Jacksonville Jaguars: Blake Bortles an MVP Candidate?

Don’t look now, but Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles could be on the verge of a breakout season that has him mentioned in MVP discussions.

Let’s immediately get this out of the way: Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles probably won’t be named the Most Valuable Player of the 2016 National Football League regular season.

For starters, Bortles will have some stiff competition. Reigning NFL MVP Cam Newton is just now hitting his physical prime and may be even better in 2016 than he was last season. The upcoming Tom Brady Bleep-You Tour that is set to begin in Week 5, assuming that Brady does serve a four-game suspension, could be epic.

The idea of Bortles being a sleeper MVP candidate stems from a piece I produced for Bleacher Report earlier this week. In that post about “bold predictions” for the remainder of 2016, I suggested that Bortles could be a fun pick for this year’s NFL MVP award. My reasoning centered around the thought that suggesting Newton, Brady, Aaron Rodgers or some other likely candidate would emerge as MVP is, at this stage of the process, boring.

Bortles is a fun pick if only because most out there wouldn’t bother wagering even $5 that he could accomplish the achievement this year.

The Jacksonville starting QB with two pro seasons on his resume is far from a finished product. Bortles, per Pro-Football-Reference.com, has a career completion percentage of 58.7. That percentage dipped in 2015 after Bortles completed 58.9 percent of his throws during his rookie year.

More worrisome is that Bortles is often accurate in hitting opposing players with his passes. Bortles has tossed 35 interceptions in 29 career starts and 30 appearances, meaning that he is averaging roughly 1.2 picks per start. To put that in perspective, it would be reasonable to predict that Bortles will throw about 19 interceptions in 2016 if he starts all 16 games and does not improve on this aspect of his play.

Bortles led the NFL in interceptions (18) last season.

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The Jaguars, per John P. Gilbert of the SB Nation blog Field Gulls back on June 7, are taking steps to make life easier for Bortles moving forward.

"Over the weekend several outlets reported that the Jacksonville Jaguars are planning on using Blake Bortles in the no huddle, hurry up offense. This comes as a result of the fact that he enjoyed better success last season running the Jags’ offense out of the no huddle, albeit in a limited number of snaps. This is not surprising, as no huddle and hurry up offenses take advantage defenses moving into a simplified scheme with a lack of substitutions available where the variables the QB must read and react to are minimized.Basically, the no huddle can help a QB make more accurate reads by minimizing the number of reads that must be made, and the simplification of reads for a developing QB can help bring the game under control and make it more manageable."

Now for the MVP argument.

Bortles finished the 2015 campaign with 35 passing touchdowns. Only Tom Brady, who enjoyed his first revenge tour against the NFL last year, had more TDs. League MVP Cam Newton, two-time Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning and Carson Palmer also ended the year with 35 passing scores.

Bortles found the end zone via his arm more often than Russell Wilson. Bortles finished ahead of Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers and Ben Roethlisberger in this category.

Best of all, as it pertains to Bortles being a MVP candidate, is that he did not do it alone.

Bortles plays alongside maybe the best one-two punch at the wide receiver position in all of the NFL. Allen Robinson and Allen Hurns, both of whom have been in the NFL as long as Bortles, finished last season with a combined 24 receiving touchdowns. Tight end Julius Thomas contributed 5 receiving touchdowns in 12 games, which is impressive considering he was plagued by injuries throughout his first season with the Jaguars.

Bortles, Robinson and Hurns are all still maturing as athletes and as pro football players. Thomas is a veteran of five NFL seasons, but he will be just 28-years-old at the start of the preseason. All four should theoretically improve with additional reps in the Jacksonville offense. Perhaps more importantly is that the chemistry shared by those teammates should increase with each snap, each practice and each game.

Those who would scoff at the notion of Bortles being a MVP candidate should realize that his stats from 2015 were not far off from Newton’s. Newton, during his best season to date, matched 35 touchdown passes with a career-low 10 interceptions. Newton also added 636 rushing yards and 10 rushing touchdowns.

Bortles can move on his feet, but he’s never going to match Newton’s rushing stats. It’s not happening in 2016, in 2017 or ever.

Passing, however, could be a different story.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that Bortles can up his completion percentage by even a few points. Newton, as an example, has completed roughly 59.6 percent of his passes during his pro career. Bortles posting a 60 completion percentage in 2016 would theoretically indicate that he managed to eliminate some of the bad throws that plagued him during his first two seasons. This, reasonably, would suggest that Bortles’ interception rate would also decrease.

Would a touchdown-to-interception rate of 38-to-12 be enough to land Bortles in MVP voting after Week 17? It should, especially if the Jaguars can improve on the team’s 5-11 record.

That last part could be the big hurdle that stands between Bortles and MVP votes. The Houston Texans should again be near the top of the division standings when all is said and done. A healthy Andrew Luck makes the Indianapolis Colts favorites to compete for a playoff spot. The Tennessee Titans should be better than 3-13 this fall.

Nobody is saying that you should fly to Las Vegas tonight to put money down on Bortles winning NFL MVP this year. This merely serves as a “what if” piece about one of the promising young QBs in the game today. Remember that Bortles is further along than where Eli Manning, Roethlisberger, Philip Rivers and other current starting QBs were after two full seasons, and many of them played on better teams than the 2014 and 2015 Jaguars.

2016 a breakout year for Bortles? Why not?