| Projected Record | 10-7 (ACTUAL: 4-6) |
| Weighted DVOA Offense | 29th |
| Weighted DVOA Defense | 3rd |
| Early Down DVOA | 1st Down – 23rd, 2nd Down – 23rd |
| Explosive Play Rate | Offense – 18th (Run 3rd, Pass 24th), Defense – 6th (Run 16th, Pass 3rd) |
| Key Additions | Aaron Rodgers QB, Allen Lazard WR, Randall Cobb WR, Billy Turner OT, Trystan Colon-Castillo IOL, Wes Schweitzer IOL, Quinton Jefferson DI, Thomas Morstead P |
| Key Departures | Mike White QB, Joe Flacco QB, James Robinson RB, Jeff Smith WR, Braxton Berrios WR, Elijah Moore WR, George Fant OT, Mike Remmers OT, Dan Feeney IOL, Nate Herbig IOL, Nathan Shepard DI, Sheldon Rankins DI, Vinny Curry EDGE, Kwon Alexander LB, LaMarcus Joyner S |
| Rookies to Watch | Joe Tippmann IOL, Will McDonald IV EDGE |
Injury Report
Players on IR: Aaron Rodgers QB, C.J. Uzomah TE, Connor McGovern IOL, Wes Schweitzer IOL, Al Woods IDL, Ifeadi Odenigbo EDGE, Bradlee Anae EDGE, Maalik Hall LB, Chuck Clark S, Javelin Guidry CB
Quarterback
Looking back on what I wrote about this team’s QB situation in June, I was not a Rodgers optimist. Sometime in August, blissfully done with all preview drafts and watching the State Propaganda that is Hard Knocks, I started to believe a bit more. I shouldn’t have. Here’s an excerpt of my initial thoughts: “Aaron Rodgers is a Jet, if you needed any reason to hate him more. The back-to-back 2020 and 2021 MVP has his ring, and has punched his ticket to the Hall of Fame, but the notoriously finicky player has decided he wants one more chance to do things his way. Rodgers, in classic I Am An Intellectual fashion, seems to revel in the chance to build up his own offense, and so the first task is to peel back which idiosyncrasies of his last year with the Packers are due to his coach and system and which are uniquely his. First, Rodgers’s top three routes he threw this year were thrown a whopping 51% of the time. That’s nuts. Kenny Pickett, a rookie just learning NFL offenses, only threw his top 3 routes 37% of the time. Both Mahomes and Burrow were around the same place. Leave it to a Smart Guy to think he has the NFL QB position figured out with just a few routes. Part of that is, of course, the nature of Matt LeFleur’s RPO offense: the speed out is a useful route to build off of play action. But Rodgers was not terribly impressive in aggregate out of play action: he had the 20th highest completion percentage, 21st highest yards per attempt, and a PFF passer grade at 11th as opposed to 12th for non-play action. He used play action 27% of the time, good for 15th right behind Justin Herbert, whose own experience with play action got his coach fired. So the scheme doesn’t explain the targets, what has Rodgers said that might explain his relative predictability? When the team seemed destined to miss the playoffs, Rodgers stepped up to the podium and said, in reference to how to fix the offense, “The simplest plays are the best plays. When we’re not executing the way we’re capable of executing or the way we should be capable of executing, it might be time to reel it back in a little bit and simplify some things.” This led to a feud back and forth between Rodgers and LaFleur, with LaFleur feigning ignorance on Aaron’s comments, asserting that he and Aaron crafted gameplans together, and LaFleur concluding that ultimately blocking and general execution lost the game. The writing was on the wall then: Rodgers would retire or be traded. Eventually, Rodgers would say that the conflict was around the Packers using motion too often, not allowing him to change up tempos for matchup advantages. But in 2 minute drill situations last year, a time when motion just can’t be done, Rodgers had the 18th best passer rating and the 20th Expected Points Added score, one that went into the negatives. Rodgers seems to not know what he needs, and seems to struggle to track which areas of his game are falling off.” That final sentence seems prophetic as the man talks about COMING BACK with a torn Achilles to play behind one of the worst offensive lines in the game. I don’t believe Rodgers even believes he is coming back; I think a man who craves respect cannot handle irrelevance. The Jets have hitched themselves to a kind of black hole, and it’s doing what black holes do.
