Gang Green Nation
Whenever I’m about to write about my “ top takeaway” from a preseason game, I’m always tempted to somewhat jokingly say that after eleven months I’ve forgotten how rough these exhibition contests can be to watch, particularly when we get deep into the second half.
As I’m sure you are aware, the Jets lost their second preseason game last night to the New York Giants 31-12 at MetLife Stadium. On paper, the result looks quite ugly.
The final score doesn’t matter all that much. The Giants were always very likely to win this game and quite handily. By the time you get to the second and third quarter of a preseason game, defenses gets pretty sloppy. A combination of a lack of talent, a lack of experience, a lack of chemistry, and overall training camp rust leaves big vulnerabilities for almost all of the 32 defenses that take the field in the preseason. It’s very likely that Jaxson Dart will have major growing pains if he needs to play regular season games against starting defenses, but a first round talent will almost certainly have the tools to exploit the breaches in shaky preseason defenses. By the time you reach the late third quarter and early fourth quarter, things get even sloppier. A quarterback with 87 games of starting experience like Jameis Winston will certainly feast if he gets into the game at that point.
So the focus should probably be on the starters. Even then, there aren’t that many takeaways. The Jets didn’t gameplan this week. They didn’t focus on developing the optimal schemes to attack Giants vulnerabilities. And the starters only got a couple of series.
At the point the first team left the game, the Giants led 7-3. If you want to draw sweeping conclusions over a 7-3 deficit from a quarter and change of football, be my guest. I just doubt that we will treat the score five minutes into the second quarter as significant when the real games start. I would say that we probably shouldn’t now.
Undoubtedly the play of Justin Fields will be the top topic of conversation for the week. Fields followed up a mostly successful opener in Green Bay with a mostly unsuccessful encore. He completed just 1 of 5 passes for 4 yards.
I’m not entirely certainly why anybody would render a sweeping judgment based on five passes under any circumstances. But even this limited sample size didn’t provide us with much new information about the Jets’ quarterback or their offense.
Of Fields’ four incompletions, I saw two that were impacted by pressure and two where he seemed to predetermine a throw to Garrett Wilson that fell incomplete.
Is it new for Fields to break down under pressure? It’s been one of the biggest weaknesses in his game to date. We could hope for some improvement on the margins, but it’s not like we can expect Fields to transform into a master of the pocket overnight.
When it comes to targeting...
