The 23-year-old from Southern Oregon might have been the biggest surprise of training camp last summer Troy Aikman Jersey , making the roster as a first-year free agent. The 6-foot-3, rock-solid 233-pounder with a booming leg made almost every kick attempted in training camp to beat out veteran Mike Nugent. It was a no-brainer for then-coach Ben McAdoo and his staff.
Then came the regular season and everything went south for McAdoo, the team – and Rosas.
There were good moments: Rosas kicked in the opener at Dallas and then hitched a ride on co-owner’s Steve Tisch’s jet so he could get to California for the birth of his daughter and first child, Karsyn Isabella.
”She is doing great, she is awesome,” Rosas said Friday after practice. ”It’s amazing. She is eating the house. She is growing so fast. It’s amazing.”
His season wasn’t so pretty.
Rosas made 18 of 25 field-goal attempts. That’s 72 percent and not good enough when coaches expect their kickers to hit 80 percent.
”It’s felt like I have done five years since last summer,” Rosas said. ”It’s been a ride. When you go back and reflect, it’s learning the game of football Joel Heath Jersey , being a professional and learning the game of life and being a Dad. I am still learning.”
Rosas said the biggest thing he learned as a player was the need to stick to a plan and take it one kick at a time, regardless of each result.
This season, he is trying to follow a routine after each kick. He wants to come to the sideline, take a sip of water and wait for his next field-goal attempt, kickoff or extra point.
Rosas insists when he walks on the field, he is never looking to see how far he has to kick the ball, or where the ball is positioned. He is looking at his spot and focusing.
”So if I pushed the last one wide right, I am still going to line up the same Jared Veldheer Jersey , right down the middle,” he said. ”I am going to give it my best effort to make it. It may be the same result, but I am not going to let the last kick dictate what I do on this one.”
Rosas has spent a lot of time recently working with regular long snapper Zak DeOssie and new holder, punter Riley Dixon. Friday was the first time the unit practiced the hurry-up, last-minute field-goal attempts with the fans and media watching.
Rosas made all three attempts.
Looking back on last season, Rosas can’t say one thing went wrong. He said his confidence level was OK, but he felt he let his mind wander on what he should and should not be doing in practice with his kicking.
This year, he wants to do the same thing every kick and have a little fun.
New coach Pat Shurmur was hesitant to say what he expected from his kicker Brian Allen Jersey , although he agreed with someone with a cranky wizard-like voice from behind the podium curtain who chirped in: ”Just make `em.”
”I think it’s important,” Shurmur said. ”Again, you’ve got to see it happen in game situations. Most often, the kickers that you have in camp make them during the practice sessions, you’ve just got to watch it happen. It’s really not that much more complicated than that.”
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The Jaguars led the Patriots 20-10 early in the fourth quarter of last year’s AFC Championship Game, but they couldn’t find any more points while Tom Brady threw two touchdown passes to lift New England to another Super Bowl appearance.
Jacksonville had the ball four times after taking that 10-point lead and managed two first downs over those possessions as the game slipped away. Given the way the defense carried the Jags over the course of the season, that led some to point to a lack of faith in quarterback Blake Bortles as a lead factor in the loss.
Defensive end Calais Campbell sees an area where the defense needs to improve if the team is going to maintain their success.
“We’ve got to be more disciplined,” Campbell said Case Keenum Jersey , via Judy Battista of NFL Media. “We’ve got to finish better. As talented as we are and as well as we played, too many times we didn’t finish the way we could have. I’m talking about assignment discipline. Everybody knows the system better, they know exactly where they are supposed to be. We can play off each other. If we play that way, with the talent we have, it will be really tough to beat us.”
The Jaguars were tough to beat last year, but there were some other rough patches for the defense over the course of the season. That was particularly true for the run defense and tightening that up would leave opposing offenses with an even harder task as the 2018 season unfolds.
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