The Jacksonville Jaguars are entering their 26th season in the league, which means their history is limited as it relates to most the other NFL franchises. That's why picking the five Jaguars on our CBSSports.com's Franchise Five is actually one of the easiest of any teams to do.
For each team, we pick one coach, one quarterback and three non-quarterbacks to make up the Franchise Five. I was assigned the Jaguars since I covered them for the Florida Times-Union from 1995-2000, as well living there for most of their existence and still doing work on their flagship radio station.
With that being said, there is no debate with any of the Jaguars selections. They are all deserving, starting with coach Tom Coughlin, who was the architect of their first teams. The other spots are as easy as picking Coughlin.
Coach Tom Coughlin
Coughlin was a surprise hire as the Jaguars' first-ever coach in 1994, a year before the team started playing.
Coughlin came to the Jaguars from Boston College, where he was the head coach. He previously worked in the NFL as an assistant for the Giants, Eagles and Packers. Even then, he was known for his disciplinary ways.
In Jacksonville, Coughlin was tasked with building the team from scratch, and he controlled almost every facet of the organization. It was his team, and things were done his way.
His rules were rigid, almost leading to a team mutiny in 1996, but he softened some that season and the success came. Coughlin led the Jaguars to two AFC Championship Games in 1996 and 1999, showing off the coaching prowess that would later win two Super Bowls with the New York Giants.
But Coughlin made some personnel mistakes, which led to cap issues, which led to him being fired after the 2002 season when the team went 6-10. Some league observers at the time said that might have been his best coaching job since that roster was depleted.
Coughlin's laundry list of rules wore on players, but they came to respect him as a coach for his discipline-focused ways. He had four consecutive winning seasons from 1996-1999, capped by a 14-2 season in 1999.
Coughlin returned to the team as vice president of player personnel in 2016, but he was fired from that job last year. He is clearly the best coach in franchise history and he's arguably one of the best ever -- and should be on his way to Canton.
OT Tony Boselli
He was the first draft pick in team history and the second overall pick in the 1995 NFL Draft. It was not a sexy pick at the time, but it proved to be the right one. Boselli was every bit as dominant as expected, handling some of the best pass rushers in the league in one-on-one situations.
Boselli played in an offense that featured a lot of seven-step drops and almost never had help, which is why he should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. His career was cut short by botched shoulder surgeries by the team, injuries that exposed him to the Houston Texans in the expansion draft. He never played for the Texans despite being selected.
Even though his career consisted of only 90 starts, he was named to the NFL's All-Decade team for the 1990s.
RB Fred Taylor
The Jaguars took Taylor with the ninth pick in the 1998 draft, a pick acquired in a trade from the Buffalo Bills for Rob Johnson. Taylor immediately showed his amazing talents as a rookie and finished second to Randy Moss in the Rookie of the Year voting after rushing for 1,223 yards and scoring 17 touchdowns.
At 6-foot-1 and 230 pounds, Taylor had sub-4.4 speed and had an amazing ability to cut in the hole and turn runs into big plays. That big-play ability is best exemplified by him averaging 4.5 yards or more per rush in eight seasons. That is better than most backs in the Hall.
Taylor is 17th on the all-time rushing list, and his career average of 4.6 yards per rush is behind only Barry Sanders, Jim Brown and Adrian Peterson. Of the top 17 rushers who are already eligible for the Hall -- Peterson and Frank Gore are still playing -- Taylor is the only one not in Canton.
Taylor should be in the Hall, but he was hurt by the fact that Coughlin took him out foolishly on the goal line and his touchdown numbers suffered. He also was labeled as Fragile Fred after injuries early in his career, but he still had 137 starts in his career and put that notion to rest in his mid-2000s.
WR Jimmy Smith
Smith is one of the more underrated players -- and one of the truly great stories -- in league history. There are defensive backs to this day who still talk about how tough it was to defend Smith.
At 6-foot-1 and 205 pounds, Smith was a second-round pick of the Dallas Cowboys in 1992, but his Cowboys career was cut short first by a broken leg in 1992 and then an appendectomy in 1993 that nearly cost him his life. He was released after that, failed to latch on with the Philadelphia Eagles in 1994, and was basically out of football before the Jaguars signed him as a street free agent.
Smith was mostly a backup in 1995, and then took over as a starter in 1996 when the team released Andre Rison. He caught 83 passes that year, which was the start to a seven-year run where he caught 642 passes (91.7 per-year average) with seven consecutive 1,000-yard seasons. In a three-year span, from 1999 to 2001, Smith had 319 catches for 4,222 yards. That's an average of 106 catches for 1,407 yards for a team that didn't throw it as much as most teams do today.
To truly show how dominant Smith was at the time, one need only look to a game against the Baltimore Ravens in 2000. That Ravens defense set the scoring record for a 16-game season on their way to winning the Super Bowl. Smith torched them for 15 catches, 291 yards and three touchdowns in a 39-36 Jaguars victory.
Smith's career was cut short because of issues relating to drug use, which he later admitted. He was suspended for four games in 2003 and retired in 2005 at the age of 36, even though he still had the talent to keep on playing. He is 24th on the all-time receiving list, which is amazing considering the way his career started and ended.
QB Mark Brunell
In the year Coughlin spent without a team, he scouted the league and came up with Brunell as a player he wanted as his quarterback. The Jaguars traded third- and fifth-round picks to the Green Bay Packers to land Brunell.
He came to their first camp in 1995 in a quarterback competition with Steve Beuerlein, with Beuerlein winning the job. But Brunell took the job and ended up starting 13 games that year.
The next season he led the Jaguars to the AFC Championship Game as he threw for a league-best 4,367 yards. Brunell, who would end up going to three Pro Bowls, led the Jaguars to a 14-2 record in 1999, but they were upset in the AFC Championship Game by the Tennessee Titans.
Brunell was known for his ability to get outside the pocket and improvise, his running a big part of who he was as a quarterback. He ran for 480 yards in 13 games in 1995, and his scramble and run against Denver in the 1996 upset of the heavily favored Broncos is one of the team's signature plays.
The Jaguars, faced with major cap issues at the time, traded Brunell to the Redskins in 2004 for a third-round pick. He would go on to play seven more seasons for three teams, winning a Super Bowl as a backup with the New Orleans Saints in 2009.
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