New Jets Book Starts With Familiar Script
It would have been poetic had Robert Saleh, on the weekend of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the event where he feared he lost his brother who worked in the South Tower and then motivated him to trade in his banking job to pursue his passion for coaching football, had engineered a Jets victory in his professional head coaching debut in Carolina on Sunday.
Alas, as fans well know, the Jets are rarely capable of composing beautiful prose, or even laying down the foundation to a compelling verse. To the contrary, their figurative drivel typically has to be crumpled up and tossed in the trash every few years so they can start fresh.
Saleh and his staff are the Jets’ latest iteration, and while one game is too soon to call for everyone to be shot into the sun, there are concerns, some of which I laid out to you in recent columns and came to fruition in Sunday’s 19–14 defeat that wasn’t nearly as close as the final score suggested.
New York fell behind, 16-0, in the second quarter thanks to a baffling offensive game plan. They never had a possession down by one score after the former Jets combination of quarterback Sam Darnold and wide receiver Robby Anderson hooked up for a 57-yard touchdown bomb with about 4 minutes before the intermission.
Offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur is responsible for play calling, but Saleh has at minimum blessed a philosophy that hinders the development of rookie quarterback Zach Wilson, whom the Jets selected with the No. 2 pick after trading Darnold to Carolina this offseason. Between the ultra-conservative play-calling, an overmatched offensive line, and some key drops by receivers, the kid had almost no chance to succeed in front of a rather significant contingent of Jets fans (including me) who made the trip to Charlotte.
I knew Wilson would be under constant duress based on all the training camp reports, telling my son that he would go down four times on Sunday. It turned out I was too optimistic, as Wilson was sacked six times and endured 10 QB official hits, a massive undercount in my observations, that didn’t even include all the times Wilson escaped encounters where a Panther had him dead to rights.
While there were a few instances where Wilson held onto the ball a bit too long and the line has to be able to block the men in front of them, a good chunk of the blame for such a pathetic operation belongs to the coaching staff.
The New York Post’s Brian Costello recently laid out some bullet points of the new Jets Way document, some of which looks like the Same Old Jets. In particular, the team has stated that it wants to commit to a running game, for reasons that are bogus. As college coach Mike Leach said, at different times, “There’s nothing balanced about 50% run/50% pass because that’s 50% stupid,” and “If you’re establishing the run against an 8-man box, you ain’t establishing s#*t.”
Unartful commentary aside, the theory has been advanced by those who’ve looked at the data. It shows that throwing on early downs is more likely to be a winning formula, whereas teams that rely on runs are more in the “playing not to lose” category. Where have we heard that before?
Simply put, it’s a passing league. Yet LaFleur dialed up handoffs on New York’s first seven first-down snaps before allowing Wilson to get a look at a base defense with 9:43 remaining in the second quarter. Not so ironically, a 14-yard catch-and-run by rookie running back Michael Carter on a 1st-and-10 on the following Jets possession exceeded the cumulative yards gained (13) on the aforementioned seven running plays.
With all the jailbreaks the Jets offensive line allowed, with so many Panthers defenders running free to the quarterback off basic concepts like stunts, you’d think LaFleur would have understood that getting Wilson into must-throw situations would be counterproductive.
Nope, LaFleur and Saleh are disciples of 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, who is also known for using a heavy dose of early-down runs. The difference? Shanahan has the horses to pull it off.
In scoring 24 offensive points (they also added a pick-six) in the first half of their contest in Detroit, San Francisco had a nearly 50% run/pass split, but averaged 5 yards on 7 runs (including two touchdowns) and over 9 yards on six pass attempts.
Like prior Jets coach Adam Gase with running back Frank Gore last season, Saleh and LaFleur seem to have their own favorite in Tevin Coleman, a former Niner. Gase was infamous for feeding Gore the ball no matter his effectiveness. Similarly, LaFleur entrusted Coleman with 6 first-half carries that generated 12 yards before the Jets deficit grew large enough to effectively abandon the run and limit Coleman to 17 total snaps. (Side note: Why were so many of the handoffs directed to the right side of the Jets offensive line or up the middle as opposed to running behind massive left tackle Mekhi Becton?)
On the other side of the ledger, wide receiver Denzel Mims, a 2020 second-round draft pick, received exactly three offensive snaps, one of which he turned into a 40-yard gain, albeit late in the fourth quarter. Rookie Elijah Moore, who many reporters considered the Jets top performer throughout training camp, was invisible except for two drops.
If you’re looking for a notable difference from last season’s 2-14 debacle, though, it’s that Saleh didn’t give up on the game like Gase often did. Wilson hung in through some savage beatings and tossed the first two touchdown passes of his hopefully lengthy career (though more games like that and he could easily morph into David Carr, a former No. 1 overall pick who needed treatment for shell shock after his first few seasons getting battered in Houston).
Of course, this being the Jets, the first Wilson strike, a 22-yarder to a wide-open Corey Davis in the end zone, was marred by a scary injury to Becton, who was forced to leave the game and will undergo an MRI to confirm an initially-reported sprained MCL.
No matter the author, the Jets are nothing but predictable.