted players -- a brutish runner who crashes into tacklers rather than eluding them. It's a group that helped the Jaguars build a 7-5 record before last week, making the once-preposterous notion of the playoffs a legitimate possibility.
And with so much good going for them, the Jaguars still did not inspire last Sunday. The game was blacked out and even with a strong day of walkup sales, there were gaps of teal seats in the crowd. Then once the game started, the Jaguars were flat, pounded physically by the Miami Dolphins who seemed -- at times -- to roll over them at will. Jones-Drew, the once-invincible back, had just 59 yards on Sunday. Even still, the Jaguars had several chances to win the game in the fourth quarter, failing each time. A festive pregame euphoria drained in the late-day gloom.
That evening the radio call-in shows were filled with dread as fans fretted about an unimaginative offense and worried aloud that the team's time in Jacksonville was limited. Again and again they raised the name of the one person people here believe will be the salvation of the franchise, a beloved native son, University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow. If only the Jaguars could draft him next year, the thinking is, everything can be good again. This despite the fact the team has given no signals that it is interested in having Tebow as its next quarterback or that he is even seen by the NFL as a legitimate professional passer.
Prescott has heard this, too -- it's impossible to go anywhere in Jacksonville and not hear it. But he wonders just how many more tickets Tebow would really sell. Historically, he said, the Jaguars have had 4,000-to-5,000 no-shows on days after a late Gators game. This, he surmises, is the passionate Florida following that would perhaps buy extra seats to watch Tebow play. The Jaguars, who are averaging 47,637 this year, need to sell much more than 5,000 tickets a game to be viable.
Yet on Monday, as sunlight danced off the windows of the stadium on the kind of day a mayor could dream of, Peyton smiled.
"I think the economy has been a big part of it," he said in explanation of why attendance has fallen so much. "We have a large stadium in a small market. But we're going to work through this."
He said he has been encouraged by the attitude of the team's owner Wayne Weaver, who has been a champion of the city's long-term viability. It has long been Weaver's belief that if the team can just hold on for another 15 years, Jacksonville will have grown enough to be a wonderful NFL city. Those who have approached Weaver with dreams of buying the team and moving it far away, have been met with the same resistance. He wants it to stay here.
And yet on a day when the simple announcement of a sellout turned into a rally, when the mayor said enthusiastically, "I think we've exceeded expectations," by selling out a game, the question still lingered.
How much longer can Jacksonville hold on?
Pretty good article...
Good article, and Tony's words are very well said. I just don't understand the Tebow bandwagon, he is a horrible QB when it comes to pass efficiency, especially when throwing down field, and that doesn't look good in the eyes of the NFL.
There are other good QBs like Sam Bradford, Tony Pike, and Colt McCoy that are better than Tebow as true QBs.
Quote from: tufsu1 on December 16, 2009, 10:29:21 PM
Quote from: JaxNative68 on December 16, 2009, 08:46:42 PM
^ but could be viewed on the web for free, which doesn't help out on resolving the ticket sales/black-out problems.
yes...because watching a game on a choppy computer feed is so much better than seeing it live!
no one said it was better, just available for those who couldn't make it. Something is better than nothing.
Maybe it's not my soapbox to get on, but I guess someone has got to...
...our town has it's one shot this year on national TV, in what has amounted to a fantastic game, and not a few of our regulars are in other threads (i.e., not at the game)...
And not one comment going here? Not one thought about how our city is looking on national TV? Not one comment on how the team is representing so far?
Is the priority really state and national issues and that all politics isn't exactly local?
/soapbox
What?
Quote from: Clem1029 on December 17, 2009, 09:33:49 PM
Maybe it's not my soapbox to get on, but I guess someone has got to...
...our town has it's one shot this year on national TV, in what has amounted to a fantastic game, and not a few of our regulars are in other threads (i.e., not at the game)...