Tomorrow, the Jets will start Tim Boyle, the guy who got a 3rd string position (and was the backup in Green Bay) because Aaron Rodgers really likes his vibe. Boyle has not thrown more TDs than INTs since some time in high school and, even then, he threw a shocking amount of INTs considering most small children playing defense have no idea what they’re doing. Against the Bills, the Boyle offense turned the ball over two notable times, one on a silly fumble by Wilson and the other on a perfect pass if Boyle had the power to throw the ball through 3 guys who all could have picked it off. Two Bills were shaken up on the play after running into each other because they BOTH picked the ball off. There is nothing to really say about Tim Boyle, an unremarkable Madden CPU player of a football guy. He has no personal life page on his Wikipedia. He is from Connecticut. He told media this week that he was “feeling dangerous,” which, in itself, feels pretty dangerous. The most merciful thing a Tim Boyle start does for me is that I am not committed at all to writing about Zach Wilson, who may never again play a down for the Jets. His benching in the Bills game once the game was out of reach feels Josh Rosen-esque in terms of reaching the end. Wilson was terrible, poor with timing, poor with media, a great arm and good movement skills wasted by the worst instincts I’ve ever seen at the position. Tomorrow, he will be the emergency inactive QB, New York’s personal Skylar Thompson with Trevor Seimian playing the backup role. Dire.
Coaching
Robert Saleh bought a lot of goodwill last year. Tasked with putting together a strong defense, his calling card, Saleh’s first season was more of the same defensive disaster that he inherited. The Jets finished as the worst defense in weighted DVOA by a mile, exacerbated by just how bad the pass defense was. In 2022, Saleh’s second year and on the heels of a very strong draft, Saleh’s defense allowed the 5th fewest yards (3rd best against the pass), good for the 3rd best weighted DVOA. This is a true worst-to-first story, as the Jets allowed the most yards in the league (3rd most pass) in 2021. How did the Jets do it? Saleh imported players for his scheme in droves. The most notable acquisition was, of course, PFF’s best corner in the league Sauce Gardner, a true rookie sensation. He also brought in D.J. Reed Jr., who stabilized the pass defense along with Gardner, if not quite as sensationally. The defensive front stayed healthy and returned to form, as Quinnen Williams was pass-rushing gamewrecker, and Carl Lawson and C.J. Mosley returned from injury to be veteran leaders. Basically, the stars aligned and Saleh was able to call a defense that fit his mold of attacking conservative. He blitzed way less, dropping his rate from around 25% (essentially league average) to 15% (league lowest). That number was a stark departure from his 2020 season, a year in which the 49ers were a top 10 blitzing team under his leadership. Saleh is a malleable coach, willing to tinker with personnel to build whatever they offer him. Clearly, last year they offered next to nothing between injury and just plain poor talent level. Schematically, Saleh is a holdover from before the Fangio-craze, still implementing a number of defensive looks that resemble the Legion of Boom era Seahawks. It led to fan outcry in 2021, but once the talent level rose to the level needed for a scheme like this to work, the Jets saw real results. Gardner and Reed fit the mold of corners needed for the scheme, with Gardner’s length giving real Richard Sherman flashbacks. Whitehead and Joyner looked like Earl Thomas and a poor man’s Kam Chancellor (the Jets will bring in Chuck Clark this year to look a little less “poor man” at the latter position). C.J. Mosley has to fill the Bobby Wagner role, and did so admirably, as the scheme is vulnerable in the middle, both by seam passing routes and in the run game. It helps, then, that Williams is a talent that the Seahawks never had, both eating up blocks in the middle and shooting gaps to rush the passer hard. The Jets now have talent at every level of the defense, and had injury luck go their way, all to the benefit of a coach that needed to show something in Year 2. Even with a terrible offense, they did just that.
