It has been a bad, bad year for New York football overall, and each team has one incredible bug-a-boo weighing them down. For the Giants, it’s the offense’s long stretches of malaise, which can be pinned in part and at times on any number of injuries or personnel shuffles.
But when it comes to the Jets…exactly why is their run defense so bad, on a squad with a very strong front seven on paper?
“It’s disappointing. There’s a lot of missed tackles in the run game, and it’s clearly not good enough,” head coach Robert Saleh said after Sunday’s loss to Miami, where the Jets were once again gashed on the ground. “Credit to them for running hard. That’s not good enough. Not that we don’t have answers, but we have to do a better job tackling and from a schematic standpoint.”
The Jets have faced a few very good to elite backs this year; Christian McCaffrey and Derrick Henry were still healthy when the Jets played Carolina and Tennessee, Jonathan Taylor might be an NFL MVP finalist, and they’ve also seen Melvin Gordon III, Alvin Kamara, and Joe Mixon this year.
However, they haven’t even been able to stop lesser backs, and on Sunday, it was Duke Johnson – a practice squad call-up who was out of the league at one point this year – taking it to the Jets for 107 yards and two touchdowns…a career high for the man who left the University of Miami seven years ago as their all-time leading rusher.
“I think we stopped the run early, but a couple runs in the second half got a little out on us, and we weren’t able to get off the field on third downs,” cornerback Bryce Hall said in the understatement of the year.
Hall said the Jets didn’t change much in their game plan to combat Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa, saying that “we felt we beat ourselves a little bit” in Miami’s previous win over Gang Green, so they wanted to “be tight in coverage and be aggressive, and force him to throw aggressive balls.”
Great, but in that first game, Myles Gaskin had 89 of the 105 yards Miami piled up on the ground in the win, and this time, Johnson’s 107 was combined with 54 from Gaskin as part of 183 total.
“To start off, it was on us to keep the run game under control with their scheme, but as the game continued, they started to execute better than we did,” linebacker C.J. Mosley said. “We missed tackles, I know I had a few, and it’s definitely frustrating coming off the field and seeing how many rushing yards they had.”
That’s a quote Mosley could seemingly use every week, as the Jets’ 1,987 rushing yards allowed are the third-most in the league, and they’ve given up a league-high 26 rushing scores. It’s not attrition, either, as they’ve given up 13 runs of 20 yards or more, which is tied for second-most in the league, and they yielded the second-longest single rush of the year at 78 yards.
“Whether it’s scheme or execution, the run game is what’s getting us, and we have to keep trying to figure it out,” Mosley said. “Doesn’t mean we can’t get better at it, but it’s going to take time.”
Time the Jets actually have, as at 3-11, they’re officially out of the playoff race and now just a few games away from a Top 5 pick. Still, they’re going to use the final three weeks to try to learn how and what to do in those situations, and where their deficiencies are, as a means of looking towards the future.
“Coach posed the challenge to us to take the mindset of treating these last games like a playoff mentality,” Hall said. “We’re still engaged in it, and I really feel that the energy of this team is we’re on the climb.”
“The underlying message is that this is December football. Winning games in December is a grind, a back and forth battle that comes down to a few make or break plays,” Saleh added. “I’m proud of the guys for the fight and there will be a lot of things we can look at, but we have three December games left to learn and see what it takes to win these games.”
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