Humiliation At Home

Edition #710

Good morning.

I’ll repeat what I put on ‘X’ this morning. I have absolutely no energy for this football team this morning. I like to write these reviews on Monday morning so I have time to reflect on the game and not make emotional proclamations. Well, I’m as pissed this morning as I was when I went to bed last night. As soon as I’m done here I’m turning my full focus to the Mets as they try and clinch a playoff spot in Atlanta today.

I always try and put a positive spin on performances and at 2-2 and one game out of first in the AFC East, it’s not like the season is over. But, right now, I feel absolutely no positivity towards this team. That game against the Sam Darnold led Vikings who find themselves 4-0 could be an absolute disaster. We’ll see. I feel for anyone who paid good money to go and sit in the rain and watch that team yesterday.

Even if that Greg Zuerlein FG went through with 52 seconds to go, this still would have been an embarrassing performance.

Let’s just say the defence did their job. When you hold a team to 10 points at home with a Hall of Fame QB, you should win the game. So while some of the tackling was questionable at times, they did their job. I’m not going to poke holes at a unit who allowed 10 points. Aaron Rodgers is 33-2 in his career when his defense allowed 10 points or less. It’s rare for a team to lose games when they hold their opponent under 10 points, Saleh has managed it twice in the last year.

The blame for this loss, the entire blame for this loss can rest on the shoulders of the offence. Denver are a good defence, in three of the four games they’ve played they’ve held opponents to under 15 points. But the Jets are supposed to be a good offence and good offences score more than three field goals at home, even if the conditions sucked

"The weather sucked, but so did some of my throws," said Aaron Rodgers afterwards. This was only the 5th time in his 20 year career that he finished a game without the offence having scored a touchdown.

It’s hard to argue with that sentiment, but the issues obviously went far beyond Aaron Rodgers. Let’s just mention a few of them.

Offensive Line - One of the worst performances I’ve seen from a starting offensive line in some time. Aaron Rodgers was hit 14 times, and sacked on 5 occasions. There were multiple false starts, holding penalties. They gave us absolutely no time in the pass game and created zero movement in the run game. The left side of the line in particular was an absolute embarrassment. It may actually be time to worry about Tyron Smith, who has looked a world away from the All-Pro he is. Simpson looked as though he was playing in his first game and that false start on 4th and 1 was one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever seen. Everyone and their mums knew it was going to be a hard count in that situation and had Simpson not moved then Denver were jumping, new set of first downs and Allen takes that in. Instead we move back, kick the field goal and didn’t sniff the end zone again. If the offensive line keeps playing like this, Aaron Rodgers is going to get hurt and the season will be done. Rodgers got checked out yesterday but was able to return and confirmed he’ll be fine for Sunday.

Wide Receivers - Do the receivers practice with Aaron Rodgers during the week? As it sure as hell didn’t look like it. On numerous occasions Rodgers and the receivers seemed to be on different wave lengths, hell they seemed to be in different playbooks. The cuts weren’t clean, the routes weren’t run with the precision you want to see. Rodgers expected cuts at certain points which didn’t materialise, which resulted in a lot of throws hitting the turf. We were promised this elite connection between Rodgers and Wilson and they look on completely different pages at the moment. Wilson is frustrated as he’s not getting a lot of the ball, Rodgers is frustrated as Wilson doesn’t appear to be where he’s expected. We expected Surtain to shadow Garrett and while he was on him a lot, there were plays where Wilson drew coverage from CB2 or CB3 and the connection wasn’t there.

Breece Hall - I love Breece, I think he’s an absolute star in the making. But it was clear as day that he didn’t have it yesterday from the first two carries. His footing was completely off, he seemed to be hesitant hitting the line, and while the offensive line was getting very little push, he seemed to be just running into the back of his teammates. He got more carries than Braelon Allen despite averaging 0.4 yards a carry. You read that right, 0.4 yards a carry. Allen averaged 4.2 and got just 8 carries in the game, in absolutely awful weather. Someone explain that to me?

Coaching Staff - Which leads me nicely onto the coaching staff. Aaron may be able to audible out of some plays, but he doesn’t really impact the personnel groupings that head onto the field. When you are at the goal-line, use your big back that you brought in for these exact situations. Breece has a great skillset, but if there is ever a play to get your yards after contact guy on, it’s when you need just half a yard after contact. The offensive line were doing nothing, so it was down to the RB. Breece got stuffed multiple times and then we threw the ball. Nathaniel Hackett is an absolute joke of a coordinator and even Aaron Rodgers can’t save him this time. But it’s not just on Hackett when it comes to coaching staff blame. Robert Saleh yet again, put out a team who were not ready to play. 13 more penalties for the Jets, and a lot of them were avoidable. I don’t know if Saleh is too easy on the team or there is a lack of intensity in the sessions through the season, but it is a very common trend that the Jets start slow. When I say slow I mean super slow. "We had some chances, but [we made] way too many mental mistakes, too many poor throws," Rodgers said. "We just missed some easy stuff -- some protection stuff that should've been easy and some route-adjustment stuff that should've been easy. I don't know, our focus just wasn't as sharp as the first few weeks." - Lack of focus is on the players, but it’s also on the coaches.

We could go on and on about how disappointing that performance was. Were the Jets too overconfident? they came in as 8 point favourites and walked away with a 1 point loss, nothing says same old Jets like that does. They came in with the best third down efficiency in the league and converted just 4/17. They came in with a top-5 red zone unit and came away without a touchdown. They came in off the back of a 400 yard offensive performance and failed to get over the 250 mark. They averaged just 3.5 points per play.

I want to banish this game to the depths of history, to be resurfaced only when we achieve some success. I don’t know if we’ll look at this again tomorrow, maybe we’ll move straight onto the Vikings. Maybe we’ll try and dig out some positives and highlight those. For now, I don’t want to think about this team at all.

Here’s the one positive. Nobody else in the AFC won yesterday.

The Bills were taken apart by the Ravens (35-10) allowing over 400 yards and 7.9 yards per play. They were bad in protection, they were bad on third down and I think they came crashing back to earth after an unexpected 3-0 start. But as Jets fans, we can’t exactly point the finger. But it’s good to still be one game out of first place.

New England did what we expected New England to do, they got blown out in San Francisco (30-13) and it probably could and should have been a higher gap. The 49ers had over 400 yards of offence, the Patriots managed just 3.5 yards per play. So as good as we felt beating the Patriots last Thursday, it looks as though they’ll be challenging for the #1 overall pick in the draft.