Jets Continue To Show Us Who They Are
I can’t wait for Jeff Ulbrich telling the media at his Week 14 postgame press conference after the Jets get blown out in Miami that this “is not who this team is.”
The Jets interim head coach may not want to admit it to the public--or himself--but when your team loses enough games, that IS who you are.
The Jets are an overrated mess, thanks to an owner who seeks big splash headlines without any understanding of what wins the actual games on the football field. In the past two weeks, Woody Johnson fired Head Coach Robert Saleh, gave the go-ahead to mortgage another future Draft asset to acquire wide receiver Davante Adams, and negotiated the end of the stalemate with holdout edge rusher Haason Reddick.
Meanwhile, the Jets (2-5) lost their third and fourth consecutive games, with Sunday night’s 37-15 thrashing in Pittsburgh sending them to the precipice of practical elimination from postseason qualification for the 14th straight year, the longest drought among the four major pro sports leagues’ teams.
Johnson’s biggest bet of this Jets era was going all in during the 2023 offseason on future Hall-of-Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who, at 40, just might not be who Johnson thought/thinks he is.
For the first six weeks of the season, Jets fans, including me, have been willing to give Rodgers the benefit of the doubt. He missed all but the first four snaps of last season after suffering an Achilles injury and had some rust. The receivers needed to learn where Rodgers wants them to be on routes. The offensive line sucked in both pass protection and in failing to establish some semblance of a running game. The play-calling was too conservative on early downs, consistently putting Rodgers behind the chains. The kicker can’t kick. And on and on.
Enough. At some point, one must conclude that this disgrace needs to also be pinned on the shoulders of the quarterback, the most important position in all sports.
In the old days, with bums like Mark Sanchez, Josh McCown, Sam Darnold, Bryce Petty, and Zach Wilson under center, the Jets asked their QB to not lose games. The “Game Manager” role. Since we had cleared the 20th century, it never had a real chance to succeed. Rodgers was specifically brought in to upend that misguided thinking. As the tag line in the irreverent 2000 football movie “The Replacements” went, “Winners want the ball with the game on the line.”
Except Johnson never conceived that Rodgers, a four-time NFL MVP and a Super Bowl champion, might no longer have what it takes in his body to execute those winning plays, which might have been why the Packers were so eager to turn their page from Rodgers to Jordan Love in the first place. In fact, you can trace the source of the last three Jets defeats in large part to Rodgers miscues in key moments.
In the final two minutes of Sunday night’s first half, New York was set to embark on a drive that would increase their 15-6 lead. On a second-&-four snap from the Jets 36-yard line, Rodgers pushed a ball into the deep middle looking for receiver Garrett Wilson. Unfortunately, Pittsburgh cornerback Beanie Bishop Jr. got his head turned around just in time to make an impressive interception around midfield.
The Steelers, who previously looked discombobulated from their QB switch from Justin Fields to the aging Russell Wilson, then seized the momentum. A defensive pass interference call on Sauce Gardner on a deep ball down the right sideline not only set Pittsburgh up in the red zone, it knocked Gardner and safety Tony Adams off the field with injuries, leaving Gang Green with five backup defensive backs to handle George Pickens and Co. (Gardner returned in the second half; Adams did not). Pickens’ touchdown reception with 32 seconds remaining in the half opened the floodgates to 24 more unanswered Pittsburgh points after intermission.
Unlike Rodgers’ third quarter pick that bounced off Wilson’s chest and into Bishop’s arms, the first interception was one where you could substitute Rodgers with any of the above-mentioned names and have a feeling of déjà vu. It was a bad decision and a bad throw.
And it’s not an outlier. He’s up to 7 picks on the season, including 6 in the last three weeks. Before he was intercepted 12 times during his final season in Green Bay in 2022, the last time he hit seven picks in a season was in 2016.
Rodgers still has some “wow” plays in his arsenal that he brings out a few times every week, like the 52-yard Hail Mary touchdown to Allen Lazard before halftime of Monday night’s 23-20 loss to Buffalo. But for the most part, he’s your typical dink-and-dunker. Take away the lucky Lazard catch and he was averaging 10.3 yards per on pass attempts over 20 yards downfield going into Sunday night, per ProFootballFocus.com. That put him in 20th place among the league’s 32 QBs with at least 10 such throws this season, just ahead of Joe Flacco and Bo Nix. Rodgers was also ranked 21st in rbsdm.com’s expected points added per play metric and 30th in completion percentage over expected (115 play minimum). Hardly the work of the explosive play machine he used to be.
Sensing this, the Steelers made locker room adjustments to limit Rodgers’ quick passing game, holding him to 11-for-20 passing for 118 yards after halftime--and 56 of those yards were more in the give-up bucket with Pittsburgh up by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter. That drive ended when Rodgers’ third down pass to tight end Ty Conklin was stuffed for no gain and then his next throw was batted down at the line of scrimmage.
Before that sequence, NBC analyst Cris Collinsworth drew on memories of past Rodgers comebacks, as if Collinsworth believed Rodgers still had it in him to rise above the Jets’ dysfunction and save them from another crash into the abyss with the late-game magic he dispensed with regularity in Green Bay.
But that was then. This is who Rodgers—and the Jets—are now. As I wrote last week ((1) Pondering The Unthinkable: What If The Jets’ Moves Don’t Take Flight?), everyone is going to have to deal with it sooner or later.