Gang Green Nation
The New York Jets certainly had a wild week in the lead up to their game against the Cleveland Browns. At the trade deadline, the Jets sent two of their three best players, Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams, out of town. The third of the trio, Garrett Wilson, was a total nonfactor in the Week 10 game against Cleveland and left early with an injury.
How does a 1-7 team without its top three players perform? Naturally they won.
The Jets beat the Cleveland Browns in Week 10 action 27-10.
Of course it isn’t that massive of a surprise. The Browns are one of the worst teams in the NFL themselves. They certainly played like it, making error after error, including a pair of horrendous penalties on New York’s last drive that allowed the Jets to run out the clock.
The other big factors behind the Jets’ win were a pair of special teams return touchdowns by Kene Nwangwu and Isaiah Williams, Will McDonald posting an incredible 4 sacks, and Breece Hall carrying the offense on his back late in the game.
I think it’s natural to look for some sweeping takeaways from each game, but that approach just doesn’t work sometimes.
The formula for the Jets to win this game probably won’t be repeatable in the weeks ahead. For starters, they won’t go up against a struggling rookie quarterback like Dillion Gabriel most weeks. They won’t face an opponent as mistake-prone as the Browns. Will McDonald won’t have the game of his life, and the Jets certainly won’t have one much less two special teams touchdowns.
I think there are probably around five teams in the league the Jets could have beaten playing like this. The Browns just happened to be one of those five.
Of course a big part of the reason I say this was the performance of Justin Fields. Fields followed one of the best games of his career two weeks ago in the win over the Bengals with a terrible outing in this one. He had only 54 passing yards, and 42 of them came on a screen pass that Hall took for a touchdown in the fourth quarter.
One only needs to look at where Fields was two weeks ago to see why sometimes a performance doesn’t merit a sweeping conclusion. I think most Jets fans were realistic about what Justin’s game against the Bengals meant. It was a nice moment in a rough season. It was enjoyable to watch a struggling player find success for a week, especially after his owner scapegoated the quarterback in classless fashion as the sole cause of the Jets’ struggles. It wasn’t a game that magically turned Fields into the Jets’ quarterback of the future.
So what can we and the Jets take from these wins?
Well hopefully one lesson is that the Jets need to use Breece Hall a lot. It’s difficult to explain how Hall only had 6 touches on the first 27 Jets offensive plays....
