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East Rutherford, New Jersey – Here is the deal in a nutshell – this New York Jets Jets win over the Buffalo Bills was very similar to wins last season.
What I mean by that is it came against a weak opponent, just like most of the Jets’ wins in 2015 en route to a 10-6 record.
The Jets had the easiest schedule in football in 2015.
This year, perhaps the hardest.
The last three Jets’ wins were over Cleveland, San Francisco and Buffalo (with Tyrod Taylor benched for contract reasons) were against low quality opponents.
The Jets’ pass defense was terrible this year, and in my opinion, their #1 problem.
So when they faced competent veteran quarterbacks, like Tom Brady and Andrew Luck, they got destroyed. When you blow coverages against quarterbacks like this, they will eat your alive. Quarterbacks that can read defenses like Brady and Luck, will find the weaknesses, find the blown coverages, and destroy you.
Quarterbacks like Colin Kaepernick, E.J. Manuel and the Cleveland guys, who don’t read defenses that well, the Jets survived even with their substandard pass defenses.
So the Jets beat teams with bad quarterbacks who couldn’t take advantage of their glaring weakness.
In a lot of ways, this Jets team was similar to last year. The big difference was the schedule.
Last year they had a lot more Cleveland’s, Buffalo’s and San Francisco’s.
So after two years of substandard pass defense, Todd Bowles and Mike Maccagnan need to finally get this fixed.
You can’t be a top-shelf team in this league, a passing league. playing pass defense the way the Jets have the last two years . . .
The Jets gave OLB Corey Lemonier extensive playing time today even though he just arrived on December 26 via the waiver wire.
They basically kept it simple for him since had little time to learn their playbook – just come in on passing situations, come off the edge, and get to the quarterback.
And he did that on a play he met Jordan Jenkins at the quarterback, causing a fumble the Jets recovered.
Look, this was just one play and I’m not putting him in Canton, but you saw on this play why he was so highly-regarded in the 2013 draft. He’s 6-3, 255 and legitimately runs 4.6. You saw that speed on this play.
There was some first-round talk regarding this player before the 2013 draft. He ended up slipping to the third round to San Francisco. Not sure what happened during his two years there, but he didn’t seem to play very much, and then went to Cleveland for the first half of this season and had two sacks.
Not saying he’s the panacea for the Jets’ anemic edge rush (they need to add a player in free agency AND the draft), but he is a very intriguing guy with a nice size-speed ratio, who had 9.5 sacks as sophomore at Auburn.
The Jets need to keep fishing on this edge-rusher thing, keep throwing the line in the water and this addition of Lemonier is doing just that . . .
January 1, 2017