Return of the Zach
Jets QB1 returns for the game against Houston and has the perfect opportunity to flourish.
🗽 Good morning Jets fans and welcome to Thursday’s edition of the Jets Way. First of all a very Happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating today, I hope you have a great day whatever you choose to do. We’ve got three games to look forward to later with Chicago @ Detroit in the early game (Urgh) , followed by Las Vegas @ Dallas, before finishing with Buffalo in New Orleans. Football, football, and more football. I love it.
Zach is Back 🟢
🏈 On Tuesday the Athletic’s Connor Hughes confirmed that Zach Wilson will return to the starting lineup on Sunday against the Houston Texans. The PCL sprain that has sidelined the #2 overall pick for 4 weeks is fully healed and now Zach has the perfect opportunity to showcase his skills and finish the season in style.
Season so far
🏈 Let’s just say that the season hasn’t exactly gone to plan so far, and that’s before you factor in the injury sustained against the Patriots. He’s shown flashes of brilliance like in the Tennessee game, but overall his play has been inconsistent. He’s turned the ball over too much, he’s missed too many short and intermediate throws with dodgy mechanics, and he’s failed to really get in sync with the offense at times.
Disclaimer, he’s a rookie, it happens.
The completion percentage is probably around 5% lower than you’d want at this point in his career. The average in the NFL tends to sit around 65%, give or take a couple of percentage points. That 57.5% mark sets him at 34th/35 qualifying QB’s leading only New Orleans Trevor Siemian’s 56.9%.
Most of the rookies are struggling with their accuracy outside of Mac Jones (70.2%) and Davis Mills who is currently at 67%. Justin Fields is 33rd with 58.1% and Trevor Lawrence is 32nd with 58.4%, it’s not uncommon to see accuracy issues early as players get used to the speed of the game, but by the end of the season, you’d like to see that around the 62% mark at least, if not a little higher.
Deep Shot 🎯
🏈 Intended air yards is a good stat to show the kinds of plays the QB’s are trying to make. The higher their number, the deeper their targets tend to be.
For example, Mac Jones completes 70.2% of his passes which is the 2nd best accuracy mark in the NFL, but his intended air yards of 7.6 rank 21st in the league. That isn’t a slight on Jones, that’s just a little bit of context to better understand and appreciate the numbers. Dak Prescott for example is 3rd in overall accuracy at 69.6% but 18th in terms of intended air yards, so a similar mark to Mac Jones.
Zach is extremely low in accuracy and very high in intended air yards. His 8.7 ranks 6th highest in the league, you want a QB that’s able to push the ball downfield, but you need a QB who can complete the simple throws. It’s a similar issue with Justin Fields who’s IAY is a league-leading 10.3, as a rookie, I’m not sure you want that.
Mike LaFleur is in a better rhythm in terms of play-calling now he’s in the booth and I’m looking forward to seeing how Zach does with John Beck on the sideline. The system we ran with Flacco and White is the same system, same scheme, same concepts, but the flow felt better. Zach’s average depth of target is 9.1 yards which is 17th highest in the league, and Joe Flacco’s wasn’t a million miles behind that at 8.3. Zach will always take a few chances deep, that’s his game, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see that ADOT come down from 9.1 to around that Flacco mark at 8.3 considering the system we run.
Accuracy 🏹
🏈 This table perfectly highlights where Zach needs to improve. He ranks dead last amongst all qualifying QB’s in terms of accuracy on short and intermediate throws but ranks 3rd in terms of deep-ball accuracy.
Here’s the good part. Throwing the deep ball accurately tends to be more difficult than the shorter stuff. If you can hit a man in stride 40 yards downfield, you should be able to do that on a 6 yard out. There are some mechanical issues with Zach’s footwork, but any good coach should be able to sort that out.
In short, I’d rather he be able to throw deep and need to improve the underneath and intermediate stuff than have that down and need to improve the deep ball. But that accuracy between 0-19 yards is going to be a huge deciding factor in whether he keeps this offense humming, or we go back to earlier season stagnation.
Schedule 📆
🏈 Although not completely plain sailing for the rest of the way. Zach will have the opportunity to restart his rookie season against some favorable matchups.
Over the next three weeks, the Jets play the Texans, Eagles, and Saints. None of those have top 10 pass defenses on the season as a whole, and if you drill down to recency (last 3 weeks worth of data) then the Texans rank 30th, Eagles 26th and New Orleans 18th in regards to passing yards allowed per game. By contrast, the Jets 324 passing yards per game over the last three weeks ranks them #1 in the league.
The offense has been humming with Mike White, Josh Johnson and Joe Flacco, mainly because all three have played to the strengths of the offensive system, which is more of a horizontal attack than a vertical one. Zach Wilson is more than capable of making all the same plays and some, and that’s why he’s QB1. But, the decision-making on when to push the ball and when to just get it into the hands of your playmakers is the area where we need to see development, and I think we will.
Decision-Making 🤔
🏈 When people ask what I’d like to see from Zach in the 2nd half of the season, I often say an improvement in decision-making and process speed.
Disclaimer here, Zach takes a lot more deep shots, so sometimes his average time to throw will naturally be longer because he needs the play to develop. But in both categories, the time to throw is longer than you’d want it to be, and it may explain some of those issues with the shorter and intermediate routes.
A lot of those routes are about getting the ball out quickly and in rhythm, if you hold the ball for even a split second too long, the window closes and it’s tough to complete.
Again, you see this a lot with rookies, they tend to hold onto the ball for too long because the game is going a hundred miles an hour. But that 3.93 while under pressure will be part scrambling to try and make a play, but also not knowing where the hot route is and when to just get rid of the ball. Zach’s pressure to sack conversion rate is 23.5% which is significantly higher than Mike White at 8.9% and Joe Flacco at 10.5%.
It’s the same story when being blitzed. At the moment Zach is completing 42.6% of passes when blitzed, which is the lowest mark of any rookie and the 2nd worst mark in the NFL.
All these things are typical of your rookie QB and do tend to improve with reps. In the first 8 weeks of the season, Justin Fields’ pressure to sack rate was 31.7%, in the last three weeks that’s dropped to 22.7%. He and the other QB’s have had the benefit of reps, Zach hasn’t had that at the moment.
Help 🤝
🏈 While Zach can be his own worst enemy when it comes to pressure, there’s not much he can do about the drops. 12.6% of his accurate throws were dropped by his receivers (I’m looking at you Corey Davis), that’s the highest mark on the team, Mike White in comparison only had 6.4% of his passes dropped.
Zach Wilson’s mark is the 4th highest in the league and 2nd highest when you discount QB’s who have attempted less than 40 passes. Only the 49’ers are more culpable of hurting their rookie QB, dropping 13.8% of Trey Lance’s passes.
Conclusion 📝
🏈 This is a really important stretch for Zach. I don’t think we should expect wonders, but if he can complete around 62% of his passes for 10 TD and 5 INT’s while showing better accuracy in the short and intermediate game, then that sets up the 2022 season nicely.
He needs to continue to get the ball to guys like Moore, the 2021 season is mainly about Zach Wilson’s development, but it’s not only about his development. Moore has burst onto the scene with Mike White and Joe Flacco as his QB’s, not we need to see that relationship develop with Zach.
I’m excited to see what happens.