Penalty Problems

Edition #521

Good morning!

I’ve had a few work things come up over the last 24 hours, so this is going to be very short and sweet and we’ll aim to potentially send a newsletter on Sunday as we prepare for the game. It may be that makes more sense going forward.

Anyway, I wanted to give everyone a place to discuss your New York Jets on this Thursday morning.

Robert Saleh confirmed that the Jets have officials at all practices in the hope that they can get their penalties under control.

The Jets actually started the season as one of the more disciplined teams in football being called for just 10 penalties across the first 3 weeks of the season.

But then that unravelled against the Chiefs with some questionable calls meaning they were tagged for 7 penalties, they’ve never been below that number since:

The offence was responsible for 7 of the 8 penalties against the Raiders, but the defence has become undisciplined as well. Through the first 3 weeks of the season, they had 3 total penalties. They then had 18 through the next four games before settling down again to be called for just 4 penalties over the last two games.

Coach Saleh was asked what he was doing to address the issue:

Aside from talking about it, showing it on tape. Like I said, a lot of the penalties that we’re struggling with are in play and it’s just a matter of making sure that you’re clean with your technique, being where you need to be, coaching it the right way and just stressing the details of what it takes to execute a perfect football play and there’s some where from a biased view, you’d say ‘God, that shouldn’t have been called,’ but then there’s others where it’s just plain as day, where we needed to be better, whether it’s head placement, hand placement, footwork, play design, so it’s a little bit everything and just making sure we’re clean in those regards.

The issue is it’s not just one issue. No team in football has been called for more roughing the passer penalties than the Jets (5) but that makes up a small number of the penalties. They’re also joint first for having unnecessary roughness penalties called on them, and that’s down to discipline instilled from the top. Some calls are bogus, but you also need to be aware of what is and what isn’t going to be called. It doesn’t matter if you agree with it, you just need to know it’s going to get called. What you need from the officials is consistency.

The Jets don’t have an issue with offensive holding penalties, but they do have an issue with false starts, having 14 on the season which is a top-10 number. They’re also tied for first on things like chopblocks and illegal blindside blocks. Again, small numbers and spread across a number of issues.

A lot of the false start issues can be attributed to two things:

1. The number of changes we’ve seen on the offensive line.

2. The change in QB from Rodgers to Wilson

We heard all off-season how unique the Aaron Rodgers cadence was and how the team had to get used to it, it’s a small thing but switching out of that on the fly and adapting to Zach Wilson’s cadence can be tricky. But you’re getting paid a lot of money, so it’s on them to sort it out.

I wanted to share the full quote from Robert Saleh on the release of Michael Carter:

Love Michael (Carter). I think everyone recognizes how great of a teammate he’s been over the last couple of years. I really appreciate all the things that he’s done. It came down, one, just want to give Izzy (Israel Abanikanda) an opportunity. He’s a good young back and we felt like it wouldn’t be fair for Michael to just sit there and rot on the bench and ask him to be a great teammate and all that stuff. When for him, he’s been so good to us, we felt like for him just to get an opportunity to go play for a team that would allow him to tote the rock and kind of be the feature back that we all think he could be, but part of it is him being a victim of being part of a running back room that’s got three good football players, but I’m pumped for him. I’m pretty sure he’s going to get claimed today and he’s going to get an opportunity and he’s going to show why he’s capable of it, so excited for him to get this fresh start, but releasing him was more about allowing him the opportunity to go get one rather than just be selfish and have him be on our on our bench.

I’ve been a fan of MC, and he was picked up by Arizona yesterday so he’ll get an opportunity to go in there and stake a claim to a starting spot, although he’ll be competing with James Conner and Emari Demercado. He’s certainly got a better shot at winning that job than he did winning a bigger role with the Jets. So in the end the Jets did do right by him.

C.J. Uzomah is an interesting case study to me and it sounds as though Jeremy Ruckert will start taking some of his snaps. Uzomah has had a number of issues this year, has caught just 8 balls and has dropped a touchdown. But his issues go beyond his receiving ability.

Uzomah has always been regarded as a good teammate, but he’s never been a great blocker. He’s performing below his career standard, but his career standard was average at best.

Over his entire career, he’s allowed 6 sacks and 22 pressures on just 292 pass-blocking snaps, and although PFF are rating him above average in his run-blocking this year, it doesn’t make up for his pass-blocking inefficiency