A Stratosphere Away

Edition #925: Jets put down a stinker as they're dominated by the Bills, Fields in concussion protocol, defense looks woeful.

Good Morning ☕

And just like that all the positivity vanished into thin air.

I said this in the chat last night. I knew we were losing that game as soon as Michael Clemons committed a personal foul on 3rd and 19. Instead of the Bills punting the ball, we gave them 15 yards and a first down, they turned that into a touchdown and the Jets never got close after that.

You guys know that I like to stay pretty positive, especially at the start of the season. But there is nothing to be positive about after that game. Nothing.

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A Broken Franchise

I’m not a superstitious person. When I was playing sports I didn’t have a pre-game ritual, I didn’t put my socks on in any particular order, I didn’t have a lucky charm that I stuffed into my boots. But I can’t help but think that this entire franchise is cursed, broken and cursed.

The Bills allowed over 400 yards to the Ravens, 238 rushing yards, 8.6 yards per play. They allowed over 50% of third downs to be converted and Henry ran for 169 yards on just 18 carries.

The Jets yesterday had 154 yards, 100 rushing yards, went for 3.3 yards per play and completed 0% of their third downs. The QB1 completed 3 passes for 27 yards, the RB1 had 29 yards on 10 carries (2.9 per carry), we allowed 4 sacks, missed a ton of tackles and while the Bills had more penalties, ours always come at the worst time, extending drives that should have been momentum killers.

Let’s not forget that the Bills were missing Ed Oliver and Taron Johnson. Just going to leave that right here.

Justin Fields QBR was 1.1 yesterday. I’ll be completely honest, I wasn’t aware you could have a QBR that low. It was the worst game of his career by far. His accuracy was off from the start, his timing was a mess, and so was his footwork. Now he is in the concussion protocol and there’s a good chance he misses the game next week.

Every single positive we saw in week one was absent in week two. And for the second week in a row, the home crowd was filled with away fans. MetLife is now a neutral stadium thanks to the greed of Woody Johnson and the lackluster performances over the last few decades.

"It's not OK, it's not OK to lose like that," Glenn said. "I'm not a big fan of sitting here and telling everybody, 'Guys, it's OK.' No, no, you don't just lose like that and it's OK." Changing a culture is extremely difficult and it doesn’t happen in one off-season, but I think Glenn is now starting to understand just how difficult it’s going to be to turn this franchise around. While he can’t cut every player who makes a mistake, the likes of Clemons needs to understand that there are consequences for ill-disciplined play.

Yesterday looked a lot like what we saw under the Robert Saleh regime. Poor offensive output with poor QB play. A lack of discipline at all the key moments, lots of missed tackles and a post game press conference where the HC said it wasn’t acceptable but that he’d need to watch the tape. Although Glenn took a lot of the responsibility on his shoulders stating "Apparently, I didn't have the guys ready to play."

"First off, I've got to take a look at myself," Glenn said. "I want to take a look at every player, and I want to take a look at every coach. There's no stone that won't go unturned without figuring out the issue."

The Jets have now given up 30+ points in back-to-back games and just based on what we’ve seen, I think it’s safe to say that this defense will end up as one of the worst in the league this year, and that’s not a good look for a HC who’s background is on the defensive side of the ball. Only the Dolphins have allowed more points over the first two games in the AFC and only the Bears have conceded more in the NFC, so right now the Jets are 30th in scoring defense.

I know it’s important to not overreact to one game. Last week we played well, and we lost. This week we played badly and we lost. We’re already 2 games back in the division and travel to Tampa to take on the Bucs next week, a team who could be 2-0 depending on what happens tonight. At least the Jets should be used to playing in a hostile environment after two games at home. But Baker Mayfield, Evans and Egbuka are going to absolutely embarrass this defense.

For some reason the Jets just wanted to play a lot of cover-1 press yesterday, and Josh Allen will absolutely carve that up every single day, Mayfield will do the same. There was a serious lack of adjustment but I just hated the defensive gameplan as well. I need to watch it again, but I can’t remember many plays where they gave Allen different looks from the safety position. Playing single high exclusively is going to lead to problems when playing a half decent QB.

The Jets missed 9 tackles including the Quincy Williams one on the James Cook TD. Watching it with the naked eye, I thought we missed a lot more than that. Those stats are courtesy of NextGen, we’ll see what PFF say in our stats update tomorrow.

Were there any positive from yesterday? There were a couple of firsts.

Jeremy Ruckert scored his first NFL TD in garbage time, this is his 4th season in the league so I’m not going to be doing cartwheels down Broadway about that.

Briggs got his first sack as a yet. But when you allow over 400 yards with 200+ of those coming on the ground, I don’t think it’s a performance to celebrate.

Tyron Taylor came in and looked healthy, that’s a good thing. But overall this is a tape that you burn. The ultimate embarrassment in football is your divisional rival being able to rest their starting QB down the stretch because the game is safe. Which is exactly what the Bills did with Josh Allen yesterday.

I’m fearing that we’re going to be talking draft by mid October at this rate.

"Very frustrating," was how Garrett Wilson put it "I always feel like we have a good plan. We had a good week of practice, and we come out and lay an egg when it matters, so we have to figure it out. I don't know. I don't exactly know how that happened."

Maybe the team were listening to the praise a little too much last week. Well they’re about to be pelted with negativity for the next 6 days and how they respond in Tampa will tell us a lot about this team. Are they any different from Jets teams of the past? Are they made of stronger stuff? We had some questions following last weeks loss, we have a lot more following this weeks loss.