Phil Simms: Blake Bortles’ struggles with Jaguars are because ‘he’s scared’ of where his passes will go

Phil Simms isn’t the least bit surprised that Blake Bortles has flopped as a starting quarterback for the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Simms saw enough of Bortles to recognize when a passer looks too uncomfortable to succeed. And that, according to the former NFL quarterback and CBS analyst, is at the heart of his struggles.

‘When you’re a quarterback or a pitcher, it’s not something you learn’

“When he came out, I said, ‘It doesn’t look natural,'” Simms told Jim Miller and Pat Kirwan on Movin’ The Chains. “Throwing should be easy. When you’re born to throw, however you want to put it, when you’re a quarterback or a pitcher, it’s not something you learn. That rhythm of doing it is natural to you, you’re truly born with it. And it just looks like so much work for him to throw the ball.

“All the techniques, I can give you a thousand things right, wrong or whatever, but one thing you cannot do as a quarterback, is he takes his arm back … then, he reaches back with his hand and straightens his arm out. And I’m just telling you, that is the death of throwing the football. And we saw that last week (against Tampa Bay).”

‘I expected to see a guy that was going to be drastically changed’

Simms isn’t sure what it is what Bortles learned during his offseason work with quarterback gurus.

“I’m not getting on anybody, (but) I’d like to have gone on one of these sessions, because I want to hear what they were teaching him,” Simms said. “Because I see maybe a slight difference (from) what I’ve seen of the first years, but I didn’t see anything drastic, and that’s what I expected. I expected to see a guy that was going to be drastically changed from what he has before. I did not see it.

‘They know where the ball is going to go when it leaves their hand’

“I’m going to tell you … Brett Favre, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers … they go back, they see it, ‘Hey, I believe it, man, that’s a big hole’ And it’s about one-foot-by-two-foot. And they just throw it in there, because they know where the ball is going to go when it leaves their hand. That’s the biggest problem for Blake Bortles. He’s scared of where it’s going to go.”