The Jaguars’ story in the 2023 season was marked by a second-half collapse that kept the team out of the playoffs, and the same was true of Sunday’s opener against the Dolphins.

Jacksonville led the Dolphins 17-7 at halftime but failed to score in the second half, leaving Miami with a 20-17 lead after Jason Sanders made a field goal with time running out. The Jaguars managed just six first downs in the second half, five of them on a single drive.

That drive ended with Dolphins safety Jevon Holland knocking the ball out of running back Travis Etienne’s hands before he could reach the end zone. Tyreek Hill scored an 80-yard touchdown on the next play, but quarterback Trevor Lawrence said “we just gave it away” rather than blaming Etienne for his loss.

“We preach take care of the ballnot to do it, but I was in the same position and I told Travis that,” Lawrence said about Gene Frenette of the Florida Times-Union. “I’ve done that before, too. So nobody’s pointing fingers at us. We had a lot of time left in the game and we need to be able to handle the adversity and score on the next series, and that was the only good drive we had all half. When something like that happens, it’s on all of us. We need to pull ourselves together and make the next play, and we didn’t do that.”

Etienne’s fumble was painful, but Lawrence is right to point out that the Jaguars had plenty of other chances to beat the Dolphins. They didn’t do it, and that’s a sad reminder of how things went in Jacksonville last year.