The Stat Pack: Buffalo Bills

#Edition #258

Good morning!

I hope you’re still enjoying the taste of victory this fine Tuesday morning. Some of the national media were quick to jump off the jets bandwagon last week, but they seem to be queuing to get back on this morning.

I’m hoping that later this evening I’ll get a chance to look at the All-22 tape from Sunday’s game and my plan is to do a feature on Nate Herbig tomorrow because the big guy deserves a lot of credit.

Today we’re going to focus on those good old statistics. Apologies that I missed this piece last week, as you can imagine it takes a lot of time to put together, and with the Zach Wilson stat dive I just didn’t have a chance. But we’re back to normal operations today.

Let’s start the day with some quick-hitting stats in the quick throws.

First just a little injury news. The Jets will be losing DT Sheldon Rankins for 4-6 weeks after he dislocated his elbow. Rankins has been playing well for the Jets, so this is a big loss. Linval Joseph visited recently so I wonder if JD picks up the phone.

The Jets are now 4-0 when taking a lead into the 4th quarter and have yet to be outscored in that period in any game this year. On 7 occasions they’ve outscored their opponent and on two occasions they’ve scored the same. This is a 4th quarter team.

The Jets have won a game heading into their bye week for the first time since 2015. Enjoy this win ladies and gentlemen.

This one is courtesy of my man Michael Nania - Zach threw 64% of his passes in <2.5s from in the pocket; way up from 37% in the last 5 games.

Not only did Wilson enjoy the most efficient start of his career completing 72% of passes he also had a career-high NFL passer rating of 101.1.

According to ESPN, the Jets now have a 72% chance of making the playoffs. This is not a drill.

Quinnen Williams has 7 sacks on the season which is tied for a career season high…we still have 8 games to go.

Quarterback

Our first port of call is to take a look at the QB. Zach wasn’t asked to do much but what he was asked to do, he did well. Only 5 of his 25 attempts came further than 10 yards down the field and he connected on two of them. The Jets established a quick short passing game to get the ball out of Zach Wilson’s hands as soon as possible with over 60% of his attempts being thrown in under 2.5 seconds. Considering he had the 2nd highest time to throw entering the game, this is notable. Mike LaFleur may want to dial up those long slow developing plays, but it looks as though he understands that’s not the way to utilize his personnel.

I’m also going to use the defensive line separation from the QB graph to indicate why a quick passing game was so absolutely vital. The below shows the average distance from the QB when the ball left his hands, the league average is 4.53 yards. Oliver and Jones were almost a yard closer than the league average and Zach was getting the ball out fast, any long-developing play would have been blown up yesterday. Mike LaFleur was right to eliminate them from the playbook. The only deep shot was on the opening drive to Denzel Mims, following that pass they never pushed the ball beyond 20 yards.

Zach had just 168 intended air yards yesterday which represents the 4th time in 6 games where he’s been under 200 yards, against New England that number was 355 and we took the loss. The best way for the Jets to utilize Zach right now is as a game manager. According to PFR he also had 0 bad throws on the day in comparison to 12 bad throws against New England.

Receivers

If we switch our focus to the receivers we can take a look at their average separation. The number on Mims doesn’t look great but he did convert a key third down, and when you have his kind of big body then you if used correctly you don’t need a huge amount of separation. The key one here for me is Garrett Wilson who gained on average 3.06 yards of separation, one of the keys to a quick passing game is having a receiver who gets open quickly, and Garrett Wilson makes that style possible. Moore didn’t receive a target but he almost tripled his snap share from last week.

Now that we’ve checked out the separation let’s take a look at the target share. PFR didn’t credit any Jets receiver with a drop yesterday for the second week in a row, that goes a long way to victory.

Garrett Wilson - 9 targets, 8 receptions, 92 yards, 11.5 average, 32 yards after catch
CJ Uzomah - 3 targets, 3 receptions, 16 yards, 5.3 average, 12 yards after catch
James Robinson - 2 targets, 2 receptions, 5 yards, 2.5 average, 1 TD, 14 Yards after catch
Denzel Mims - 4 targets, 1 reception, 12 yards, 12.0 average, 4 yards after catch
Tyler Conklin - 2 targets, 1 reception, 7 yards, 7.0 average, 3 yards after catch
Braxton Berrios - 2 targets, 1 reception, 6 yards, 6.0 average, 0 yards after catch
Michael Carter - 1 target, 1 reception, 10 yards, 10.0 average, 15 yards after catch
Jeff Smith - 1 target, 1 reception, 6 yards, 6.0 average, 0 yards after the catch.

It’s clear that Zach has a favored target in Garrett, Wilson’s targets were triple the next closest receiver. I do feel as though teams will now start to work tirelessly to take Garrett away and the Jets and Zach will need to adapt.

Running Backs

When the Jets lost Breece Hall I feared the worst, but if Sunday is anything to go by we’re in safe hands. I have a huge amount of respect for Joe Douglas and how quickly he moved to fill that gap. James Robinson has arrived and slotted in alongside Michael Carter perfectly. The Jets had 174 rushing yards against an outstanding defense yesterday and that worked out to 5.1 yards per rush.

