Jakobi Meyers’s last game as a Raider gave him a real-life glimpse at his future.

He didn’t know it at the time, of course. There’d been rumblings that he’d be traded, some of his own creation, since the summer. But the deadline was two days away, and there was no guarantee anything was going to change, so he went about his business and played his 57 snaps, catching four balls for 23 yards from Geno Smith. And he took note of the team that just beat his, 30–29, on a batted-down throw on a two-point conversion attempt in overtime.

“So I actually got to feel how they played in a live game,” Meyers told me, late Sunday. “And they played tough.”

They were the Jaguars, and two days later Meyers would be one of them.

And rightfully so. The deal for Meyers—first-year GM James Gladstone sent fourth- and sixth-round picks to Vegas for the seventh-year vet—was just the latest example of the team’s new regime looking for edges in the margin by prioritizing intangibles.

Meyers possesses those. So do many of his new teammates. Which, as they see it in Jacksonville, is how Sundays like this one keep happening.

Liam Coen’s Jaguars didn’t just go into Mile High and beat the Broncos. They controlled the action from the jump. They trailed for just 4:37 of the 60 minutes of their 34–20 win, and were up by double digits for the final 18 minutes.

That said, Denver, riding an 11-game winning streak coming in and closing in on the AFC’s No. 1 seed, both threw and ran for more yards. And the Broncos’ vaunted defense forced two three-and-outs to start the game. But that didn’t wind up meaning much because of that quality that Gladstone and Coen were looking for, and found in guys such as Meyers.

He got that glimpse of it, yes, that day in Vegas. But the week to follow was when it really became clear for him.

It was a seminal few days, truth be told, for the entire program.

Meyers’s first game with his new team happened to be Nov. 9 in Houston. That afternoon started with the Jags, in pursuit of a season sweep of the two-time defending AFC South champion Texans, rolling. Jacksonville carried a 29–10 lead into the fourth quarter. And from there, just about everything came undone. The rest of the way, with backup Davis Mills at quarterback, the Texans had 196 yards to Jacksonville’s 11, and 15 first downs to the Jags’ one.

Houston’s offense scored three times to give the Texans the lead, and a defensive touchdown off a strip-sack of Trevor Lawrence punctuated the collapse at the buzzer.

The key, for the Jaguars, was what happened next.

“I mean, it’s never what it is, right, it’s always how you respond to it,” Meyers said. “The day after that, everybody showed back up and was ready to work. We learned from it, grew from it and got right back to it.”

So much so that internally it’s seen as a turning point—and perhaps one that turned a promising season into one being played by a real contender.

Since then, the Jaguars have won six straight. Five of those six wins, including Sunday’s, have come by double-digit margins. And the contributions are coming from everywhere, including a lot of people you might not expect—because, the players will tell you, of how they’re being coached, by Coen and coordinators Grant Udinski and Anthony Campanile.

“I haven’t had an offensive [head] coach in a good minute, somebody who knows exactly what he’s looking for, knows how to run up looks and tell us exactly how to do it right,” Meyers said. “He’s great at explaining what he wants from us, and I think they got the right players to go execute their vision. They just wanted to put the right guys against the best matchups. You kind of see how Parker [Washington] handled that situation.”

Washington, a 2023 sixth-round pick who had 87 catches for 1,022 yards in 39 career games before Sunday’s explosion—six catches, 145 yards and a touchdown. The score was Jacksonville’s first of the day. There was a 20-yarder to convert a third-and-9 on the drive that put the Jags ahead for good, and a 63-yard catch-and-run on the team’s next possession that was followed by a 10-yard score from Travis Etienne Jr. to make it 31–17.

Last week, it was Etienne taking center stage, with 105 scrimmage yards on 15 touches, and three touchdown catches against the Jets. The week before that, it was Tim Patrick as the primary guy against the Colts. The week before that, it was Meyers himself, with six catches for 90 yards against the Titans. And ditto for the defense, where this week, Emmanuel Ogbah strip-sacked Bo Nix and recovered the fumble, and second-year corner Jarrian Jones had a fourth-quarter pick on a critical fourth down.

All of it’s also apparent in Lawrence, who got knocked around Sunday, took five sacks, and kept coming for the Broncos, finishing with 279 yards, three touchdown passes, a sparkling 115.4 rating and everyone’s respect. As Meyers said, “He got hit, he got back up, and he kept delivering for us.”

And that, really, has gone for all the Jaguars all year, who really have been built that way.

“I just know we’re going out here, continuing to be us,” Meyers said. “We’re trying to be consistent at the end of the day. I guess if anything, you can say we fought through adversity, because it didn’t start off pretty. But we ended up getting it done.”

And Meyers’s belief in what’s being built in Jacksonville was again evident last week.

A little over six weeks after being traded there, he signed up for three more years, inking an extension with $60 million in new money that doubled as affirmation of what he first saw on that early November Sunday as a Raider, and got a better look at in the weeks that followed.

“It’s the belief, honestly,” Meyers said. “They explained to me exactly what they needed from me to come out here and just be myself and make those plays that they’ve been giving me. It’s the belief, it’s been great having that. They know exactly what they want from me—I just got to fall in line. The team was already good, and I could see it.

“Like I said, I played them. So it was just a blessing, just getting here and adding on to it.”

And, by the looks of it, this whole thing is just getting started.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as How One Turning Point Ignited the Jaguars’ Six-Game Winning Streak.

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