During his four years at the NFL, the Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback has become the butt of jokes about what it means to be a bad quarterback. There is even a Twitter account that is dedicated solely to mocking him, and in November, a fellow player called him “trash.” But Bortles doesn’t listen to it. “It f-cking pisses me off. I get so angry about it,” said center Brandon Linder, one of Bortles’s good friends on the team. “But he doesn’t listen to all the bullshit, he’s great about it. … If the joke is in his face, he’ll laugh about it, but then lets everything go.” Bortles has been through it all as the face of one of the worst franchises in football. But on Sunday, Bortles will be starting a home playoff game against the Buffalo Bills, the first one in Jacksonville since the 1999 season. The Jaguars have a great defense and the sixth-best offense in total yards, and while Bortles’s play is not elite, it shouldn’t be a joke, writes The Ringer. Bortles is a competent NFL player. When Jadeveon Clowney called him trash (after the Jaguars beat the Texans by 38 points and Bortles threw for 326 yards and three touchdowns), Bortles said, “If how we’re playing and how I’m playing is trash, then I’m fine being trash.”
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