The move of the offseason, then, is one of the biggest gambles in years (okay, just one year) to fix an offense in just one offseason. It is essentially impossible to separate the coaching from the QB offensively: Nathaniel Hackett will spend the second straight year as the brain of a Frankenstein’s monster, this time for the stitched-together Rodgers/Jets marriage after flaming out with the Russ/Broncos last year. Russell Wilson’s year in Denver was the previous “biggest gamble” and it went bust, with a 28th rated weighted DVOA. Hackett himself did not even last the full season, becoming the 5th head coach not to finish his first full season and only the 2nd who was not attempting the College Legend Goes Pro track (Urban Meyer, Lou Holtz, and Bobby Petrino are the three who came from college and all left in hilarious fashion). On Hackett’s Wikipedia, a hater has added “Hackett’s tenure as the Broncos’ head coach has since been considered to have been one of the worst and most inept head coaching tenures in Broncos’ history and NFL history” with an amazing four citations (all pretty good tbh). I heard a podcaster describe Hackett as “kind of having no scheme” ditching both what his Packers teams with Rodgers did well (timing-based offense with plenty of RPOs) AND the Seahawks Russ scheme of extending plays and throwing out moon balls on the sidelines. Instead, it was some kind of murky hodgepodge that made nobody happy and played to no strengths. Here’s what I wrote before Rodgers was injured: “This time, the Matt LaFleur disciple will have Aaron Rodgers to reckon with. Rodgers has long expressed friction with the LaFleur offense, mostly saying that the frequent motion used to scheme up free releases and quick looks disrupts his feel for the game and his ability to quickly respond to what defenses show him. It’s classic Rodgers orneriness: he looked like he was on his way out prior to the arrival of the scheme and promptly put up two MVP seasons. Still, he has some merit in what he says: part of a QB-friendly scheme appears to be some Golden Handcuffs that deliver a higher percentage of open looks at the cost of freedom for the signal-caller. For a guy like Tua who looks substantially less comfortable with higher uncertainty, this is a godsend; for a guy like Rodgers who plays football with a jazz legend flair, it’s probably somewhat annoying. Team sports are entirely about annoyance, being let down, and taking accountability for things outside of your control, a prime reason many of the greatest athletes to ever play the game took far fewer meaningful snaps than some dipshit in a Patriots uniform dodging another round of media questions. Will this year be a sax solo or a coordinated and exact dance recital? No offense or defense in the league feels murkier than this unit right here.” Time clears all murkiness: Hackett has had absolutely no answer for the Rodgers injury. The Jets offense is formless and listless. Plays to Breece Hall, still a shining star of a young back, are your run of the mill screens and inside zones. Pass plays don’t have hot reads that are useful, which meant I spent hours watching Zach Wilson bail from the pocket instead of even seeing what the offense was trying to do. Hackett appears to be a good teacher (Wilson’s bad habits, funny enough, were diminished from what we saw in his first season), but not an architect of either a game plan or a cohesive offensive philosophy. Unless the team truly scapegoats Wilson to save face with Rodgers, Hackett has proven unable to elevate anyone.
