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Grading The Jets: Week One – Tampa Bay
The New York Jets, whom most fans and critics considered to be one of the worst – if not THE worst team in the league this year, opened their season in thrilling fashion with a 18-17 win over Darrell Revis and the Tampa Bay Bucs.
The game was everything a fan could have hoped for and more, as cautiously-hyped rookie quarterback Geno Smith provided over 300 all-purpose yards (256 passing, 47 rushing) and lead the Jets on a last-second drive with :34 left to get the Jets into field goal position for a Nick Folk game-winning kick with :02 left in the fourth quarter.
The following is my final thought summaries, which ended my live-blog of the first game of the season. The grades for each position can be found below.
–
I don’t have children, but I’ve adopted a lot of rookies over my years as a sports fan to essentially treat them like my surrogate sports children. It’s the reason there’s a whole industry devoted to the draft in the major professional sports. People like the new, exciting and fresh. And when that happens to be on your team, it’s like you just had a child.
Geno Smith is every Jets fan’s baby now. He exceeded ALL expectations for him going into the game. Threw for over 250 yards with one score and one pick. Most importantly, he didn’t throw wildly away from his receivers. He put his receivers in perfect position to catch and run with the ball, something Sanchez was horrible at.
That’s not even mentioning the last drive of the game, with just :34 left and no timeouts. That rollout where he used his underrated speed and baited the defender into hitting him while he was straddling the line between out of bounds and the field – brilliant.
It’s clear there are plenty of things to like about Geno Smith – much more than we expected and there’s a good chance by the end of the season Jets fans could be saying we went from the biggest qb bust in years to the biggest steal of the draft in 2013.
But that’s if you’re only focusing on offense, and not the defense – where the young stud lineman basically won the game for the Jets and a huge chunk of that was the other less hyped Jets rookie – Sheldon Richardson, who had 3 tackles, 4 assists and a half a sack in one of the best rookie defensive games Jets fans have seen in years.
General Manager Jay Idzik might have gone 3-for-3 if not for the disappointing debut of Dee Miliner, who struggled with penalties and failed to have the same positive effect on the game that his fellow top draft picks did.
As a exhibition of player development, this game could not have impressed fans of the Green & White more. As a game result, it probably hurts the development of the team overall to lose draft positioning, but with the top college players being defensive linemen and quarterbacks – and this first game showing the Jets appear to have those positions covered, maybe the “Drown Me for Clowney” or “Slaughter for Bridgewater” can fade into the background and Jets fans can just curiously watch Geno Smith, Sheldon Richardson & other young players like Muhammed Wilkerson, Milliner, Quentin Coples (who missed the game with injury), Stephen Hill & Chris Ivory develop, while dealing with what will probably be a 5 to 6-win season.
Bad enough to miss the playoffs, but not bad enough to get a Top-5 pick.
If we get more games like this one day, I doubt Jets fans will mind.
–
Overall Defense: B+ – This overall grade for the defense is taken on balance from an awesome game for one position, a bad game from another, and an unbalanced game from the third.
Defensive line: A+ — What else can you say about this unit that hasn’t been said, other than Sheldon Richardson might be further along as a disruptive force than Muhammed Wilkerson was in his rookie year – and that’s scary. This unit carried not just the defense, but the entire team for stretches at a time. This is the strength of this team bar none.
Linebackers: C+ — Antoine Barnes was a standout on a few plays early in the game. David Harris had one good stop on a 3rd down run. Demario Davis made a nice hustle play to prevent a touchdown. Other than that, they were frequently slow to the ball or ineffective at stopping any player that got past the front four.
Secondary: C- — This is an amazing turnaround from one of, if not THE best secondaries in the league three years ago. Guess why that is? Yeah, blame the loss of Darrell Revis. but outside of Antonio Cromartie looking like a shell of his 2012 self against Vincent Jackson, the Jets were done no favors in the debut of No. 9 – overall pick Dee Milliner. Milliner was called for two penalties and frankly got lucky on the one pass defend he did have. Think Tom Brady wasn’t watching him and salivating about next …um… Thursday? Really?
Offense Overall: B — This overall grade for the offense is taken on balance from an awesome performance by one player, a good game from one position, a horrible game from one, and a so-so game from another.
