Sports Redux: Here Come The Jaguars

The Chargers sputtered for a while yesterday, but finally turned it on enough to beat Tennessee and ensure that the Jacksonville Jaguars will be the next team to come into Foxboro and try to spoil the Pats' Date With Destiny.

The Jags, everyone's chic pick to make a wild-card run in the AFC, barely beat Pittsburgh, but the consensus is that they're well-suited to giving the Pats as tough a game as they've had all year. David Garrard may not be the best quarterback in the world, but he's quick and mobile, and as he proved at the end of the Steeler game, he's got guts. He's also got a running game featuring Fred Taylor and Maurice Jones-Drew, which will test the you-know-what out of the defense.

Offensively, the Patriots match up well against Jacksonville. Actually, offensively, the Patriots match up well against any team that's ever played football. Jax is nursing some injuries (see item #2 for details) so may be vulnerable.

If there's one irony to this matchup, it's that we're hosting a team from Florida and we don't want crummy weather for the game. We saw what happened to the Pats' airshow in the muck against the Jets; try that against the physical Jags and it could be a very tricky game. (The current forecast is 38 and cloudy, so so far so good.)

A quiet day for the local teams. In the rest of the sports world, Roger Clemens faced the nation on 60 Minutes (Dan Shaughnessy doesn't believe Roger; it's actually a pretty good read). And tonight is apparently the NCAA championship game, where Ohio State will play LSU in a matchup apparently picked out of a hat. Catch the fever.

Photo from Flickr's aptly-named Tambako the Jaguar.