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          NFL Nation

          Jaguars making Leonard Fournette work his way up the depth chart

          • Michael DiRocco, ESPN Staff WriterAug 7, 2017, 11:00 AM
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              Michael DiRocco is an NFL reporter at ESPN. DiRocco covers the Jacksonville Jaguars. He previously covered the University of Florida for over a decade for ESPN.com and Florida Times-Union. DiRocco graduated from Jacksonville University and is a multiple APSE award winner. You can follow DiRocco on Twitter at @ESPNdirocco.
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          JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Leonard Fournette took just two snaps with the first-team offense during this past Friday night’s scrimmage, but Jacksonville Jaguars coach Doug Marrone said it would be wrong to read anything into that.

          Fournette isn’t the only running back that’s having a good training camp, Marrone said, and it’s still more than a month before the regular-season opener. The rotation will work itself out by then.

          “When you’re seeing competition or you’re seeing maybe something at left tackle [between Cam Robinson and Josh Wells], what we’re doing with the twos, whatever it may be, I think that stuff will work itself out,” Marrone said. “Right now, we’ve got three guys that we feel that are having a pretty good camp. We’re just going to keep putting them in there.

          “If we have three players that it’s tough to make a decision with, that’s the best thing that can happen rather than saying, ‘Holy cow, we don’t have anyone. We’ve got to put this guy in there.’”

          Fournette was impressive in the scrimmage at EverBank Field. After being knocked on his rear end as soon as he took a handoff by defensive tackle Sheldon Day, he had a 72-yard catch-and-run for a touchdown. Fournette had four carries for 12 yards and two catches for 78 yards, giving him 90 yards of total offense on just six touches -- an average of 15 yards per touch.

          Chris Ivory, T.J. Yeldon and Corey Grant got more work with the first-team offense than Fournette. That may change after the joint practices with New England on Monday and Tuesday and the preseason opener for both teams on Thursday, Marrone said.

          “We’re practicing against a different football team, so there’s still a lot of installation [of the offensive and defensive systems] in,” Marrone said. “We don’t want to really narrow that down, but then when we get into the game on Thursday we’ll narrow it down then. So from the standpoint of the rookies, they’re swimming, but now we should see that next progression where they really start picking some things up and feeling good about it.”

          The Jaguars drafted Fournette fourth overall to help carry the offense and take much of the burden off quarterback Blake Bortles. Marrone has said previously that he wants rookies to earn their roles and making Fournette work his way up to being the feature back is part of that process.