Saints march past Jets
Ouch!
🗽 Good morning Jets fans. Apologies the newsletter is a touch late today. Usually, I write it straight after the game but I couldn’t bear to go back over that one last night, so I decided to leave it until this morning.
Help me not
When you're down a WR1, WR2, TE1, RB1 and RB2, you’re probably going to struggle just a little bit. The Jets struggled a lot. Over the course of the first half, the Jets receivers failed to get any separation, Ty Johnson dropped 3 passes in the first quarter alone and some bad penalties by Denzel Mims had the Jets going backward.
Help them out
Don’t blame it all on the receivers though. Zach Wilson was poor yesterday, make no mistake about it. Right now he’s not receiver friendly, and what I mean by that is he fails to make their job easier, in fact, his timing and ball placement make it much harder. You may get away with that when you have Elijah Moore and Corey Davis but you won’t when your supporting cast is diminished. Zach really didn’t move the ball until garbage time when the Saints backed off, at one point deep into the 3rd quarter he had less than 100 passing yards. He’s still missing the easy layups, this week bouncing a ball to Berrios in the flat and completely missing Griffin on a short one. The ball is coming out super wobbly at the moment too, that won’t make catching it any easier.
Defense bent… then broke
There were points yesterday where I believed the Jets defense were playing well, it’s hard to keep Kamara down but as Saleh said in his post-game press conference, the Saints were going at under 4 yards a carry at one point. The issue was the Jets inability to get off the field when they really needed to. The Saints had the ball for nearly 39 minutes compared to the 21 minutes for the Jets. That’s a huge disparity. If you keep the likes of Taysom Hill and Alvin Kamara on the field for 40 minutes, they're eventually going to have success. In the end the Saints scored 30 points and rushed for over 200 yards, so it goes down as a bad game for the defense.
Denzel!
Illegal hands to the face and illegal formation penalties on the same drive relegated Mims to the bench for the rest of the game. Saleh said it wasn’t a punishment but when D. J Montgomery gets playing time over you, it’s absolutely a punishment. Saleh said Mims will get another chance next week but right now he looks completely clueless out there and worse than that he doesn’t look bothered at all. Unless something changes over the final 4 games, Mims won’t be back in NY next year. He’s a 6'3 receiver who runs sub 4.4, you’d get someone to bite on that upside.
3rd down issues
The Jets offense struggled on pretty much every single down yesterday but none more so than on 3rd down where they were just 3-14. You're not going to win too many games with that kind of conversion rate on a key down. I don’t know if it was poor play-calling, poor execution, or a mixture of both. We'll find out when we take another look (yay).
Eddy!
Finally, the Jets got a little consistency at the kicker position with Piñeiro hitting 3/3 field goals with a long of 46, but I don’t think the Jets have found the answer to their kicking problems. Maybe it’s just his style, but despite them going through, the kicking didn’t look that convincing and punter Braden Mann had to take care of kickoffs. I’ll take it for now, but I’m not sure I’d want to put my faith in Eddy’s leg in the postseason, unfortunately, we don’t need to worry about that for at least another year.
📝 Stat Zone 📉
Zach Wilson recorded 10 off-target throws according to ESPN, that's the highest single-game mark for Zach all season.
A Jets QB has now been sacked in 48 straight games, the longest active streak in the NFL.
The Saints are now 36-1 since 2018 when leading at the half.
The Saints are 108-16 under Sean Payton when scoring 30+ points.
Zach Wilson completed just 45% of his passes, the 2nd-lowest completion pct with a minimum of 40 pass attempts this season. The other? Sam Darnold, 41.5% Week 6 vs. Vikings. (h/t Rich Cimini)
Who Said What
Ty Johnson on three drops in the first quarter:
“They hit my hands and I dropped them. What else is there to say?”
Coach Saleh on his young players and seeing improvement:
“I promise you they’ll be better next week”
Saleh on the issues on offense and if not having Moore and Davis were the reason for it:
“We could have been a lot better with or without.”
Ty Johnson when asked about the Saint defense and what they did well:
“They get away at holding a lot,” - but he did go on to give them credit, saying they’re good at what they do.
Put it to bed
I’ll have to convince myself to watch that one again when the All-22 comes out tomorrow, best place for that game is in the history books. It was lifeless, dull, lacking any real storylines or many positive plays for the Jets. I thought the offense were horrendous and while the defense made a few plays, they had too many missed tackles again and the lack of quality talent on the 2nd and 3rd level is quite clear. Lets move past this one and look forward to the Miami game at the weekend, that Dolphins defense continues to improve so it doesn’t get any easier for Zach.