The Stat Pack: Detroit Lions

Edition #288

Good morning! ☀️

My mood was slightly listed last night as I caught up with the Knicks and Ranger games, with both teams now on a 7-game win streak. If you’re a fan of either and watched the early-season struggles, I hope you’re enjoying this mid-season resurgence as much as I am.

Unfortunately, the Jets don’t seem to have received that New York memo, as we’ve now lost 4 of our last 5 and our season is in danger of ending with a whimper on Thursday night. I haven’t worked out all the permutations, but I imagine if we lose the chances of a playoff shot are minimal at best.

As we do every Tuesday, it’s time for the stat pack.

🧐 Saleh confirmed that Mike White is still being evaluated, but would not be drawn on whether White would start if he is cleared. Said he needs to talk to offensive coaches before making that decision.

👍 He did confirm that Quinnen is looking good for the game on Thursday and all being well he should be able to play. He sounded very optimistic.

⬆️⬇️ Saleh also seemed optimistic about Corey Davis, but it’s likely that the team will be missing Denzel Mims who is in concussion protocol. Lamarcus Joyner is also questionable and Brandin Echols will be out. However, although Bam Knight will be questionable, the coach confirmed “arrows are pointing up” for him which is great news.

🤕 Saleh confirmed that Mike White would need to get some extra scans to see how he has healed, then get cleared for contact. I would put the chances of White playing at 20%, just don’t think there is enough time to get him through. It sounded as though Saleh wants a starter named by practice tomorrow with it being a Thursday Night game.

🏆 Congratulations to Garrett Wilson, in the aftermath of the loss yesterday I missed that he had become the Jet’s all-time leader for catches by a rookie. He’s currently on 67 which is one more than Wayne Chrebet's 66 catch 1995 season.

🗳️ Also, the fan vote Pro Bowl results came in and four Jets players were on the list. DT Quinnen Williams, CB Sauce Gardner, LS Thomas Hennessy, and ST Justin Hardee.

SAUCE @iamSauceGardner

Jets Nation… Just want to say that YALL are the reason I passed whoever was leading in Pro Bowl votes at the CB position. I just wanna say I appreciate y’all for being the best fanbase I could ask for; and for supporting me and my teammates❕

🚨 Zach Wilson's off-target throwing percentage was 35.3% according to Rich Cinini, which was actually worse than his New England performance (35.0%). The 35.3% mark against Detroit ranks 434th out of 442 individual passing performances this season.

Stats only tell part of the story. That’s something I constantly remind myself of when writing these posts. I don’t always add a ton of context as I presume that anyone interested in reading a daily newsletter about the Jets likely saw the game, so know the context. That may not always be the case, but obviously, if any questions come up, pop them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Quarterback

QB is always the most interesting position in football, and someone who I follow on Twitter said it best today when he said “still a man hears, or in this case also see, what he wants to hear and see and disregards the rest”. I’ve been highly critical of Zach this year and I desperately wanted to see improvement, so I think I saw what I wanted to see and largely ignored the rest.

Zach threw for over 300 yards and connected on two touchdowns, both to Uzomah. On the surface, it’s not a bad stat line, but there was a lot missing from his game. The fact he still completed just 51% of his passes, missed key receivers, bounced a pass to Berrios, and just showed poor footwork again while throwing up some hit-and-hope passes concerns me. A lot of those passes were completed, but that won’t happen every week.

Here are a few more stats for Wilson based on yesterday’s performance:

Average time to throw: 2.94 seconds
Pressure to Sack Percentage: 21.1%
Turnover Worthy Plays: 2
Big Time Throws: 5
Completion under pressure: 46.7%
Completion when kept clean: 55.0%

Wilson will more than likely get another chance on Thursday to prove he’s the guy and Jacksonville represents a great opportunity considering their struggles as a pass defense.

Running Back

The running game was non-existent for the Jets yesterday. Detroit stacked the box and challenged the Jets to beat them in the air and that turned out to be the right call. The Jets rushed for just 50 yards and 41 of those came after contact, so on 21 attempts, the Jet’s offensive line gave their runners just 9 yards before contact or 0.4 per rush attempt. I don’t think we need to go any deeper on that number.

There isn’t a great deal to write home about, our longest rushing play of the day went for 6 yards and we forced just 6 missed tackles on 21 attempts, most of them behind the line of scrimmage.

After winning rookie of the week for his performance against the Bills, Knight crashed down to earth with a yards per attempt of 1.8 yards, and then he got an ankle injury for his trouble.

The Jets are a better team with Zonovan in it, and we’ll see what happens with him for Thursday’s game, although the early signs are positive.

Receivers

It was a strange day for the receivers. Garrett was quiet until he exploded in the 4th quarter, Moore was quietly effective and the Jets finally realized that targeting their tight ends in the red zone was a good idea.