And not one comment going here? Not one thought about how our city is looking on national TV? Not one comment on how the team is representing so far?
Is the priority really state and national issues and that all politics isn't exactly local?
/soapbox
Looks like a good game so far. Some of our regulars are at the game. However, I'm a Dolphins (I did attend Sunday's game) and Heat fan and the Heat are playing the Magic on TNT. So I'm flipping to the Jags game during commercial breaks.
Come on Nelson! Man up Jax. Your playoff dreams are on the line!
Close but no cigar. Indy wins again.
I would immediately cut Nelson. Garrard wouldn't be a distant second a nine year vet has to be better than this. That F'ing sucked. Every opportunity to win and they can't get it done....SUX!
Chad Henne would have completed those passes! ;)
It was a great game, and Jacksonville was portrayed very well, with all the scenes. Every time they were talking about the game, it was beautfiul with the team's logos over the St. John's by the Hart and Matthews Bridges, and they showed a lot of scenes of town. They even showed a few shots of St. Augustine. Jacksonville should be proud of their team.
The Panthers have sold out all but two or three of their games in Charlotte ever, and did well with attendance even at 1-15.
This team, which has surprised everyone, being in the playoff hunt so late, should be filling the seats. Next year, the fans need to support this team. They are a team on the rise, with all of their young stars.
If the Jags would have played this well against the Dolphins this loss would not have been so bad...
Jacksonville DID get some great exposure last night... :)
How many shots did they show of St Johns Town Center, River City Marketplace, Southside, Blanding or Argyle Forest Boulevards?
Quote from: thelakelander on December 17, 2009, 10:54:28 PM
Come on Nelson! Man up Jax. Your playoff dreams are on the line!
he's a Gator...'nuff said
^Yeah, we all know Fred Taylor never did anything with the Jags...;)
QuoteHow many shots did they show of St Johns Town Center, River City Marketplace, Southside, Blanding or Argyle Forest Boulevards?
Absolutely none... I DID see a shot of a lit up building in St Augustine tho...
For those who think refurbishing Freindship fountain is a waste of money there must have been 5 or 6 shots of our current anemic fountain...
The aerial shots of downtown were really good. At first I didn't even recognize them because the city looked so big.
I too thought the shots of downtown were incredible and thought of all those idiot TU posters who want to abandon downtown. I was thinking how funny it would be to see a shot of a strip mall or rows and rows of block homes, to them that IS Jacksonville.
The crowd was pretty amazing last night. I wish it was like that for every home game.
Crowd was great, the 150k was WELL SPENT. Even if they spent a fraction of that each game, more people would come down. It was great to get little kids excited about Jags games, they are the future season ticket holders. So great job by the City all around, not just the Mayor who loves to take credit for anything.
Reggie Nelson is the next waste of a draft pick to get sent off. We need CBs and a DT to help on D. Garrard is his own worst enemy, he is mediocre at best, but in tight games, he is not supposed to cost you the ball game. The D made enough stops for the O to win the game, at the end of the night Garrard was his own worst enemy and could not come through 2 weeks in a row.
Reggie Nelson will be out of football next year. He can't cover, and won't tackle. After the Jags cut him, no one will pick him up.
He will be in Jacksonville next year but with the Sharks.
I agree, it appears that Reggie Nelson is destined to join his brother Reggie Williams as another 1st Round Jaguars draft pick that ultimately gets cut and is not picked up by another NFL team.
I have tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, observe him and see what maybe he does well. Often times good plays aren't noticed if you are in the right spot, etc. I have thought, "maybe he does things that don't end up on the stat sheet".
I will not say he does nothing right, but he doesn't do nearly enough to make up for the awful mistakes. Blown coverages, terrible angles to ball carriers, and useless shoulder bump attempts at tackles (or prissy slapping at the ball) when he does find himself in the area of the ball carrier. Gene Smith has forgotten more about football this morning alone than I have ever known in my life, but if Reggie is starting or even on the team next year I will be amazed.