James Robinson - 13 attempts, 48 yards, 3.7 average, 26 yards after contact
Michael Carter - 12 attempts, 76 yards, 6.3 average, 1 TD, 73 yards after contact
Zach Wilson - 5 attempts, 24 yards, 4.8 average, 5 yards after contact
Ty Johnson - 2 attempts, 17 yards, 8.5 average, 7 yards after contact
Ashtyn Davis - 1 attempt, 2 yards, 2.0 average, 1 yard after contact.
Garrett Wilson - 1 attempt, 7 yards, 7.0 average

Here are a couple of rushing graphs, the first is for Michael Carter:

As you can see Carter got pretty much all his joy running outside left tackle, although his touchdown came inside. NFL Next Gen Stats has it behind the LG, but the block that sprung Carter was actually thrown by Nate Herbig at right guard.

Below is the graph for James Robinson who found most of his success running behind Nate Herbig. It’s also important to remember that it was Herbig who got out in front for James Robinson’s received TD, although that doesn’t show in the graph below as this only outlines the rushing direction.

Offensive Line

If you’d had said to me at the start of the season that in week 9 we’d have Duane Brown and Cedric Ogbuehi starting at tackle, Alijah Vera-Tucker and Breece Hall lost for the season and the Jets running for 170+ yards and allowing 2 sacks against te Buffalo Bills, I’d think you were absolutely crazy. Yet here we are and we have to give a huge amount of props to the offensive line who outside of the odd play here and the odd play there, were absolutely flawless.

Let’s just launch straight into the statistics.

Duane Brown - 0 sacks, 0 pressures, 100% pass-blocking efficiency
Laken Tomlinson - 0 sacks, 0 pressures, 100% pass-blocking efficiency
Connor McGovern - 0 sacks, 0 pressures, 100% pass-block efficiency
Nate Herbig - 0 sacks, 1 pressure, 98.3% pass-block efficiency
Cedric Ogbuehi - 0 sacks, 0 pressure, 100% pass-block efficiency

Everything works in a complementary fashion with football, I often speak about the defense and how coverage works with pass-rush, but rarely do we say the same about the offense. Quick-hitting throws help the line maintain their blocks and while we’ve often pointed that finger of criticism at the line this year, we have to pair that with Zach’s time to throw which is often one of the slowest in the league.

I thought the line as a unit were all on the same page, and there will be some very difficult decisions to make when George Fant and Max Mitchell return.

Defensive Pass Rush

The Jet’s pass rush is legit. They generated 17 pressures on Josh Allen and sacked him 5 times, and they rarely blitzed. What I loved about the line on Sunday is that we got contributions up and down the board. Jermaine Johnson got in on the action with an outstanding sack, Quinnen got in with a sack, JFM, and Lawson all had an impact and Bryce Huff made the play of the game with the strip sack of Allen on that final drive.

The quickest sack however came from the linebacking crew:

Now let’s take a look at the pass rush average separation to the quarterback:

As you can see from the graph, the Jets had four players who were under the league average in terms of separation and that was led by Carl Lawson and his 4.21 number. Basically, the Jets were in his face all day.

Now let’s take a look at the pressure numbers for the boys in green:

JFM - 5 pressures, 0 sacks, 9.6 PRP, 30.8% win percentage
Quinnen Williams - 3 pressures, 1 sack, 6.1 PRP, 6.1% win percentage
Jermaine Johnson - 2 pressures, 1 sack, 13.6 PRP, 9.1% win percentage
Bryce Huff - 2 pressures, 1 sack, 11.5 PRP, 15.4% win percentage
Vinny Curry - 2 pressures, 0 sacks, 10.0 PRP, 20.0% win percentage
Sheldon Rankins - 1 pressure, 0 sacks, 7.1 PRP, 14.3% win percentage
Kwon Alexander - 1 pressure, 1 sack, 100 PRP, 100% win percentage

Coverage

When you hold the Bills to under 20 points and Josh Allen fails to throw a touchdown pass, you know you’ve had a good day at the office. When you pick off two passes it’s even better. I firmly believe that the Jets have the best cornerback tandem in football and that’s backed up by the statistics. The Jets held Josh Allen to a 52.9% completion and Stefon Diggs was held without a catch in the second half, huge success.

Let’s take a deeper dive into the coverage stats and see who got stuck in the Sauce:

Sauce Gardner - 3 targets, 1 reception allowed, 42 yards, 1 PBU, 1 INT
D.J Reed Jr - 6 targets, 3 receptions allowed, 39 yards allowed, 1 PBU
Lamarcus Joyner - 6 targets, 3 receptions allowed, 32 yards allowed
Jordan Whitehead - 2 targets, 1 reception allowed, 14 yards allowed, 1 PBU, 1 INT
Michael Carter II - 4 targets, 2 receptions allowed, 22 yards allowed
Quincy Williams - 6 targets, 4 receptions, 21 yards allowed
C.J Mosley - 5 targets, 3 receptions, 27 yards, 1 PBU
Will Parks - 1 target, 1 reception allowed, 8 yards