Losing Mims early with Davis already sidelined was a blow, but Jeff Smith made the mode of his opportunity catching 80% of his targets. Wilson was targeted 9 times, but his conversion rate from targets to catches of 44.4% isn’t ideal, and I would place little blame on him for that one.

The Jets didn’t have a single drop yesterday which is good progress for the receivers, and only having 58 yards after the catch shows that the majority of the yards came on deep field shots.

The Detroit secondary was there for the taking and I just don’t think we exploited it enough. The yardage totals look better than they were in my mind.

Blocking

The first thing to note here is the discrepancy between the sacks. The Jets allowed 4 sacks in total, but only 2 have been attributed to the offensive line. When this happens it’s based on PFF deciding that the QB was responsible for the sack due to indecision, or holding onto the ball for too long.

Even with that, it wasn’t a very good day for the Jets.

Nate Herbig, who’s been one of the better waiver wire pickups in recent memory had a tough outing allowing a team-high 6 pressures and a sack. Closely followed by Duane Brown with 4 and CMG with 3. Fant allowed just 2 pressures but one of those was a sack.

One thing I did note here is that the RBs were only left in to block on 10 of 41 snaps, with the offensive line struggling I find it hard to believe that MLF didn’t respond by offering up some max protection scenarios, especially with a QB who we know holds onto the ball too long.

It’s not easy changing from one QB to the other, especially when they are basically polar opposites in terms of pocket ability. But, LaFleur is paid a lot of money to make these adjustments and I don’t think he did that yesterday.

Defense

The first thing we’ll look at is the pass rush because without Quinnen Williams it really struggled. We knew going into the game that Goff was poor under pressure, in fact, he’s one of the worst QBs in football, but unless you see the guy’s name on the table below, he didn’t record a single pressure:

Yet again, Bryce Huff is the most productive pass-rusher on the team. 4 pressures in 5 pass-rush snaps with a win rate of 33.3% is exceptional, the fact he only got 15 pass-rushing snaps is a problem. It’s becoming clear that Huff needs to play a little more and he’s starting to outperform Carl Lawson, who the Jets are paying a ton of money.

We have to give credit to the opposition, Detroit have an outstanding line and they did a nice job keeping Jared Goff clean. Sometimes the opposition just do a better job than you do, and that was the case yesterday. The Lions’ offensive line was better than our defensive line.

Would it have been the same had Quinnen been healthy? Almost certainly not, but the Lions can only beat what’s put in front of them and they did that. Hat tip to them.

Coverage

Sauce Gardner is getting all-pro respect and he’s only 14 games into his NFL career. He wasn’t even targeted last night and that’s for two reasons. One, Jared Goff rarely looked outside, opting to keep the majority between the hashes. Two, Sauce just completely shut down whoever he was against to the point that Goff just moved off that read.

The one touchdown the Jets allowed was credited to C.J. Mosley but there is some debate as to whose responsibility it was. I don’t think it matters all that much, it was a defensive breakdown and it happens.

In total, the Jets recorded 0 interceptions and the lack of takeaways is becoming a little bit of a problem. When your offense isn’t firing, giving them a short-field position is vital. We did record 3 PBU’s with all of them coming courtesy of the best free-agent signing of the off-season D.J. Reed.

Michael Carter II was tested the most and considering he was on St Brown a lot, that really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Yet again he held up well allowing a 57% completion into his coverage and just 33 yards. St Brown’s average separation was 2.9 yards, which was 0.3 yards under the league average.

Unfortunately, it was a down day for the linebackers when it came to coverage responsibility, but C.J. only allowed a 33% completion and he’s been much better in coverage this year than last.

Run Defense

By now you’ll know that I don’t like sharing PFF run defense grades, as they never made much sense to me. But what I am going to do is share some stats on defensive run stops, and missed tackles in the run game.

Run stops are as you’d expect, plays against the run that constituted a defensive failure.

Defensive Run Stops

Quincy Williams: 3
Nathan Shepherd: 3
Micheal Clemons: 2
Carl Lawson: 2
Sheldon Rankins: 2
Jermaine Johnson II: 1
Tony Adams: 1
Jordan Whitehead: 1
Solomon Thomas: 1
Kwon Alexander: 1

Interestingly C.J. Mosley was not credited with a single play in the run game that constituted a defensive stop, although he got there on that goal line stuff after Quincy made the initial contact.

Missed Tackles:

Jermaine Johnson: 1
Jordan Whitehead: 1
D.J. Reed: 1
Nathan Shepherd: 1
Will Parks: 1
C.J Mosley: 1

Punting

Here’s why I don’t like PFF grades. According to the site, Braden Mann’s performance yesterday was rated as the 3rd best performance among punters.

Yet his net yardage was 30/30 with just 32.2 yards, he had just 1/6 punts downed inside the 20, and his hangtime of 4.32 rates him 15/30. So how was he the third-best punter? Either PFF don’t know how to grade punters or his agent is slipping them a few extra dollars, as believe it or not, teams do actually use PFF as part of their player evaluations.