Gang Green Nation
Jets quarterback Justin Fields is in the spotlight this week for all the wrong reasons. The Jets fell to the Broncos 13-11 in London in Week 6. Fields finished the game completing only 9 of 17 passes for 45 yards. He took 9 sacks, which led the Jets to finish the game with -10 passing yards. All three Jets scoring drives were aided by great field position. I could go on. I think you have the gist. It was an ugly performance.
So where does this leave us?
You could be the biggest Justin Fields believer in the world. When the team finishes a game with negative net passing yardage, the quarterback has to take a heaping portion of the blame.
Particularly frustrating are the relatively simple throws that Fields missed. Take this one from the final Jets offensive drive.
This is a third and eight from the Denver 44. The game is on the line, and the Jets are trying to get the ball to their best receiver. Garrett Wilson goes into motion, which gets him away from Patrick Surtain II.
This not only gets Wilson away from one of the league’s best corners. It gives him a free release at the line of scrimmage and a cushion that makes the short out route he’s running impossible to cover.
This is where Wilson is at the top of Fields’ drop.
Fields just stares it down, though, and throws late. This is where Wilson is at the point the ball is thrown.
Wilson runs out of real estate, and the throw leads him too far upfield. It ends up incomplete.
Despite all of the struggles in the first 59 minutes of the game, the Jets very well might have won the game had Fields hit that pass. It likely would have put the ball into Nick Folk’s range. (On a side note, I was at the game on Sunday. I watched Folk warm up, and kicking to that side of the field, he came up well short trying practice field goals from 57 yards out. So any criticism of Aaron Glenn passing up a 62 yard try after this play is misplaced.) With an on time throw, Wilson might have had enough space to turn it up the field and pick up a big gain. This is just a miss by Fields. Playing quarterback in the NFL is difficult enough without missing the relative layups like this one.
It is important, however, to determine whether the rest of the offense was executing at a high level. Was this the quarterback squandering an otherwise winning effort by the rest of the offense, or was the quarterback part of a broken infrastructure? In this game, I think it is clear it was the latter of the two.
There are plays in which Fields and the rest of the offense must share some of the blame.
Let’s talk about the play which followed the...
