Gang Green Nation
For the most part, the best teams in the NFL have balance. It’s important to have more than one way to win a game. There will be weeks where your offense is down. In cases like that, it’s important to have a defense that can pick up the slack and carry you to victory. In a game where the defense is struggling, a good offense can win a shootout.
The inverse can also be true. On truly bad teams even when one unit plays surprisingly a surprisingly strong game, the other unit can be weak enough to produce a loss.
It was true in Week 1 when a dazzling Jets offense wasn’t enough to overcome an awful defense. It was again the case yesterday in London as the Jets wasted a stellar defensive effort because the offense couldn’t function on a basic level.
Steve Wilks’ defense had been much-maligned through the first five weeks of the season and rightly so. The Jets defense was a mess. It found some answers in Week 6, though. There were personnel changes. Jermaine Johnson returned from an ankle injury that had kept him out for three games. Malachi Moore and Jarvis Brownlee also took bigger roles. There also seemed to be some changes to philosophy. At least by my eyeball test, it seemed like the Jets took on more of a bend but don’t break approach. Either way, it’s tough to argue with the results. The defense allowed only 13 points and put 2 on the board with a safety forced on an end zone hold (drawn by lighting rod for criticism Micheal Clemons no less).
It didn’t matter because of how bad the Jets offense was. The unit produced only three field goals. All three scoring drives were set up by short fields.
Most of the blame will correctly fall on the shoulders of Justin Fields. It was another distressingly bad performance by the quarterback. Fields completed 9 of 17 passes for only 45 yards. He took an incredible 9 sacks. And while a big sack day typically generates a lot of criticism of the offensive line, it is clear that Fields played a major hand in his own demise.
Fields has always flashed some ability to play at a high level through his career. Unfortunately those moments have been too infrequent. They have also been accompanied by low moments that have come too often and have been really low.
When the Jets signed Fields, the hope was that he could be developed to flash the high end stuff on a more frequent basis and reduce the frequency and depth of his bad games.
Unfortunately through six weeks it seems like Fields has regressed. The quarterback he was in Chicago wasn’t good enough, but he is playing at a lower level in New York. His current QBR of 36.4 is significantly lower than the 46.9 he posted in 2023, the year that convinced the Bears to give up on him.
Perhaps most disturbing...
