JACKSONVILLE – He's back in the building and looking ahead.

That's true of Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence – and of linebacker Foyesade Oluokun. But while the two team leaders said the focus is on the future as the 2024 offseason program begins, they also said something else is true.

The past will be motivation – and that motivation will be real.

"You have to use it," Lawrence said Tuesday.

Such is the overriding theme for the Jaguars entering 2024, a theme Head Coach Doug Pederson established last month at the NFL Annual Meeting – that while a disappointing end of the 2023 season can't define everything about the future, it also can't be forgotten.

"It'll never be in the rear view," Oluokun said. "Maybe next year after the season."

The Jaguars, after winning their last five regular-season games to win their first AFC South title in five seasons in 2022, started the 2023 regular season 8-3 and led the division by two games. They lost five of the final six regular-season games to finish 9-8 and missed winning the division with a road loss to the Tennessee Titans in the regular-season finale.

Pederson last month said the finish would be "my motivation, my fuel moving forward," with Lawrence and Oluokun echoing that sentiment Tuesday when meeting with the media on the second day of the team's 2024 offseason program.

"I think it'll fuel us," Oluokun said. "Everybody's committed to doing things right this time around. We don't want to get in that position again and it starts from the first game all the way to the last – just keeping improving every week no matter where the scoreboard is, keeping our standard every week.

"Sometimes you win games that you didn't play your best in. You don't learn from them if you're not trying to get better. I think that kind of happened to us and we're not going to do that this year."

Lawrence, entering his fourth NFL season, said the Jaguars open the '24 offseason "heading in the right direction" and spoke of the advantages of a team having strong offseason attendance after the franchise's first back-to-back winning seasons since 2004-2005.

"We know what we need to do this offseason and be really intentional," Lawrence said. "There are very tangible things we need to get better at – for myself, for us as an offense, as a team. Now we're all on the same page of where we're heading, where we're going, what we need to work on.

"It's necessary to do that at the beginning of the offseason. You don't want to waste time. You don't want to just come here and work out and go home and really not know where you're heading and what you want to work on.

"It was good to get everybody centered and know where we're going."

Added Lawrence, "I'm glad everybody's back and we get to all kind of do it together and train and work out and move towards where we want to be. I'm always excited when we start back up."

Lawrence left three of the Jaguars' last six games in 2023 with injuries, a stretch that also included the first missed start of his NFL career, and he said he first felt 100 percent physically after the season in mid-March.

"It took a while," he said. "When March hit, I felt really good – like lifting and doing everything like totally normal. I'd been so used to the back half of the season adjusting everything, whether it was workout or throwing or practice or whatever it was. I would work out, but still modified.

"I'd say that [March] was when I started to feel like a hundred percent do the stuff that I normally do to get back in the kind of shape I want to be and train the way I wanted to."

And Lawrence said now that he's 100 percent – and with the offseason program beginning – the time for the future is at hand. Even if the immediate past shouldn't be forgotten.

"You have to move on pretty quickly because it's a new year," Lawrence said. "Everyone's kind of turning the page and going on to 2024. So, you move on. It was obviously a disappointing season, but I think just being removed from it, it's a lot easier to see the good after the fact."

"Not necessarily the good things that happen, but use the bad things as good and to make yourself better moving forward. There are so many things I learned last season, whether it's trying to stay healthy and dealing with some things that I haven't had to deal with in my career or not playing as consistent as I wanted to play.

"All these things that have gone through my head. Being removed from it, you can take stuff from that and use it to make you better in the moment."