Offense
Making sense of the Jets offense this year means that you first have to figure out just which skill positions will be on the field. The offense is a slightly-unholy mix of Guys Who Did Ayahuasca With Aaron Rodgers and Guys Who Will Soon Have Done Ayahuasca with Aaron Rodgers. In the former camp, the Jets signed Randall Cobb and Allen Lazard (to go with Adrian Amos on defense and a rumored Mercedes Lewis signing in camp). The Jets claim that Lazard, signed before Rodgers was officially on the team, would have happened anyway, and we can indulge that lie. Lazard has consistently been a mediocre possession WR, never topping the 2 yards per route run that you would hope to see from a star, but keeping an average of around 13 yards per catch in each of his four seasons as a starter. He’s a legitimate red zone target, with 14 TDs over the last two years from Rodgers. He is 6’5” and somewhat slower (4.55 40), but the former undrafted pickup has made a respectable name for himself. This year, he has .84 yards per route run as the second receiving option on this team, which is truly laugh out loud bad. Cobb is a depth player in the slot, still effective in limited touches, but 10 years past his peak as a potential 1000 yard burner. He should not factor into a functional offense, and does not, with just 3 catches for 20 yards. It is the other two receivers of note that should get the most attention: Garrett Wilson broke out last year to the tune of 83 catches for 1,103 yards with just 4 TDs (blame Zach Wilson there). Wilson is an incredible route runner, with some length (he tops 6’) but at only 192, has speed and shiftiness to get out of breaks. From week 8 (his second game over 100 yards against the talented Patriots), he racked up 789 of the 1,103 while also seeing the most off-target passes of his season. There are shades of Davante Adams here, a weapon at any point on the field. Rodgers and Hackett’s task will be to find him more easy targets: a whopping 39 contested targets were thrown his way last year, and that isn’t where Wilson excels, pulling in just 15 of them. An efficient Jets offense would mean half the amount of contested balls, and better placement by a QB to raise that rate. That, of course, did not happen and yet Wilson has played admirably amongst chaos, with 57 catches for 651 and 2 TDs to date. His ceiling is far higher than that, but he has taken over and won games in the worst circumstances over his first two years in a row. Mecole Hardman rounds out the receiving room. He sat on IR for much of last season with an abdomen injury, coming back for just a few snaps in the playoffs. The year as a whole was a bust for the gadget player in Kansas City, with just 27 catches for 307 yards on just 36 targets all year. Hardman was the speedster next to Tyreek in KC who was supposed to mature into the Waddle in that offense, but he lacks the physicality and the game-wrecking route skills to do so. He might find more success in a full-time slot role, as he has only ever played half the snaps in the position in his first four years in Kansas City. He never flashed, so the Jets traded him back to Kansas City. If you’re keeping track, that’s one superstar, two disappointments that are Rodgers buddies, and one guy sent packing to his old team for pennies. The Jets added Tyler Conklin this year to compete with C.J. Uzomah, and neither provide much excitement as a receiving threat. Conklin racked up catches in Minnesota, with 61 in 2021 and 58 in 2022, but he’s a sub-10 yards a catch player, offering little in terms of excitement in the seam. This year, with 37 catches and some actually spectacular airborne catches, Conklin may be turning a corner. Uzomah can do that seam stuff a bit more, and was asked to do it plenty in Cincinnati. But the real redzone TD monster conversation comes around the RB position, where Breece Hall is working like mad to come back from a midseason ACL tear. He was an absolute menace in his 6 games (with 4 carries in a 7th) to start the season last year. He went for 463 yards on 80 carries, an insane 5.8 yards per carry clip. A whopping 330 yards came after contact, the best among any RB with more than 20% of his team’s carries. He also caught 19 passes for 218 yards, a good mark for a receiver handling dump-off passes. This dude is ready to explode next year provided he has the running skill he possessed prior to the injury. That has proven true, as Hall is absolutely the dynamic weapon we saw from last year, third on the team in catches with 35 and 19th in the NFL in rushing despite a diminished load to start the season and the terrible OL.
