Four touchdown passes again, and this time they lost by three

Houston 34, Jacksonville 31.

Houston gained fourteen more yards.

Lawrence threw four touchdown passes. He threw four in Week 1 as well. That afternoon they won by twenty-four.

This one they lost by three.

The table, now six deep

Week 5 is the one this paper owes a correction of emphasis on.

For four weeks the line here was that this team wins without the yards. Then they went to London and took 433 off Philadelphia, who managed 242. That is 191 yards to the good. It is the widest margin either way all season and the first time since the opener the ball moved their direction.

They won that game by two.

A week later, same city, they lost the yards by fourteen and lost the game by three.

So the yardage has not explained this team in either direction. Not when they were behind on it and winning. Not when they were ahead of it by 191 and barely holding on.

Six games. One of them the yards and the scoreboard agreed, and it took a 57-yard kick on the last play to make them agree.

What happened in the third quarter

Houston scored fourteen in the third. Jacksonville scored seven.

That is the game.

Jacksonville put nothing on the board in the first quarter. They had fourteen in the second and ten in the fourth, which is a team that played three good quarters out of four and lost the one in the middle.

Stroud went 24 of 34. Three touchdowns, one interception, 312 yards.

Lawrence went 24 of 41. Four touchdowns, one interception, 306 yards.

Same completions. Seven more throws. One more touchdown. Six fewer yards. One fewer win.

The ground, and the lack of it

Neither side ran it.

Marks carried fifteen times for 56. Rodriguez carried eleven times for 55. Nobody on either roster reached sixty yards on the ground, and the two leading rushers between them did not reach a hundred and twenty.

Houston ran 57 plays. Jacksonville ran 68.

Eleven more snaps and fourteen fewer yards is an offense taking the long way to the same place, and on a day the defense gave up 34 the long way is not available.

Noel caught four for 107 and a touchdown. That is 26 yards a catch and it is the only explosive line in the box score on either side. Meyers led Jacksonville with five for 83.

Where they are

4-2.

Both losses are by seven and by three. Both London games came down to one possession and they split them.

They have been outgained in five of six. They are two games over .500 anyway, which is either a defense and a kicker doing something repeatable or a team that has spent six weeks borrowing against a margin it does not have.

The table above is how that question gets answered, and it only answers it in arrears.

Worked from the published box score and the line score, both archived. Nobody from this paper was at Wembley.