And yes, Jacksonville looked amazing on TV last night. Looked like the shots were from a helicopter rather than a blimp. I just wish we had some lights on the BoA building! It still was barely noticeable in a lot of the shots. They finally gave some views that were from around Emerson looking north, so you could see the buildings on the southbank as well as those on the northbank. I get frustrated when all anybody shows is the same shot of the landing with the the main street bridge on the right. That is the shot 85% of the time and it makes it look like we only have 3 buildings downtown!
Great effort overall by the Jaguars. I wish I could have been there instead of up here getting a foot of snow in Virginia. Anybody who went to that game last night and wasn't entertained to the point of looking forward to seeing this team in person next year is too far gone to have a football pulse.
A few people have blamed Garrard and the offense. While I like a crunch time quarterback, and Garrard didn't get it done, I actually thought he was good most of the game. Remember, the offense did score 31 points. I don't think you can really hang this one on them.
Very few teams can win while giving up 35 points.
Garrard played a good game. But he did not get it done when they needed him to. He had the ball with a 3 point lead and 7 minutes on the clock and could not get a first down. The last three plays were awful.
He played like what he really is.... a middle of the pack, average NFL QB.
Middle of the pack might be a stretch.
QuoteVery few teams can win while giving up 35 points.
I was reading Sports Illustrated at my barber today, I saw where one of the SI writers said if you "give Peyton Manning the ball with 2 minutes, he is going to score against any team in the league". He was right, Reggie got burned, and burned bad. How many sacks did the front 7 have against Peyton? To beat #18, you have to rattle him, and we have done that in the past and won. We did not rattle him enough on the D-line, and what idiot moved Daryl Smith to DE should be fired. He's not a pass rusher, he's an ILB, and faster in coverage that Durant, but for some reason Del Rio mistook Smith for Paul Spicer. Del Rio must be down to no one as a backup for the DE.
The D did not give up 35 points either, aside for a runback for TD, a bomb to Wayne, on behalf of Reggie "TOAST" Nelson, the D did pretty good, well enough to win. The D did their job when the O punted the ball back to Indy with 2:31 left to go, stopped them and had 1 TO with 2:01 left to go. Jags were driving and the 60 million QB let down the team and fans, yet again. He is not at the same caliber as Manning, and it shows.
IMO: The Jags played a very good, very close game. If you noticed some of the Colt's faces, they apparently weren't pleased to have to work that hard to hold the Jags off. Jaguars pride was unmistakable in the stadium, not only with the sold out game, but the NOISE the fans made in the stands...and the field looked like somebody showed up and played some damned football on that thing! I was very proud of them.
After all, I don't expect everyone else to share my passion for etymology or Enlightenment era witticisms. Or even collard greens.
Glad that you don't expect others to share your passion on those subjects...wouldn't think there would be many takers...and by the way how passionate can won be when it comes to collard greens? :)
You'd be surprised. I really look forward to opportunities to eat well-prepared collards. I also love the Jaguars. Etymology can be pretty interesting too. For next week's game I'll have to try to combine all three :)
I am a little late with this(been out of town for a while) I have attended all games except the Colts game,family on a cruise that week. Of all places out of Miami. Anyway the Dolphin game was gift wrapped for the Jags to win. The Dolphins did all but score a TD for the Jags. They were just as BAD! Lake,, many teams can bring up past SB wins, but what does that do for the phins right now? I thought Steeler fans were bad, but after enduring 4 qtrs of phin fans I'll add the phins to my list of teams to root againts. Atleast the rest of the AFC put the phins were they belong.
I watched the Jags/Colts game when I returned, and it went as expected. Love the shots of the city, they really looked nice on TV. Friendship foutain = pathetic. Nice shots of the Landing, bridges, and even the statue Andrew Jackson. It was nice to see the stands full and the crowd was loud, but as usual Jags lose.