The offensive line will be the hinge-point for everything on this team not named Aaron Rodgers. The Jets find themselves in a remarkably similar situation to the Dolphins: years go by with frequent investments in the offensive line, and yet even average seems woefully out of reach. In the Jets case, just one offensive lineman showed off his talents last year, while the rest have a whole bunch of hope built in. Alijah Vera-Tucker took the step from average to plus last year with an excellent run blocking grade in PFF’s grading. Some nut in the vein of our 3YPC guys charted good blocks (as measured by successful lanes on above-average plays) and bad blocks (assigning responsibility to the blockers in the hole for a run stuff). In his very fun and essentially made-up run statistic, Vera-Tucker was an absolute force at the point of attack as a guard, winning 75% of the time. If he can stay at RG while improving his pass set base, Vera-Tucker will keep ascending. At LG, Laken Tomlinson had a massive fall from grace after being the big-ticket OL signing last year. He was still the same Ironman as ever, playing every single snap for the Jets, but his run blocking numbers absolutely plummeted from his days as the key cog in the Kyle Shanahan zone run game. I wrote of Tomlinson last year that “He’s a beacon of consistency, well above average in both the thriving 49ers run game and in pass protection.” Not anymore! Tomlinson started with a nasty game against Baltimore, with a career-high 8 pressures allowed to a host of different Ravens (his previous career-high was 5, which he did twice long enough ago that my brother has earned two master’s degrees since it occurred). He stabilized from there, allowing just 24 over the rest of the season (far more usual) but the run blocking never followed. In zone blocking, his bread and butter, he completely fell off, ranking 104 of 138 blockers who even *took a snap* at guard. Control that for full-time starters, and you get a who’s who of young players people are panicking about as the only guards worse (Cesar Ruiz, Alex Bars, Kenyon Green, Cole Strange are all examples). And he was worse when asked to play the gap run scheme that typically features a pulling guard. What happened to Tomlinson? Coaching? A secret injury? 30 is typically not the end for guards, especially guys who push 325 like Tomlinson. The answer may be locked in the relatively poor play of Duane Brown next to Tomlinson. The former Seahawks star actually is ancient, he will be 38 to start this season. He was PFF’s 76th worst run blocking tackle, and average pass protection could not save him from a 69/81 overall grade. As recently as 2020, he was a top 10 tackle, but the veteran who came into the league the Year of the Wildcat may finally have the end of his career in his sights. His pressure rate (23 on 439 opportunities) is consistent with the rest of his career, but he abandoned the idea of difficult run blocking in the trade to Seattle and does not look found in the new offense. One issue is that he is asked to play more gap running, and he looks slow on reaching his assignment. Age gets us all. Will Brown still be the left tackle by the end of the season? Beyond injury concerns to the whole line, Mekhi Becton still sits on this team after feeling more like a disappointment each year past his rookie breakout. One thing is still true, this is a guy over 350 pounds. He can literally engulf you. The problem is that his listed weight of 363 is almost certainly wrong: Becton is probably nearer to 400 pounds. The mystery of his year-and-a-half knee injury is not totally solved. The last time we saw him in early 2021, he was a step slower, noticeably bigger, and an injury listed as “week-to-week” took 2021 and 2022, during which he was ordered to stay home from the facility. Coaches spoke publicly about a poor want-to from Becton. This year he is slimmer, he is studying, he is at the facility, BUT he has yet to step foot on the field. Helping him is that Brown has not either since rotator cuff. We are not yet close to an answer, and official depth charts typically place Brown at LT and Becton at RT. This, too, feels less than guaranteed: the Jets signed Rodgers Buddy and former Dolphin cut in a blaze of glory Billy Turner. Turner was not particularly good in spot starts with Denver last year (who was?) but he is a former average run blocker and slightly above average one with the Packers. He has greatly improved his technique over the years, adjusting from 52 pressures in 2019 to 30 in 2020. Maybe the pandemic was good for pass blocking practice. Okay, that was exhausting to explore, and probably could have been summed up by saying “Vera-Tucker = good, the rest are A. injured B. old C. weirdly bad or D. all of the above.” But then I wouldn’t get to talk about the new rookie face who will soon disappoint! Yes, the Jets’ new Liam Eichenberg is Joe Tippmann, a dude with a mullet and too many consonants. He is, perhaps concerningly, not particularly strong with his leverage in his college snaps, but he is wickedly fast in all phases of the game, actually grading better as a college guard than center. The Jets might make him the day one center, but they also re-signed Connor McGovern, who has also been fairly steady in his play through the Saleh era. Tippmann and McGovern is the only battle that doesn’t really worry you, as the baseline for both is high, and the loser will get plenty of time based on the OL injury history. Confusion upfront has traditionally never been a good sign for a team, and this is the place where Jets fans should worry the most with their new Old QB.
That offensive line, like many of the terrible Phins unit, has shuffled all year. Here is the combination slated to play Miami: Becton at LT (he has an ankle sprain, so he might be benched for Carter Warren, a nightmare backup who conjures memories of some hilarious Dolphins fill-ins), Tomlinson at LG, Tippmann at C, Turner at RG, and Max Mitchell at RT. Mitchell and Becton have combined for 51 pressures despite just 270 snaps that Mitchell has taken. Turner is even worse with 13 pressures on just 120 snaps (90% efficiency rate, really bad for an NFL lineman). Tippmann might be the best of them all with a subpar 56.6 PFF grade. It’s ugly for the Jets, who have watched bad QBs play under duress all year. Boyle will likely be knocked out of this game, which will be sad, especially because of how little he was given to work with.
