Situation Impossible: Replacing Brandon Linder

Situation Impossible is a weekly column focusing on the most devastating injury of the week in the NFL. "Next Man Up" is a catchy phrase, but some players are harder to replace than others. Here we investigate the alternatives on hand and how a team reacted, or will react, to having to replace star-level performance.

Injured player: Brandon Linder, Jaguars guard. Yes, that's right, the Jaguars have a star player.

Injury and diagnosis: Linder has a torn labrum. He originally suffered the injury during practice, but tried to play through it in Week 3. Linder didn't play at all in Week 4 and was then placed on IR.

No timetable from — Ryan O'Halloran (@ryanohalloran)October 5, 2015

This is the sort of injury that you expect to see with pitchers, not offensive linemen. But when you put as much stress on your shoulders as linemen do while consistently trying to stand defenders up, it's not a complete surprise.

What's missing: Linder isn't the best guard in the league, but he was head and shoulders above anyone else on the Jacksonville offensive line last season.

Jaguars Full-Time Offensive Linemen, 2014

Player

Snaps

Blown Blocks

Zane Beadles

Luke Joeckel

25.3

Luke Bowanko

12.8

Brandon Linder

7.5

Linder had a great game against Ndamukong Suh in Jacksonville's lone win of the season. Unfortunately, with Pro Football Focus behind a paywall now, there is little public information with which to judge offensive linemen. Jacksonville has run much better to the right side of the line this season.

What the team will do: Well, not much. The Jaguars already spent a third-round pick this year on South Carolina guard A.J. Cann. He took over the starting spot against Indianapolis last week.

What actually changes here is the status of Zane Beadles, who was under fire in 2014 and wasn't a lock to make the team out of training camp this year. Linder's injury means that any kind of succession plan from Beadles to Cann is off the table for 2015.

This could mean more snaps later in the year for last year's starting center, Luke Bowanko. Or, if not Bowanko, the Englishly named Tyler Shatley. It'll be interesting to see what shakes out here toward the end of the season if (or when) the Jaguars are out of contention.

X factor: This injury could have a cascade effect. The Jaguars would kill to keep the game close and run the ball. That's the ideal game script for coach Gus Bradley. Without their best offensive lineman, it could make that strategy much more untenable.

Quarterback Blake Bortles has been most effective this year off play-action. While every shred of empirical evidence I can find points to the idea that play-action fakes and run effectiveness aren't correlated, the Jaguars could be an interesting case study for that.

I don't want to overdramatize the loss of Linder. He's one lineman of five, and the Jaguars have a decent replacement, as good as a team could hope for. I'm curious to see how the Jaguars react if Cann doesn't play well immediately. If the bread and butter of this run game is no longer effective, how will things change?

Adjusting our expectations: Well, the Jaguars are still technically in the playoff race by virtue of being in the AFC South. They're hovering around 15 percent in Football Outsiders' playoff odds. Like every AFC South team, they have a very cupcake-heavy schedule. Anything can happen if we suddenly get word that Andrew Luck is out for a longer period.

More realistically, I think we downgrade the Jaguars offense just a little bit across the board. Cann was highly regarded in this year's draft. His pass protection needed work coming out of South Carolina, but he's got the attributes you look for in someone who can play right away. The question is simply how effective he will be playing right away.

This is the least sexy of the Situation Impossibles we've done so far. (It was a light week for devastating injuries, thankfully.) We see quarterbacks and running games devastated by poor offensive line play on a routine basis. Any sort of major downgrade in Jacksonville is going to end their hopes of a miracle playoff run.