Kickers are the butt of far too many jokes at all levels of football, but if you don't have one, you're missing out. The Jaguars started the 2011 season with Matt Turk as their punter, and he was nothing short of a failure with the team. Nick Harris was called in to take Turk's job, and he did a pretty good job in fixing the Jaguars' punting problems.

Place kickers are, in my opinion, even more critical than punters at the NFL level. The ability to score points from outside the 30 yard line is a great asset for coaches, and few do it better than Josh Scobee, who signed a 4 year deal worth $13.8 million earlier today.

Scobee was good 23 out of 25 attempts in 2011 (92%), and he forced a touchback on nearly 63% of his kickoffs. His accuracy has always been the concern, and he finally showed that he can be a complete kicker last season. Sure, the next four years are expensive considering that Scobee is a kicker, but as the video above illustrates, the investment is worth the cash. Few kickers could nail a game winning field goal from 59 yards out, and Scobee has shown over the years that he's money with the game on the line.

I've been a proponent of just paying the man, and that's exactly what the Jaguars did.

Tania Ganguli of the Florida Times-Union reports that Josh Scobee has signed a 4 year contract with the Jaguars worth $13.8 million with $4.75 million guaranteed.

Specialists have been a point of regret since the Jaguars were unable to secure Adam Podlesh, leading to last year's Matt Turk disaster. More on the Scobee news later.

If you've been a regular visitor to The Jaggernaut over its year and a half of existence, you probably recognized that something is a touch different about the site today. If not, well, you can take notice now. The Jaggernaut is sporting a new banner at the top of the page. It's something I personally designed, intentionally keeping it similar in some ways to the old one. This is in preparation for a brand new season, and hopefully, a brand new era of winning in Jacksonville. Hopefully, everyone doesn't hate the new banner too much.

The new style black uniforms look every bit as great as the old ones did. I just can't wait to see them on the field on gameday this year. Fingers are still crossed for that one.

While it's still unclear if/how often the Jaguars will be wearing their all black uniform in 2012, we do finally have a look at exactly what the black jersey looks like.

The black Jaguars jerseys recently made their way to NFLShop.com, and I'm very tempted to take the financial hit and snag one for myself. It's more or less what I expected them to look like, and I'm more than a little excited to see them on the field in Jacksonville once again.

The following is from a heated exchange at TGS involving the comments section of a recent article I wrote. This guy is angry:

"Listen Lemonsuckers, I seen Elway play from day one til he retired - and looking at your picture, you never saw him play....  don't tell me how Elway Played when you were probably still [expletive] in your diapers....  Elway was a RUNNING QB - JUST LIKE TEBOW - OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO - DOES THAT SHOCK YOU????  Elway made plenty of mistakes the first few years.  The Broncos D was 1-4 without Tebow - GIVE TEBOW CREDIT.   I don't know why I'm writing you, you keep saying Tebow is not a great QB - Hey Dumbshit, I already proved you wrong on that so ADMIT YOU'RE WRONG...."

I know September 9th is still a long ways off, but I think that July is all about looking forward to the beginning of the NFL season. The Jaguars open their 2012 campaign against the Minnesota Vikings, and the way I see it, they couldn't get a better game to kick off the season.

The Jaguars' game against the Vikings will tell us a lot about the Jaguars very early on. The Vikings' offense isn't the scariest of bunches, and the Jaguars will likely be able to focus their defensive efforts on shutting the Vikings' running attack down. From there, the Jaguars simply have to hold Christian Ponder down, and if last year is any indication of how difficult that will be, the Jaguars should be in good shape on defense.

This may be my favorite series of event in the history of football. By my count, the Raiders had 4 unsportsmanlike conduct penalties called after one play. Hat tip to this Big Cat Country article for making me search for the video on Youtube. The best part is that David Garrard threw an INT immediately after the penalites.