If there’s one overriding theme about the 2023 Jacksonville Jaguars season, it would be a failure to establish any kind of identity about who they were or even wanted to be.

By the end, this Jekyll-and-Hyde team had morphed from contender to pretender.

It was unable to handle the hype of being a division favorite. There was no more glaring evidence than players and coaches being lost for answers as to how they went from 8-3 to a 1-5 finish, sabotaging their chances of winning back-to-back AFC South titles for the first time.

With so much at stake in Week 18 against the Tennessee Titans, a shocking 28-20 loss to their biggest rival will persistently hang over the offseason and leave a stench that won’t easily go away.

“It wasn’t going to be handed to us,” said tight end Evan Engram after the Titans’ loss. “We could sit here all day and go back and forth about negative plays, this and that.

“At the end of the day, you can go back and find things that could have kept us out of this situation in the first place.”

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For myriad reasons, the Jaguars couldn’t duplicate last year when essentially the same team under Pederson learned just in time how to finish games and make clutch plays in big moments.

The Jaguars’ 9-8 record this year had the opposite feel of the same mark in 2022 when Jacksonville won the last five regular-season games, followed by erasing a 27-0 deficit to the Los Angeles Chargers in an AFC wild-card game.