Welcome To Jets Training Camp: Where Hope Has Crashed And Burned
Here’s what being a lifelong Jets fan has brought me: The death of hope. When Gang Green’s veterans arrive on Tuesday to open training camp for the 2022 season, all delusions of positivity that I may have had in the past about what’s in store for this team have been erased.
No, the opening of camp only means I’ve inched another year closer to my death without ever getting the opportunity to watch my favorite team participate in a Super Bowl. Everything else that I expect to happen will be just noise. Am I really supposed to get excited about the possibility that, if all goes really, really well, this club might be able to reach seven wins?
Some call it the “Same Old Jets” syndrome, but it goes deeper than that. For the past 53 years, the players coaches, executives, and yes, even the owners have changed. They’ve tried coaches old and young. Nice guys and gruff guys. Those with an offensive bent and others who built their careers on the defensive side of the ball. Yet, with rare exceptions, this team has maintained an irrelevancy that has defied the NFL’s bias towards parity.
The nation just saw the Cincinnati Bengals, long known as one of the league’s worst-run franchises, catapult into the elite through shrewd drafting and player development. Other than a near-miss in 2015, the Jets haven’t even come close to sniffing a playoff berth in the last 11 seasons.
And, despite some solid offseason efforts, they are no closer now.
For this season, Jets fans are supposed to get all hyped up by the slew of young players that have been infused into the roster, particularly on offense, by General Manager Joe Douglas. While it’s true that as many as five of New York’s expected 11 offensive starters will be rookies and sophomores, their success will be determined by how well their talents are developed by this coaching staff.
And what Jets fan, perchance, has any confidence in that? Many of the coaches, led by Robert Saleh, are as green in their field as the players on the field they are tutoring.
Saleh, as I have often complained, tends to abide by philosophies that are in contrast to where the modern game has evolved. You listen to his press conferences and he’s often talking about how the game is about winning third downs. Never mind that, as NFL data expert Warren Sharp recently tweeted, the following teams were the best in the league at AVOIDING third downs last season:
1. KC- made AFC Conference Championship
2. TB- second best record in the NFL
3. GB- No. 1 seed and first round bye
4. SF- made NFC Championship Game
5. LAR- Super Bowl Champion
The Jets, using plays called by Offensive Coordinator Mike LaFleur, who will also be entering his second season in that capacity, called 1st-and-10 runs on 112 of 200 first-half snaps in 2021. Of the six teams that ran it more often, only Saleh’s old mates in San Francisco made it into the above top 5 ranking.
No one is expecting this to change this season after the Jets traded up to select running back Breece Hall near the top of the second round of the 2022 NFL Draft. So, this is their plan to turbocharge quarterback Zach Wilson’s development as he heads into his second pro season? By putting him into more second-and-third-and-longs? Good grief.
You’d have to have a QB who is deadly accurate to succeed in such a manner, and Wilson was anything but as a rookie. When passing out of a clean pocket last season, which is considered by many data analysts to be a useful measuring stick, Wilson completed 67% of them, the fifth-worst efficiency among the 32 QBs with at least 100 dropbacks.
NFL history isn’t rife with examples of quarterbacks who’ve rebounded from a rookie season as poor as Wilson’s. Even Buffalo’s Josh Allen, who is often cited by many as the poster child of such outliers, didn’t turn the corner until his third season, and only after the Bills acquired a game-breaking wide receiver in Stefon Diggs. So, while it’s always possible for Wilson to make a positive leap in Year 2, the odds are heavily stacked against him.
Just like the odds that the Jets will take a leap this season from the joke of a franchise that they’ve been for most of my life.