Defense
As a unit, the New York Jets finally arrived as a top defense last year, a year after I wrote that, “If Saleh’s defense bottoms out again, there are reasons to believe he won’t be long for the top job.” They performed incredibly due to savvy moves, a killer draft, and some rebounding play from many key pieces as they have fully arrived in the scheme. It starts with Quinnen Williams, who proved Robert Saleh to be a fibber with last year’s proclamation that the defensive front would play “about 30 snaps a game.” Williams added more and more to his plate each week, playing a career high 690 snaps and delivering the Jets his best ever season, with a career-high 52 pressures. Williams is a physical force in the defensive interior, and he is in the midst of a contract standoff that requires him to deliver more excellent play. Next to him, Big Al Woods comes over from Seattle after honing his game with the Seahawks since 2019. Woods is 36 and nearing the end, but he has just been wildly consistent against the run and can anchor a nose tackle position to allow the Jets to utilize multiple fronts. Saleh has not typically used a nose tackle in his career, and Woods can certainly cause disruption from a more traditional interior spot. Joining him is last year’s Seattle teammate Quinton Jefferson, who can play more snaps but delivers less quality. In his first Seattle stint in 2018 and 2019, Jefferson emerged from his rookie contract as a plus run defender, but slipped outside of Seattle, playing his way out of town after one year in a two-year contract in both Buffalo and Vegas. Saleh may think he has the sauce (and the Quinnen Williams) to solve this problem. Woods, unfortunately, was not a factor this year due to injury, and Jefferson has been fine in the absence with the help of former 1st-round pick Solomon Thomas. Edge rusher is a far deeper position than interior defense, and they produced well last year. The Jets had the third-most pressures according to Pro Football Reference (a somewhat nebulous stat, as there is no official measure of a hurry) and the 7th most sacks (concrete, with 45). John Franklin-Myers, out of the lower-tier Stephen F. Austin University, has continued his run as the team’s best edge player, showcasing his highest pressure percentage of his career last year to go with his most career run stops. He seems comfortable in all phases, and will kick inside to allow the Jets to avoid keeping Woods/Jefferson in on passing downs. Carl Lawson played next to him, starting to justify his contract after tearing his ACL in training camp last year. Lawson was good, managing a similar amount of pressures to Franklin-Myers (52 to Lawson’s 49), but he is certainly not an edge setter, as demonstrated by a 20% missed tackle rate. Another year in the system could help him return to his Cincinnati form. Two first-round picks, 2021’s Jermaine Johnson II and 2022’s Will McDonald, will rotate in with the two veterans, and both show promise. Bryce Huff, yet another edge rusher, exploded onto the scene with 36 pressures, adding yet more to the rotation. Johnson had as many stops in the run game (19) as Lawson despite playing a shade under half the snaps: his deployment against the run was very effective, and he added 14 pressures while getting in on 3 sacks to round out his game. Jets fans may have hoped for more with the capital spent on Johnson, but the reality is that they did not need more. Will McDonald comes out of Iowa State as a bit of a project, but one with clear athletic gifts. A workout warrior, McDonald posted an elite amount of agility and a 36” vertical (to go with a 4.7 40) that all screams elite speed rusher. The problem, then, is that the 6’3” player only weighs 240 pounds! That’s a little LB, not an NFL edge. McDonald will look to replace Lawson long-term, but now will look to add strength to that already athletic frame. Finally, there is Bryce Huff, who played way out above his skis in 2022 when he posted a pressure percentage in terms of snaps higher than Myles Garrett and Joey Bosa! This feels…silly, so it will be interesting to see what he can do with his 2023 workload. Of those players, there has not been a single disappointment! Franklin-Myers has not been quite the dominating physical presence this year, but Bryce Huff has an absurd 48 pressures on 250 snaps. Carl Lawson is the only problem, as he was benched with his big contract, but that benching was just to get more snaps for high-end younger guys! That’s a good problem (not for Lawson).