Offensive Line: B — Mangold getting hurt might as well have been the throwing in the towel if he had stayed out longer than a series. He showed unbelievable heart in staying in the game with what as probably a severely bruised, if not worse, elbow. His guts saved the unit from a worse grade, considering they gave up 5 sacks. Overall though, when Geno wasn’t getting sacked, he was getting good time to throw. When pressure was brought, Smith’s speed helped saved the unit from registering more sacks, something that should help the unit overall getting used to playing in front of him.
Running Backs: F — Both Chris Ivory and the new & improved “starter” Bilai Powell were total busts. One fumbled and the other dropped passed.
Wide Receivers/Tight Ends: B — Shocking how well Smith worked with the first-team offense. The receivers seemed to MUCH prefer him tossing them the ball, as opposed to floaty-boat Sanchez. Sometimes their willingness to go the extra yard for Smith resulted in gruesome hits like the one to Kerley. There were some drops in the receivers though, and Revis was his usual island-lord. Kellen Winslow made an impressive debut for the Jets, finishing with 79 yards and the Jets lone touchdown.
Quarterback: A+ — You couldn’t ask for more. Not even the interception could dampen what was the best debut for a Jets quarterback I’ve seen in my lifetime. Tampa Bay is no slouch on defense and wouldn’t be any quarterback’s easiest first test. Forget the miracle at the end – Smith proved he belonged well before then, when he came back from tossing his first interception to bring the Jets right back into it with a touchdown. He just might be the real deal.
Special Teams: A+ — Perfect game all around. This unit gave the Jets excellent field position all game. Nick Folk didn’t miss once and kicked the game winner with two seconds left. What else do you want?
OVERALL GRADE: B+ – If this first game tells us a lot about how the season is going to go, we should expect a lot of ups and downs from New York. Good teams will probably destroy the Jets on offense once they figure out how to block their defensive line and abuse our secondary. Bad and average teams we can probably play pretty close, since we have a lot of holes, but we also have some strengths. Tampa Bay is probably an 8-10 win team this year. There’s no reason to think after today if the Jets play like this every week they can’t end up with, at worst, another 6-win campaign.
Smith won’t always play this well his first year, but he’ll probably have a few more games like this. That figures to be good enough to get the Jets a few more wins this year, and let their defensive line do the rest. Considering what we were all expecting, would anyone be upset at eight wins?
The game was everything a fan could have hoped for and more, as cautiously-hyped rookie quarterback Geno Smith provided over 300 all-purpose yards (256 passing, 47 rushing) and lead the Jets on a last-second drive with :34 left to get the Jets into field goal position for a Nick Folk game-winning kick with :02 left in the fourth quarter.
The following is my final thought summaries, which ended my live-blog of the first game of the season. The grades for each position can be found below.
–
I don’t have children, but I’ve adopted a lot of rookies over my years as a sports fan to essentially treat them like my surrogate sports children. It’s the reason there’s a whole industry devoted to the draft in the major professional sports. People like the new, exciting and fresh. And when that happens to be on your team, it’s like you just had a child.
Geno Smith is every Jets fan’s baby now. He exceeded ALL expectations for him going into the game. Threw for over 250 yards with one score and one pick. Most importantly, he didn’t throw wildly away from his receivers. He put his receivers in perfect position to catch and run with the ball, something Sanchez was horrible at.
That’s not even mentioning the last drive of the game, with just :34 left and no timeouts. That rollout where he used his underrated speed and baited the defender into hitting him while he was straddling the line between out of bounds and the field – brilliant.
It’s clear there are plenty of things to like about Geno Smith – much more than we expected and there’s a good chance by the end of the season Jets fans could be saying we went from the biggest qb bust in years to the biggest steal of the draft in 2013.
But that’s if you’re only focusing on offense, and not the defense – where the young stud lineman basically won the game for the Jets and a huge chunk of that was the other less hyped Jets rookie – Sheldon Richardson, who had 3 tackles, 4 assists and a half a sack in one of the best rookie defensive games Jets fans have seen in years.
General Manager Jay Idzik might have gone 3-for-3 if not for the disappointing debut of Dee Miliner, who struggled with penalties and failed to have the same positive effect on the game that his fellow top draft picks did.
