Lawson’s Awful Injury Should Not Alter Jets’ Flight Plan
There’s a theory making the media rounds following the devastating, season-ending Achilles tear suffered by edge rusher Carl Lawson, the Jets marquee free agent acquisition this offseason and perhaps the team’s best player, during New York’s joint practice in Green Bay on Thursday.
Call it the Trickle Down Theory. Or the Slippery Slope. It goes something like this: Jets Head Coach Robert Saleh’s 4-3 defense is predicated upon a strong push up the field from his four-man front, like he had with his prior 49ers teams. Lawson was going to be The Guy, a pass rushing demon on the edge this franchise hasn’t had since John Abraham 16 years ago.
Last season, Lawson’s rather low 5.5 sack total obscured his impact as a pass rusher, as his 24 QB hits were the league’s second-most behind Pittsburgh’s T.J. Watt. Lawson had been a dominating force throughout training camp, abusing the Jets second-year left tackle Mekhi Becton repeatedly in team drills.
So, insert Bryce Huff/Ronald Blair/Free agent X or whomever for Lawson, and there’s bound to be a dip in pressure production. The ensuing extra “Mississippi’s” opposing quarterbacks will receive on their dropbacks will then further expose a Jets secondary that can most charitably be called “unproven.” New York’s D will hemorrhage points, putting the onus on an offense led by a rookie, Zach Wilson, to keep pace, assuming, of course, that Saleh won’t be pulling an Adam Gase this season and give up on games by running out the clock with meaningless handoffs.
Ergo, such pressure from playing from behind, with opposing defenses able to hone in on the QB, will stifle Wilson’s development.
My rebuttal, in a word: Nonsense.
Let’s take a step back for a minute. Jets fans may not be aware of this based on their team’s output in recent years, but the NFL is an offense-driven league. The rules have been repeatedly tweaked so that fans can watch the scoreboard light up like pinball machines. A team’s defense is very often a function of its schedule, and more precisely, the opposing quarterbacks they face. That’s why, as my son Jack likes to say, defense has a high degree of variance from year-to-year while a good offense is more likely to be sustainable.
Heck, even during Lawson’s reps in the joint practices, Green Bay was reportedly obliterating the Jets D. Why? Because the Packers had Aaron Rodgers, one of the greatest signal-callers of All Time, picking Gang Green apart.
In modern football, QBs can effectively neutralize a pass rush by getting the ball out of their hands quicker. Defensive backs are limited in their physical contact with receivers, including how hard they can separate them from the ball upon arrival. Quarterbacks on the whole are more mobile than ever before and thus able to buy time in or out of the pocket to survey the field and locate open receivers. All this has resulted in scoring averages that have soared approximately 20% since the turn of the century.
The Jets’ plan for this season, then, was always to throw Wilson to the wolves and see where the offense stands. Why else would the organization eschew bringing in a qualified backup instead of relying on two QBs who have also never thrown a pass in an NFL regular season game and journeyman Josh Johnson, who hasn’t tossed one since 2018?
It would be a mistake to roll out a “bad defense keeps putting Wilson in tough spots” excuse the way many pundits were always looking for ways to absolve former Jets quarterback Sam Darnold. Wilson will sink or swim on his own—in fact, he appears to have significantly more weapons at his disposal than Darnold.
I do believe in the Bill Parcells axiom that a fourth quarter pass rush wins ballgames, but what are we talking about as it relates to the Jets? It’s not like anyone expected them to compete for a playoff berth. Their over/under win total for this season on most betting sites was six with Lawson and, as of this writing, it hasn’t moved.
Look at the Chargers last season with rookie Justin Herbert. They lost 9 of the first 11 games he started mainly because the defense allowed over 30 points per game. Yet by midseason, no one was questioning whether L.A. was on the right track, because, despite the results, they found their QB.
The Jets under Darnold last season, however, were losing games 36-7, 30-10, 35-9, and 40-3. If Wilson can get these games to 35-27, I’m sorry, but as brutal a hit it was to lose Lawson, in the grand scheme of things, that’s a step in the right direction for this woebegone franchise.
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