Behind the defensive line, more stars couple with more useful veterans to round out a contender for the NFL’s best defense in 2023. After 2021’s abysmal year in coverage for C.J. Mosley, who was returning from injury, Mosley looked far more like his Baltimore past than his Jets form: he racked up tackles and run stops while staying serviceable in coverage. His 2021 coverage numbers were a bonafide nightmare, allowing 67 of 77 passes to be caught for 4 TDS. His 2022, with 48/73 caught, gives the impression that Mosley has settled into the scheme. Next to him, Quincy Williams (Quinnen’s brother) was rewarded with an inexplicably high contract, unless the explanation was to appease/annoy his little brother. He misses a troubling amount of tackles (17 last year) and allows a troubling amount of production in the pass game (60 of 70 passes in his area were caught, though Mosley will continue to bail him out). He did succeed as a blitzer, getting home for a hurry on half of his 29 pass rush snaps. There’s not much to like about Williams’s game, but he seems to be a leader for the team and we could certainly see an Elandon-Roberts-like devotion to the player despite analytical evidence. Here in 2022, I could not have been more wrong: Quincy Williams has developed into a star at the position, delivering wildly physical hits and the best coverage season from an LB seen in a while. He’s having a year that reminds me of Bills LB Tremaine Edmunds in Buffalo: the light has come on. He and Mosley have 140 tackles between them in this young season, which is tremendous. Jamien Sherwood, a 5th-round pick in Saleh’s 2021 defensive youth movement, intrigues as a potential rotation piece at the linebacker position. But it is in the secondary where the Jets are truly great, stacking up with the Packers and Dolphins as the best units in the league with both star power and depth. What else can be said about Sauce Gardner? He was PFF’s top corner and the numbers are legitimately hilarious. He allowed 34 of 74 passes to be complete. 34 of 74. Close out this stupid preview and go watch Sauce Gardner highlights. It’s giving me flashbacks, painful ones, of Darrell Revis. Teams attempted to beat him by simply running go balls, as they targeted him at an average depth of 15.2 yards, good for 18th in the NFL and the only good corner on the list. With most great corners, you want to attempt to challenge them quickly, giving them less time to win with technique and feeding the ball before they can challenge separation. With Sauce, whether through his own baiting techniques a la Xavien Howard or teams hoping to capitalize on their receivers fighting through his physicality to get open, teams tried him deep and they failed. I wrote that the Dolphins may use their quicker receivers to try and capitalize on agility, which was the question mark for Sauce. Nope! He limited Miami to 58 yards in 2 games, with an INT to boot. This man is a problem for QBs across the NFL. And he has help! D.J. Reed Jr. added a second straight solid year after coming over from Seattle last year, allowing just 56.6% of passes to be completed in his area. He’s not Sauce, but that’s no problem! He too can be physical, with 70 tackles putting him among the best tackling outside corners. Inside, Michael Carter II put up good coverage grades as a slot, allowing fewer completions and less yards than 2021 despite more snaps. He was a much more capable tackler (didn’t play Tua, who trucked him hilariously in 2021), and seems like a piece worthy of continued development. All three have been great to start this year. Saleh prefers veteran safeties, which is why Jordan Whitehead and Chuck Clark are perfect anchors for this defense in the back end. Whitehead wasn’t really his Tampa Bay self in 2021, with fewer run stops than his time with Todd Bowles, but he rarely gets beat deep and seemed to be a good communicator last year, as the Jets limited explosive passes quite well, with the 3rd best rate in the NFL by my numbers. The acquisition of Chuck Clark was an attempt to do the same, as he is a remarkably consistent tackler who provides the physicality the Jets will need this year. His OTA ACL injury changes the calculus of the Jets back front, but the Packers signed Adrian Amos off of his first down year since his breakout in Chicago in 2018. Amos was gashed in coverage last year, but is still the same sure tackler he ever was with another year of a missed tackle rate under 8%. Both Whitehead and Amos are dependable veterans, and play like it. The front 7 has made their lives very easy.
