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I’m going to repeat what I said and wrote early in the year – I have no issue with how Justin Fields is playing.
He’s giving it the best shot.
And he’s also playing just like the film from his first four years, three in Chicago and one in Pittsburgh.
Why would anybody criticize somebody who goes to a new team, in his fifth year in the NFL, and plays just like the film from his first four seasons?
I don’t get it.
Do you think that giving somebody a two-year deal for $40 million deal with $30 million guaranteed, who was 14-30 as a starter prior to inking the contract, is going to improve his skills based on the money?
Money doesn’t elevate a player’s skill set.
Fields is who he is.
A world-class athlete, with a rocket arm and great speed, who can make plays with his legs, but is a very inconsistent passer.
That was the case in his first four years in the league, and continues in his fifth.
Anybody who expected that to change at this stage of his career – caveat emptor.
In the Jets’ loss to New England, he passed for 116 yards, including 23 in the first half.
“Obviously, we have to do a better job in the passing game, and that has a lot to do with Justin getting the ball to the right guys,” Aaron Glenn said on Friday.
Fields, who is a great person and seems to be doing the best he can, wasn’t a full field reader in his first four years. He wasn’t a guy who would go through his progressions – one, two, three checkdown.
He’s always been kind of a one-read-and-run QB.
He always tended not to make quick decisions in the pocket, with a proclivity to hold the ball too long, not throw with a lot of anticipation.
Is Glenn considering making a QB change?
“I’m evaluating everything, to be honest with you,” Glenn said.
It would probably be very hard to have a chance at winning at Baltimore, in the Jets’ next game against the Ravens, with Fields at QB.
Baltimore has one of the NFL’s most explosive offenses.
So it’s possible that Tyrod Taylor, a former Raven, could start in his old stomping grounds, with the team that drafted him?
But while “evaluates everything,” as the man running the Jets football operation, he must evaluate the process that led the Jets to sign Fields, give him the kind of money he got, and anoint him the starting QB in March without a competition.
Glenn has done some very good thing running the Jets football operation – his first two draft picks – Armand Membou and Mason Taylor – look like keepers, cornerback Brandon Stephens was a good signing, and some of the recent trades look like smart moves – the trades Quinnen Williams and Sauce Gardner for three one’s and a two, and the trade of Michael Carter for John Metchie.
But the process of overpaying Fields and expecting him to be different than his first four years of NFL film needs a little self-scouting.
Hey, look, all first-year programs have some missteps. It happens to the best of them. Glenn’s mentor, Bill Parcells, was 3-13 his first year as coach of the New York Football Giants and was close to being fired. After he was able to keep his job, he vowed to learn from his first-year mistakes, and that he did, creating a Super Bowl champion.
Thinking Fields was going to be different with the Jets than his first four years in the league was perhaps misguided.
And people ripping Fields for his plays this year are making a mistake.
The film is the film, and as scouts have said for years, “The film don’t lie.”
November 14, 2025
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