As a exhibition of player development, this game could not have impressed fans of the Green & White more. As a game result, it probably hurts the development of the team overall to lose draft positioning, but with the top college players being defensive linemen and quarterbacks – and this first game showing the Jets appear to have those positions covered, maybe the “Drown Me for Clowney” or “Slaughter for Bridgewater” can fade into the background and Jets fans can just curiously watch Geno Smith, Sheldon Richardson & other young players like Muhammed Wilkerson, Milliner, Quentin Coples (who missed the game with injury), Stephen Hill & Chris Ivory develop, while dealing with what will probably be a 5 to 6-win season.
Bad enough to miss the playoffs, but not bad enough to get a Top-5 pick.
If we get more games like this one day, I doubt Jets fans will mind.
–
Overall Defense: B+ – This overall grade for the defense is taken on balance from an awesome game for one position, a bad game from another, and an unbalanced game from the third.
Defensive line: A+ — What else can you say about this unit that hasn’t been said, other than Sheldon Richardson might be further along as a disruptive force than Muhammed Wilkerson was in his rookie year – and that’s scary. This unit carried not just the defense, but the entire team for stretches at a time. This is the strength of this team bar none.
Linebackers: C+ — Antoine Barnes was a standout on a few plays early in the game. David Harris had one good stop on a 3rd down run. Demario Davis made a nice hustle play to prevent a touchdown. Other than that, they were frequently slow to the ball or ineffective at stopping any player that got past the front four.
Secondary: C- — This is an amazing turnaround from one of, if not THE best secondaries in the league three years ago. Guess why that is? Yeah, blame the loss of Darrell Revis. but outside of Antonio Cromartie looking like a shell of his 2012 self against Vincent Jackson, the Jets were done no favors in the debut of No. 9 – overall pick Dee Milliner. Milliner was called for two penalties and frankly got lucky on the one pass defend he did have. Think Tom Brady wasn’t watching him and salivating about next …um… Thursday? Really?
Offense Overall: B — This overall grade for the offense is taken on balance from an awesome performance by one player, a good game from one position, a horrible game from one, and a so-so game from another.
Offensive Line: B — Mangold getting hurt might as well have been the throwing in the towel if he had stayed out longer than a series. He showed unbelievable heart in staying in the game with what as probably a severely bruised, if not worse, elbow. His guts saved the unit from a worse grade, considering they gave up 5 sacks. Overall though, when Geno wasn’t getting sacked, he was getting good time to throw. When pressure was brought, Smith’s speed helped saved the unit from registering more sacks, something that should help the unit overall getting used to playing in front of him.
Running Backs: F — Both Chris Ivory and the new & improved “starter” Bilai Powell were total busts. One fumbled and the other dropped passed.
Wide Receivers/Tight Ends: B — Shocking how well Smith worked with the first-team offense. The receivers seemed to MUCH prefer him tossing them the ball, as opposed to floaty-boat Sanchez. Sometimes their willingness to go the extra yard for Smith resulted in gruesome hits like the one to Kerley. There were some drops in the receivers though, and Revis was his usual island-lord. Kellen Winslow made an impressive debut for the Jets, finishing with 79 yards and the Jets lone touchdown.
Quarterback: A+ — You couldn’t ask for more. Not even the interception could dampen what was the best debut for a Jets quarterback I’ve seen in my lifetime. Tampa Bay is no slouch on defense and wouldn’t be any quarterback’s easiest first test. Forget the miracle at the end – Smith proved he belonged well before then, when he came back from tossing his first interception to bring the Jets right back into it with a touchdown. He just might be the real deal.
Special Teams: A+ — Perfect game all around. This unit gave the Jets excellent field position all game. Nick Folk didn’t miss once and kicked the game winner with two seconds left. What else do you want?
OVERALL GRADE: B+ – If this first game tells us a lot about how the season is going to go, we should expect a lot of ups and downs from New York. Good teams will probably destroy the Jets on offense once they figure out how to block their defensive line and abuse our secondary. Bad and average teams we can probably play pretty close, since we have a lot of holes, but we also have some strengths. Tampa Bay is probably an 8-10 win team this year. There’s no reason to think after today if the Jets play like this every week they can’t end up with, at worst, another 6-win campaign.
Smith won’t always play this well his first year, but he’ll probably have a few more games like this. That figures to be good enough to get the Jets a few more wins this year, and let their defensive line do the rest. Considering what we were all expecting, would anyone be upset at eight wins?
http://thesterlingroad.com/2013/09/08/grading-the-jets-week-one-tampa-bay/
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