JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — "I don't want to be writing this," Trevor Lawrence begins in an emotional, heartfelt letter to the city of Jacksonville in the Player's Tribune.
He wants to be at the Super Bowl. Jacksonville wanted that too. But as the season has come to an end, Lawrence is reflecting on his time here -- and it's clear in his writing that this season, and our city, has changed his life. It's also clear that the future is bright, and next year, the Jags just might reach that goal.
And as the Jags look to next season, and the one after that, and the one after that, it looks like Trevor isn't going anywhere.
"We feel like Jacksonville is our home now," he writes, we being him and his wife, Marissa. "And we badly want to be part of turning this thing around -- all the way around."
He talks about his dedication to coming back from the difficult 2021-2022 season, and how it gave him "something to prove."
"One of the things I remember from last season is thinking, How will we ever get guys to want to stay here? Or even come here?" Lawrence writes, noting that these were his fears just a year ago -- and now he's looking back at a season with a playoff win.
After that season, Lawrence says: "I felt the pain of the city... I knew that I was supposed to be a part of something different for this team."
In other words: he understood the assignment.
He also talked about the addition of Doug Pederson and the coaching style that brought the Jags together this year. "It wasn't even about football," he writes. "It was about us."
'Nobody was leaving'
"There's one memory I keep coming back to," Lawrence says. It's one that the city won't long forget, either: The Jaguars incredible comeback from 0-27 to beat the Chargers in the playoffs.
"Most people on the TV probably thought it was over," he says, but there was a difference inside TIAA Bank Field as he looked into the stands: "Nobody was leaving."
At that moment, "those picks didn’t have to matter. The score didn’t have to matter. There was a whole half of football left, and we had a really good football team. And we had y’all."
It wasn't a change in game plan that propelled the Jags to a storied win that night. It was Jacksonville, and it was the boys: "We have no quit," Lawrence says.
He knows it's been said before. "You can call that cliché if you want, I don’t care. I was there. I’ve lived it. I know what I’ve seen. I know what we did."
He signs off with a thank you to Duval. "That playoff win, that feeling, I want that forever," he says.
So do we, Trevor. So do we.
Read Trevor Lawrence's full letter to Jacksonville by clicking here.