In last year’s preview, I wrote this of the Jets defense: “They’re betting on depth and rebound seasons: as we know with the Dolphins, rarely a good bet over high-end talent.” Then in the offseason, I wrote: “In my estimation, Quinnen Williams was the high-end talent, with Lawson, Mosley, Whitehead, and Reed elevated above their roles and over their skis. I did not anticipate the Jets starting a rookie and discovering he is the best in the league at a critical position. I did not see all four of those rebound seasons coming to pass. I will not sleep on the Jets this year, as Robert Saleh’s defense is well-equipped to help out their new experiment on offense.” I was right on this count: new emerging talent from Saleh’s early acquisitions like Quincy Williams, Jermaine Johnson, and Bryce Huff has been a shot in the arm to an already great defense. They’re a joy to watch, but I hope they’re carved up like the Thanksgiving turkey this year.
Special Teams
It was a second straight year of kicking futility for the New York Jets, as Greg The Leg was not up to the task of adding stability to the FG game. He was 28 of 29 on extra points, but just 30 of 37 on FGs. For a guy with a huge leg, 6/11 on FGs above 50 yards is a terrible number, all the more worse for an offense that struggled to score points and a defense that was already frequently let down. He has stabilized this year, going 22/23 on FGs. I don’t even want to say it, but he has, in Week 12, kicked 6 extra points. Makes me want to throw up. A half an extra point per game. The Jets offense is destined for the Hague. Thomas Morestead has won games for the Jets after leaving the Dolphins, top 10 in every punting category and pinning a wild amount of kicks inside the 10. He even threw the best Jets pass of the year on a fake punt last week. Braxton Berrios, now in Miami, was the main return man on both punts and kicks, and he was better as a punt returner, where his 11.4 yards per punt return ranked in the top 10 amongst guys with more than 10 returns. After winning a game for the team in Week 1, Xavier Gipson has been one of the worst punt returners in the league to my eyes, frequently judging kicks poorly and muffing a punt to lose a game ALONG WITH a fumbled kick return on the OPENING PLAY lost against Buffalo. I hate the seams he chooses, and the arrogance with which he chooses them results in real lost opportunities. Irvin Charles, an undrafted player, is one of PFF’s favorite special teams guys this year.
Game Prediction
Writing from my porch early this Thanksgiving morning, I don’t have the time to dedicate to the matchup that I want. For Miami, this is a real opportunity for the offense. The Jets offense will keep Miami in the game all day, as it is unlikely to imagine them topping 20 points in the best of circumstances. After road losses to the healthy Bills, Eagles, and Chiefs defenses, Miami has seen all of my favorite defenses in the league on the road except for two: Dallas and the New York Jets. Here, Miami may finally find a win against a great defense on the road, which is so important in building confidence. It’s a real test for the OL, but also for Tua, who has struggled in the McDaniel Era against instinctive coverage linebackers that can both stop the run AND defend the 15 yard dig routes. McDaniel’s offenses were not good in both their games against the Jets last year, losing once and playing a skeleton crew for a playoff-clinching win that was all FGs the second time. Tua is actually 2-0 against Saleh’s Jets, both wins coming in 2021 with strong offensive outputs. I can see a path to a 38-point Dolphins day and a 20-point Dolphins day. Either score should be enough to win, but the former would give you real confidence as we enter the home-stretch. On Hard Knocks, you saw Tua apologizing to teammates for the turnovers. This is, ultimately, the only way the Jets pull off a win against Miami’s now-fierce defense. Funny enough, the Dolphins appear to have the slightly less dominant mirror image of the Jets defense: a bruising front 7 with depth is nectar for two opportunistic and excellent corners, with all positions not filled by stars still deeply dependable. The Jets offense is running through mud on the best days, and that should not change. Dolphins win this inaugural Black Friday matchup, I believe, with the only question being how much pain they must endure to get there.
Game Prediction: Dolphins 20-10
Season Record (Taylor’s Picks): 8-2
Next: vs. Commanders
* = See Glossary
