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While everyone is talking about getting the ball to Garrett Wilson more as the panacea for the Jets’ struggles (even though WR Omar Cooper and TE Mason Taylor had big games on Sunday), I’m going to talk about a much bigger problem for the Jets – their run defense.
In 2003, the Jets picked Kentucky defensive tackle Dewayne Robertson in the first round.
At the time, Herm Edwards was the head coach and played the Tampa Two Defense, a 4-3 front where a super-quick, athletic three-technique DT was a key part of that formation.
You needed a Warren Sapp type, an athletic freak, who didn’t need to be huge, to shoot gaps and create havoc.
So the Jets picked Robertson, and he was solid for them his first three seasons under Edwards, but when the Jets hired Eric Mangini in 2006, he was no longer a good system fit.
Robertson was undersized for 3-4 nose tackle, including not having the ideal arm length for the job.
In a different era of coverage, Newark Star-Ledger beat reporter Dave Hutchinson, asked the team’s defensive coordinator at the time, Bob Sutton on several occasions, about whether Robertson was a good fit for the new defense.
And after getting a little tired of the questions, Sutton replied, “We’re going down that road against Hutch.”
And Hutch replied in his Southern accent, “Yes, because you haven’t fixed the dern thing.”
So let’s fast forward to 2026, where it’s clear when it comes to the Jets’ run defense, the need to “fix the dern thing.”
This is a much bigger issue for this team than how many touches Wilson gets.
And one of the issues might be that two defensive tackles who play a ton, Harrison Phillips and Jowon Briggs, are not good fits for DT in a 3-4 defense. They both lack the ideal length for the job, which often requires defensive linemen to tie up blockers for the linebackers to make tackles.
At times, 3-4 defensive linemen are like offensive linemen, protecting linebackers to be free to run to the ball.
If you want to know what 3-4 defensive linemen often look like, it’s Jets rookie Darrell Jackson – 6-5, 315 with 35-inch arms.
While Phillips and Briggs give you everything they’ve got, it just seems like they are not ideal fits for a 3-4 defense, and this is one of the contributing factors to the Jets getting gashed up the middle so often against the run.
If the Jets are going to play a 3-4 defense under Glenn, it’s incumbent upon GM Darren Mougey to go out and get more defensive linemen who fit his scheme.
Not blaming all the Jets’ run defense woes on Phillips and Briggs. Not at all, and will get to another issue in a bit, but what I’m seeing with these two guys is a “D-Rob” issue – not an ideal fit for a 3-4 front.
When the Jets lost to the Green Bay earlier this season, the Packers had some injuries on their D-Line, but it seemed like they had a cotorie of 6-5, 320-pound 3-4 defensive linemen, who filled in, and plugged up the middle, like on a failed 4th-and-1 at the Jets’ 49-yard line with under two minutes remaining in the fourth quarter.
The man who helped blow up this Braelon Allen run was a player named Jonathan Ford, a 6-5, 338-pound reserve DT.
Ford is a journeyman who has never started an NFL game since entering the league in 2022, but look at his size, and what he did on this huge play.
There is an old proverb about how it’s foolish to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
How much longer is Mougey, who based on one report is now running the Jets football operation, going to sit idly, watch this run defense, and not do something from a personnel standpoint to fix it? . . .
Another significant issue for the Jets’ atrocious run defense is that while David Bailey is a good pass rush, he’s really struggling in run support. Too often, either he’s getting pushed back on skates by an offensive tackle, or he’s shooting too far up field, giving runners escape lanes, like on the Dolphins’ scoring second drive, when QB Malik Willis ran 11 yard to the right side on a third-and-nine. Bailey went way far up field and Willis ran into that void of his empty spot for this huge first down. Perhaps the Jets had kept Willis in the pocket, perhaps they have to settle for a field goal, because he wasn’t seeing anybody open before he took off running.
You could argue Bailey should be a spot player now, perhaps a situational pass rusher, until he run defense improves.
Okay, now back your regularly scheduled programming about Garrett Wilson not getting enough targets.
October 26, 2026
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