The Jaguars Won 42-7 and Lost Two Starters for the Season Doing It

Sunday was the best afternoon Jacksonville has had in a long time, and it still sent them home with a bill.

The Jaguars beat the Indianapolis Colts 42-7 at EverBank Stadium. It was 28-0 at halftime. Trevor Lawrence threw three touchdown passes and spent the fourth quarter on the sideline in a ballcap. The win stretched Jacksonville's lead in the AFC South to three games and put the franchise in a position the Associated Press noted it has not enjoyed since 1999. Duval was loud, the rain didn't matter, and for about three hours everything about this team looked real.

Then Monday came. Safety Eric Murray hurt his elbow on the opening kickoff Sunday and never played a defensive snap. Nose tackle DaVon Hamilton — 335 pounds of the middle of the best run defense in football — tore his quadriceps in the second quarter and left the field on a cart. Head coach Liam Coen confirmed Monday that both injuries end their seasons, and on Tuesday the team placed both starters on injured reserve. That is the whole story of the Jaguars' week in one breath: the most complete win of their season cost them a starter at two different levels of the defense, four days before a Thursday night game on the road.

Understand what that defense just did, because it is the reason this hurts. Indianapolis ran its whole offense through Jonathan Taylor, and Jacksonville erased him — 23 yards on eight carries, and 19 of those yards came on the Colts' first snap of the game. After that first run, the league's most feared back got four yards the rest of the afternoon and lost a fumble on a botched trick play for good measure. Taylor said it plainly afterward: "It's embarrassing. It's a butt whooping. They kicked our teeth in." The Jaguars sacked Daniel Jones on the way to forcing three turnovers, held the Colts to seven points, and through seven games they own the NFL's best run defense — 77.4 rushing yards allowed per game, 3.39 yards per carry. Taylor, by the way, is the last opposing back to run for 100 yards against this team, and that was in the 2024 regular-season finale. This was not a unit surviving. This was a unit at its peak, on the exact day it lost two of its starters.

Here is the part that should keep Jacksonville fans from panicking. The man who takes Murray's spot already introduced himself — in the same game, on the same afternoon Murray walked off. Rayuan Lane III played every defensive snap Sunday, and with ten seconds left in the first half he picked off a pass and took it 92 yards the other way for his first NFL touchdown. That is not a backup being thrown into the fire on Thursday. That is a man who just played a full game at full speed and made the play that broke the Colts' back. The fire already happened. He was fine.

The rest of the patch is thinner, and there is no sense pretending otherwise. Antonio Johnson, the other starting safety, is working through an ankle injury and was limited when the week began, so the back end of this defense is one more bad step from real trouble. Hamilton's job — eating double teams so everybody else can eat — has no single replacement, and Jacksonville started the week by signing veteran defensive tackle Austin Johnson to the practice squad and carrying two open spots on the 53-man roster. The offense buys them some room: Lawrence was surgical on Sunday, 10 of 14 for 210 yards and three scores, and Bhayshul Tuten had the kind of day that changes how defenses have to play you — 104 rushing yards, 55 receiving yards, a touchdown on the ground and another through the air, the first time in franchise history a Jaguars back has put those numbers together in one game. "We just went out and imposed our will," Tuten said. Even Travis Hunter got in on the act, adding punt returns to a job description that already had wide receiver and cornerback in it.

Now comes the test, and it comes fast. Jacksonville plays at Baltimore on Thursday night, 8:15 p.m. Eastern on Prime Video, at M&T Bank Stadium. The Ravens are 4-4 and at home, and whatever Baltimore's own problems are this week — and they have plenty — a short-week road game does not care about your injury report. The question Thursday answers is a real one: is this defense a system that holds when two starters fall out of it, or was Sunday the last time we see it whole? The trade deadline lands Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern, and those two empty roster spots mean Jacksonville can shop for help if Thursday tells them they need it. But the first answer comes from the men already in the building — starting with the safety who scored the last time this defense took the field.