The Offensive Line Carousel

Edition #301

Good morning!

A season that started with cautious optimism, then accelerated into belief before spiraling into despair, ends this Sunday.

Well, it doesn’t really end. Once the curtain comes down on the season, the team will do some exit interviews with the players.

Joe Douglas and Robert Saleh will meet with the media one final time to review the season and the plans for next year. The majority of the answers will be management talk.

As the players and coaches head off for their early-year vacations, we’ll start to unravel the season as best we can. Then it’s time for free agency and the draft.

The NFL never really stops.

Mike LaFleur made a big admission in his presser yesterday, stating in hindsight the Jets should not have started Zach as a rookie and he’d had benefitted from watching a veteran: “In hindsight, it probably would have benefitted just to sit back and learn a little bit and watch a veteran do it and just kind of grow in this league, kind of in the backseat watching and getting better in practice and getting better through scout team and all that. But again that wasn’t the course that we went. And from there, we’ve got to pick it up. We’ve got to pick up the scraps and get back to work”

It’s not too late. As we said in yesterday’s piece, sitting Zach for a year is still an option. The Jets don’t have to compound one bad decision with another by trying to make him the starter in 2023. LaFleur backed him echoing his head coach “Through hell or high water, we're going to work with him ... If (a player is) on this roster, we're going to work with them."

He also took responsibility for the offensive struggles saying: "It's disappointing on many levels. It starts with me. The execution has been off, and execution starts with coaching."

When talking about his job security, Mike LaFleur said his words didn’t matter and that he was going to continue to grind to get better, ending with: "This is a production-based business. You’re not going to run from that. I grew up in a family of coaches. My dad’s been fired. My brother’s been fired. Every coach is going to be fired at some point. It’s just the cycle. That’s what it is."

Mike White was downgraded from a full participant on Wednesday to a limited participant on Thursday. That's usually not a good sign for availability. He also didn't meet with the media at the scheduled time with the team saying he was tied up with something. It wouldn't shock me if he was tied up with more tests, he certainly didn't look healthy last weekend.

We’ve spoken about the offensive line at length recently, but I wanted to just focus on that unit one last time before the season is done.

The 2023 season didn’t go to plan for Joe Douglas and the Jets. To illustrate that point I’ve put together a chart showing the carousel. Obviously, as we’re doing it today we’re a game short, but let’s take a look at the offensive line from this year.

As we worked through pre-season, the ideal scenario for the Jets was to have the following line:

George Fant (LT), Laken Tomlinson (LG), Connor McGovern (C), Alijah Vera-Tucker (RG), and, Mekhi Becton (RT).

With the injury to Becton, the Jets got 0 games out of their preferred line. That’s obviously not a good start, but it would get so much worse.

If you look at 16 games and then 5 preferred starters, that equals 80 spots where the Jets could have received play from the players designed to man that spot.

In the above chart, I colored in green how many starts we got from the designed player. In total it equates to 38/80, based solely on the availability of Tomlinson and McGovern. We got 6 designed starts from 48 at the other positions.

This was not the plan. Getting only 47.5% of starts from your designed linemen at the chosen position is never the answer.