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Going through such a difficult season
including a number of blowout losses, some wonder why the Jets didn’t make a coaching change, just to change things up a little bit, like Atlanta and Houston did. Atlanta is now 3-1 under interim coach Raheem Morris, and should be 4-0 (they should have beat Detroit).
Well, from what I understand, talking to somebody very familiar with the team’s thinking, they didn’t think they had an ideal interim head coach on the staff.
I quickly fired back at the person, “That’s what they said in 2018 with Todd Bowles when they had Karl Dorrell on the staff.”
Dorrell, the former UCLA head coach, is now the head coach of Colorado, doing a nice job.
But then the person made a very good point that Gregg Williams probably would have been a strong interim candidate, a job he held in Cleveland in 2018, if he had not made those statements on October 18, when asked about the team’s defensive struggles.
Williams said: “A lot of it is not all defensively.”
Asked what he was referring to, Williams replied, “Yeah, you’ll have to figure that out.”
This didn’t go over well with the Jets’ brass, and probably made it impossible to promote Williams to interim coach, because it would have looked like they rewarding a guy who stabbed the man he was replacing in the back.
So the Jets clearly are just going to stay put with Gase for the rest of the season.
And while it’s probably not ideal, it’s probably not the end of the world. Sometimes when a coach is fired midseason, it’s not just based on the won-loss record, but the players hating the coach, and the coach losing the locker room. That isn’t the case here. It’s a very strange dynamic. The players like his coach and are playing hard. Of course, you can probably find a play or two that you can dispute that, like when a safety, now on IR, made a business decision on a goal line tackle.
But for the most part, this team practices and plays hard, and they get along, but they are just not very good, some of that is talent, some of it is X’s and O’s, but honestly, you are not going to put in new schemes in mid-November anyway, even with a new coach . . .
Well, it looks like Bless Austin is going to play after all. After getting an MRI on his neck, he was back at practice today, and was running around like nothing was wrong.
So expect the trio of Austin, Lamar Jackson and Bryce Hall to get all get action on the outside, with Arthur Maulet in the slot.
“Justin Herbert has thrown multiple TDs in six consecutive games — the longest streak by a rookie in NFL history, per Elias Sports Bureau research — and is the only rookie in Chargers history with at least four 300-yard passing games in a season,” wrote ESPN’s Shelley Smith.
So on paper, this could get ugly.
One thing I don’t get about the Jets’ pass defense issues is why Marcus Maye isn’t used more to matchup with fast tight ends, like Jason Kelce in Kansas City. This week they face Hunter Henry. Maye has been very quiet in recent games. He has not had one PD in the last three games, meaning he has not broken up one pass. How does that happen? This guy is a gifted coverage safety. That is why he was picked in the second round.
The guy is an athletic safety with 4.5 speed, and has just 4 PD’s in nine games this season. He has one pick, one of the best picks of the NFL season, at Miami, which made all the highlight shows. That play shows what kind of cover guy he can be, but it seems like they are kind of wasting his talents, often using him as a deep safety valve.
Just another head-scratching scenario during a season filled with them.
Being successful in the NFL isn’t just about acquiring good talent, but how you use it . . .
The Jets will take over an entire hotel in Los Angeles for players and staff as a COVID-19 precaution. Only Jets people in this hotel aside from hotel staff.
November 20, 2020
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