Jaguars' first clashes of NFL season may show how loudly London is calling

London is calling once more for the Jacksonville Jaguars, in the second year of their four-year commitment to the NFL’s International Series at Wembley. As the new season approaches, Britain’s American football fans might wonder just what kind of team they are likely to see.

Last year’s Jaguars put in a less than edifying performance in a 42-10 rout at the hands of San Francisco 49ers. The game put the exclamation mark on a miserable 0-8 start to the season and while the Jaguars did claw back a measure of respectability with a 4-4 finish, the offence in particular continued to struggle.

The third pick in this year’s draft marked Phase II in the franchise’s rebuilding under second-year head coach Gus Bradley – Phase I having been the cutting of large amounts of dead wood. That pick was the University of Central Florida phenom and quarterback Blake Bortles, which has sparked real hope of a revival.

As often seems to be the case in Jacksonville, though, any step forward has been matched by a movement in the opposite direction. For reasons both pragmatic and precautionary, Bortles will not start the season, despite showing well in preseason.

Instead, Bradley will keep the team in the hands of the steady-but-unspectacular Chad Henne, a journeyman who is in his third season in north-east Florida after four unconvincing years in Miami and who owns an 18-32 win-loss record as a starting quarterback (5-12 with the Jags), with 55 touchdowns and 62 interceptions.

In some ways, such an approach attempts to turn back the clock, to an era when new quarterbacks could develop on the bench – like Aaron Rodgers at Green Bay and Tom Brady in New England – rather than undergo a baptism of fire, like Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin III, EJ Manuel, Cam Newton, Andy Dalton, Sam Bradford, Matt Stafford, Joe Flacco, Matt Ryan, Mark Sanchez and even Ryan Tannehill, to name nearly all the other first-round picks at quarterback in the past six years, all of whom then started their team’s first game of the season.

While Bortles is given the luxury of time, Henne will have to prosper with a makeshift receiving corps, a new running game and an offensive line that can only aspire to the level of makeshift.

Top wide receiver Justin Blackmon, the team’s first-round pick in 2012, is suspended indefinitely after falling foul of the league’s substance abuse policy; Cecil Shorts III has been limited in preseason, although he insists he is fully fit for Sunday’s season opener at Philadelphia. Ace Sanders, last year’s fourth-round choice, is suspended for the first four games; and veteran Tandon Doss has been placed on injured reserve after re-injuring an ankle during the final preseason game.

Second-round pick Marqise Lee has shown flashes of real promise, catching eight passes for 94 yards and two touchdowns in preseason, but his one highlight-reel moment was a 57-yard scoring pass from Bortles, who won’t actually be throwing any passes for a while.

Toby Gerhart, a four-year back-up at Minnesota, has been brought in to carry the load in place of former franchise running back Maurice Jones-Drew – now in Oakland – but he has never carried the ball more than 109 times in a season. Back-up Jordan Todman has 79 carries in his two seasons with the team.

All that, however, is comparative riches compared to an offensive line that could have coaches watching from between their fingers. Left guard Zane Beadles – signed from Denver for $30m – suffered a calf injury in preseason and “hopes” to be fit for Philly; starting centre Mike Brewster was waived after four increasingly disastrous appearances; right tackle Austin Pasztor is nursing a broken hand; and right guard has been a turnstile of rookies and journeymen.

If Beadles is unable to make the line-up, the starting five in front of Henne will have just 22 starts between them and feature two rookies and one part-rookie – last year’s No1 pick, Luke Joeckel, the left tackle, was lost for the season after just five games.

Keeping the quarterback upright will therefore be the Jaguars’ main challenge, and possibly why the team is unwilling to put Bortles in the firing line straight away. Conventional wisdom suggests a veteran like Henne might survive the experience, while a rookie might end up a shell-shocked basket case, like Houston’s David Carr in 2002 – or Jacksonville’s own Blaine Gabbert in 2011.

Of course, on the flip side a talented rookie might just lead the team to a play-off place, as Flacco did in Baltimore in 2008, Dalton in Cincinnati in 2011 and Luck with Indianapolis in 2012.

Defensively, the Jags should be far more competitive, with a deeper defensive line, a legitimate pass rush and an improving secondary that is capable of a lot more than the 11 interceptions they managed last time out.

Despite that, expectations remain limited and while the fans are likely to stay patient for Year Two of the Great Rebuilding, seasoned observer Gene Frenette of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville believes there needs to be noticeable improvement.

