Blake Bortles Faces Immediate Pressure to Develop into a Franchise Quarterback

Blake Bortles has spent his offseason tinkering with everything. His mechanics. His weight. His process. Resting his overused his arm. Pretty much anything you can think of that could lead to a different result than being, empirically, the worst quarterback in the NFL. 

For Jacksonville? They're in the same spot they were in the last time this happened, where the team was hoping Blaine Gabbert could turn it around after an abysmal rookie season. When you invest so much draft capital in a player, it's hard to admit he's not the future after just one season.

At the same time, this is a head coaching regime that desperately needs results. It's not going to be easy to sell another 4-12 record to ownership with the tagline, "Well, Bortles flopped, but we still have some interesting young players." 

That's why you saw the Jaguars go as hard as they did this offseason. Where they went after running back DeMarco Murray. Where they spent large sums of money on tackle Jermey Parnell, defensive lineman Jared Odrick and, the crown piece, tight end Julius Thomas. That's why Jacksonville went out and drafted T.J. Yeldon, a player they believe can be a true franchise back, in the second round. 

There's an optimist's view and a pessimist's view to these moves. The optimist can look at how much these players are going to make Bortles' life easier. And they're going to be right. Throwing to Thomas is more productive than throwing at Clay Harbor. It is much easier to build a ground game worthy of Bradley's system with a better running back than Denard Robinson. (And for that matter, without spending countless carries on Toby Gerhart.) 

The pessimist looks and simply says, "Look at all they've done to make the team better. They must have no confidence in what to expect from Bortles this season." 

Somewhere in between is the truth of the matter. But either way, Bortles is going to face intense scrutiny this season as the Jaguars try to find something, anything, to build on. The simple fact of the matter is that very few quarterbacks in the past 15 years have been as bad as Bortles was in his first season and actually become franchise quarterbacks. 

Player	Year 1 DYAR	Year 1 DVOA	Year 2 DYAR	Year 2 DVOA
Eli Manning	-191	-25.4%	632	6.0%
Matthew Stafford*	-652	-36.6%	1170	14.9%
Blake Bortles	-955	-40.7%	??	??

*Stafford's stats are from his second FULL season; he missed most of 2010 with a separated shoulder.

This is the template Bortles will be looking to follow. There have been other quarterbacks with awful first years that have bounced back and been respectable—Kyle Orton comes to mind—but nobody else has really flipped the switch. And Bortles didn't necessarily have a bad season because he was a mistake-prone chucker like Eli Manning or Matthew Stafford. Per Football Outsiders, he had the worst DVOA without pressure of any full-time quarterback since they started keeping track in 2010.

Even incremental progress could keep Bortles in Jacksonville's 2016 plans. But without monumental progress in 2015, there's no chance he's actually a franchise quarterback. As Chase Stuart of Football Perspective reminds us, if a quarterback hasn't shown any franchise play in his first two years, he's much more likely to not be one than he is to buck the odds. 

Do I have an actual prediction on how Bortles will play? I expect more bad than good at this point, but he's played so poorly that even WebMD would have problems diagnosing how much of his trouble is mechanics, progressions and process.

Quarterback development is the great black box of professional football at this point. It's such a niche skill that few in the media are trained to handle it appropriately on-site. We can figure out when someone looks good or bad, but the reasoning behind it is kept under lock and stock. Literally. It's locked in the process behind the doors, and all we'll get in trying to deduce it is "trust the process" and other such stock answers. 

I don't rule out entirely that Bortles can be good. But if he doesn't begin showing us something new this season, we can definitely rule out that he'll ever be a franchise quarterback. 

And if that's the case, it's time for the Jaguars to go back to the well at quarterback. Again.

Rivers McCown is the AFC South lead writer for Bleacher Report and the co-host of the Three-Cone Drill podcast. His work has also appeared on Football Outsiders and ESPN.com. Follow him on Twitter at @riversmccown.