A day after the Jacksonville Jaguars made the surprising decision to cut starting quarterback David Garrard, coach Jack Del Rio said he knows the way the team handled it wasn’t perfect. But Garrard wasn’t pointing fingers at anyone other than himself.
“The timing was not ideal,” Del Rio told reporters today. “I would have preferred it gone down differently, but you take things as you have to.”
To say the timing was not ideal is an understatement: The Jaguars spent all of training camp and the preseason giving Garrard the bulk of the work with the first-string offense, and now they’re throwing Luke McCown out there for Sunday’s opener against the Titans with less than a week to prepare.
But Garrard is declining to pile on, saying he looks at his own poor performance in practice and the preseason as the reason he’s currently out of a job.
“I have nobody to blame but myself,” Garrard told Tania Ganguli of the Florida Times-Union.
That’s a stand-up attitude from Garrard. But if the Jaguars’ offense stinks up the joint on Sunday, Jaguars fans won’t just be blaming Garrard. They’ll be blaming Del Rio and the Jaguars’ front office, too.