He explained: “They are still halfway through this rebuilding phase and there are only six or seven players left from the previous regime, so people need to be realistic. I think the fans – to a degree – are understanding of the process and see that this is a patient strategy.

“Although Bortles brings more of the ‘wow’ factor at quarterback than Henne, with all the young bodies in the offensive line, the team feels it would rather not have Blake in the middle of that line-up.

“The fans may not like it because of what they have seen him do in pre-season, but that was against second and third-string defences, not the first-string guys.”

The fans might beg to differ, if my straw poll of Big Cat Country and The Jungle – two Jags’ fan groups – is anything to go by. For the majority, the call is for “Bortles now” and anything approaching the kind of start the team suffered last year will be met with a firestorm of protest, long before the team heads to Wembley to face Dallas in Week 10.

However, Frenette is quick to point out: “This season’s schedule is much more favourable. The first half of last year was brutal, with six of the first eight games against strong playoff teams, but the second half was weaker and they did better. This time they could string some wins together before the London game, while the team they are playing there is not nearly as formidable as the 49ers. The Cowboys are very much lacking on defence and it’s a very winnable game for the Jags.

Ultimately, I don’t think we’re looking at an eight or nine-win season, but six or seven is realistic. Expectations are for a significant improvement, and the team won’t get a free pass from fans as they did last year.

Jacksonville, of course, remain heavily invested in London, with owner Shahid Khan having to split his attention between EverBank Field and Craven Cottage since buying Fulham Football Club. That has increased speculation that, in view of the league’s continued emphasis on having a full-time franchise in Britain, Jacksonville’s four-year tour of duty is simply a forerunner to a full-time gig there.

The team has invested diligently in building their profile in the British capital, with a full-time marketing rep, a burgeoning fan club – the Union Jax, with 25,500 members and counting – and a series of community-related events, including a recent Hope to Dream initiative that provided new beds to 100 needy children.

According to the marketing office, Jacksonville are now a top-10 team in the UK in terms of awareness, where they were 31st just two years ago (which begs the question, who was 32nd? Realistically, it would have to be the Cleveland Browns, the only member of the league never to have either reached a Super Bowl or staged one).

It all adds up to the kind of profile NFL commissioner Roger Goodell would love to convert into the hoped-for London franchise that, according to some people within the league, is simply a question of when and not if.

But despite such talk, Khan has been unwavering in his commitment to keeping the team in Florida since he bought it in 2012, while the long-term lease at EverBank Field would require a reported $100m to sever.

The Jags have also contributed a substantial part of this year’s $63m stadium upgrade that includes new high-tech video screens – the biggest in the US – and an extensive spectator area that includes two swimming pools with exclusive “cabana” access. So, there are plenty of financial reasons why the great London experiment remains just that, an exercise in testing the water.

Frenette is quick to point out: “The one-off games earn the Jags a nice big cheque from the NFL that makes it worthwhile for their bottom line. What will be interesting is if Khan still wants a bite of that action after the four years is up, at a time when his team will be a lot better. You can’t afford to let your wallet get in the way of winning and I don’t think you want to run your team at a competitive disadvantage.”

The team themselves are noticeably tetchy about any mention of a permanent link with London, and simply refer any questions in that direction to league HQ in New York. Season-ticket sales are up and fans are largely positive about the onfield progress.

However, the economic realities remain. This is the second-smallest market of all 32 NFL teams, and the recent stadium investment reduced capacity by 7,000 to 67,246 – which also, perhaps coincidentally – lowers the likelihood of a local TV blackout in the event of a game not being sold out.

It also remains to be seen if the eye-catching stadium additions will be attractive should the team stagger through another 4-12 season or worse. Last year, according to the Florida Times-Union, the Jaguars failed to top 61,000 in attendance for any home game and avoided the dreaded blackout only because Khan covered the cost of 34% of the unsold seats.

Only Tampa, Pittsburgh, St Louis and Oakland drew lower crowds; the Rams and Raiders have also been part of the big relocation discussion in recent times.

EverBank’s eight new 50-seat “spa cabanas”, with that swimming pool view, cost $250 a seat; the 16 “party cabanas” seat 20 at $150 each, without pool access. The team is counting on them being big earners in their battle to balance the books, yet Wembley is already a sell-out for the Dallas game and there’s not a cabana in sight.

Hence, while the Clash’s London Calling anthem remains a fitting metaphor for Gus Bradley’s men in 2014, the long-term question is more likely to be: Should I Stay Or Should I Go?