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The Sports Illustrated Jets page at this headline early this week – “Jets’ Justin Fields Early Reviews Overwhelmingly One-Sided.”
The is kind of ridiculous.
What reviews?
Throwing against the air in the early portion of the Jets’ off-season program?
This story was based on a comment from ESPN’s Rich Cimini – “Jets officials believe Fields has improved from the pocket.”
When?
Look, before I continue, I want to make it clear, I’m not hating on Fields. The signing could turn out great. None of know how things will turn out once the real games start in the fall.
But to say the early reviews are good is Kabuki Theatre. It makes little sense.
What are you reviewing?
As for Cimini saying, “Jets officials believe Fields has improved from the pocket,” I can’t criticize the writer for that; he is just going by what Jets officials told him.
So I’m not going to go after the messenger.
I’d just like to know, as we sit here on May 8, is there any evidence Fields has improved from the pocket from his stints in Chicago and Pittsburgh?
We will find out in the fall.
I’m just not sure that a player who hasn’t been great at going through progressions in his first four years in the league, is going to magically turn into a full field reader in Year Five.
You don’t see that very often, but Fields is only 26, so maybe he can buck the odds.
But it’s a long shot he’s going to be a guy who gets to his fourth read in the progression, but doesn’t mean they can’t sin with him.
If they use Fields, like the Washington Commanders used Jayden Daniels last year, they can certainly have some success.
The Commanders went 12-5 with the rookie QB last year, running at ton of read options, in fact the former LSU star can 148 times for 891 yards.
148 times!
Jets need to do that to rip a few pages from the Commanders’ playbook and use Fields just like Daniels – a ton of read options. They can’t worry about injuries. They need run him a ton. If they do, and keep opposing defenses way off balance like Washington did with that approach last year, they can have success with Fields.
You can feel he has “improved from the pocket,” and we will see about that, but one thing we know, is he’s an electrifying runner with sub-4.5 speed, and perhaps does his best work with run-pass options.
So they need to do a lot of read options, and have a top-shelf running game to set up plenty of lay-up throws on play-action and bootlegs.
I’m not trying to be dismissive of the theory that Jets officials told Cimini, but I’m taking a Missouri approach to this – “Show me.”
Let’s see what happens in real games starting in September.
And with all due respect to Sports Illustrated, there are no “early reviews” at this stage of the NFL calendar.
But I understand that headline – it’s highly competitive out there, and you need to get clicks, and it certainly worked.
May 8, 2025
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