Watching the Jets - Patriots game on Sunday morning was, in a word, tough. And I don’t mean as tough as watching just about any New York Jets game from the past decade-and-a-half or so. It was far worse than that. Not since Sam Darnold’s iconic “seeing ghosts” game have I watched four quarters from a quarterback who I didn’t particularly care for before and come away just feeling awful for him.
Watching Jets rookie quarterback Zach Wilson join Darnold as one of just four players in the last twenty years with a zero-touchdown, four-interception game, however, made me feel a pit in my stomach.
Image from: NFL.com
Considering both of those poor young quarterbacks played against a devastatingly complex Patriots defensive scheme, it makes me believe Bill Belichick is the NFL’s equivalent of fraternity hazing for rookie quarterbacks. Except, instead of having the newbies drink tequila in place of water all day, he brutally crushes their confidence with exceptional defense, leaving them subject to an all-out assault from the national media and threatening to end their promising career before it even starts and. I leave it up to you to decide which one is worse, but I lean towards the former.
It could just be that the Jets are simply doomed with poor quarterback play for the foreseeable future, regardless of how talented or untalented the man under center is, due to the team’s sheer lack of offensive talent and structure. Or, perhaps it’s a hex that was placed on MetLife Stadium after Mark Sanchez ran directly into the butt of his offensive lineman and fumbled the ball, as if some football deity watched that play in utter disgust and decided that from that moment on, good quarterback play never deserved to happen on that turf again.
In this case, I lean towards the latter.
All jokes aside, Zach Wilson’s Week 2 performance was startling, worrying, and at times downright ridiculous. Though there is definitely some level of slack that we must cut a rookie who was thrust into the starting job of one of the least talented teams in the league after spending his college career playing against mainly lower-level talent, there were takeaways from that game that pose serious questions about who Wilson really is as an NFL player.
Image From: Adam Hunger, AP Photo
Quick recap: the rookie out of BYU started his day with an interception on his very first passing attempt, and it got decidedly not better from there. Wilson tossed two more picks from his next three drives, and chucked a fourth pass directly to a Patriot player to start the second half, just for good measure. From there, his day was much less horrific, but was still rather nondescript, leading his offense to just three more points (to end with a whopping total of six). He walked off to boos from the Jet faithful, but on a positive note somehow showed quite a bit of poise in his response to it.
His outing was so bad that, at the time of writing this, the NFL's official page for the game doesn’t even show a “passing” statistics section for the Jets team. No, seriously:
Side-by-side screenshots of statistics from the NFL game page of the Jets-Patriots game
There are so many interesting factors at work that led to this performance from Wilson, so let’s discuss them one by one and decide just how bad this is long-term.
As mentioned earlier, the New York Jets are far from the ideal situation for a rookie quarterback to land in. Under Adam Gase, the Jets were consistently one of the worst teams in the league on offense, despite Gase’s status as an alleged guru on that side of the ball. In his two seasons as head coach, the Jets finished dead last in yards per game in both years, and finished second-last and last in points per game. Pick just about any offensive metric that you like, and Gase’s Jets were likely pretty bad at it. The Jets seemed to always field an offensive line that was in tatters, and a rather empty cupboard of skill position players to boot; suffice to say, very few NFL quarterbacks can look awesome there.
However, going into this season, there were quietly many reasons for things to start turning around in the Meadowlands. To upgrade their receiving corps, they signed Corey Davis in free agency, who had just put up career-bests in yards and touchdowns with Tennessee in 2020, and drafted Elijah Moore in the second round, a pick widely thought to be one of the steals of the draft. Davis is a former first-round pick who gives Wilson a much-needed outside-the-numbers receiver, while Moore projects to be another reliable safety net for Wilson to have underneath, to pair with Jamison Crowder. Left tackle Mekhi Becton was coming off a remarkable rookie season in which he established himself as a true franchise cornerstone (and as perhaps the largest human on planet Earth), but lacked help on the offensive line. To address this, the Jets drafted the versatile Alijah Vera-Tucker out of USC with a first-round pick. They also picked up a couple of talented running backs in Tevin Coleman through free agency and Michael Carter from the draft.
Aside from roster moves, the Jets hired Robert Saleh to be their new head coach, who at the very least was a major locker-room-presence upgrade from Adam Gase. Though Saleh’s speciality is defense -- he oversaw a 49ers unit that was so dominant that it powered San Francisco to be mere minutes away from a Super Bowl win with Jimmy Garoppolo at QB in 2019 -- he brought along Mike LaFleur from San Francisco to be his offensive coordinator, who found some success as the passing game coordinator under Kyle Shanahan (refer to: Jimmy Garoppolo starting the game at QB in the Super Bowl). Saleh’s leadership qualities and defensive expertise, as well as the promise of an upgraded offense that could borrow from Shanahan’s zone-run scheme all sounded quite good on paper.
Things were actually looking up. Until they weren’t.
Just before the start of the season, the defense suffered some crushing losses to key players, most notably losing defensive end Carl Lawson to an Achilles tear. They watched former Jet Sam Darnold throw a long touchdown to former Jet Robby Anderson in a Week 1 loss to the Carolina Panthers. In that game Zach Wilson was pressured on 46.5% of his dropbacks, and to make matters worse Becton was carted off the field with a dislocated right knee cap and is expected to miss a “minimum of four to six weeks”.
Image From: Getty Images
Considering that last piece of information, it’d be easy to chalk up Wilson’s game against the Patriots due to poor offensive line play. And yes, following the loss of Becton the Jets offensive line one-upped themselves and allowed a 48.7% pressure rate. But it’s not all that simple. Despite the constant pressure he’s faced, Wilson has actually thrown 4 of his 5 picks this season from a clean pocket. Of his four interceptions from Sunday, they pretty much all came from Wilson doing something risky or just plain bone-headed.
Let’s walk through them and discuss how bad they each really are.
On his first giveaway, Wilson had a pretty clean pocket off a play-action, but delivered the ball late to Corey Davis, and not at all where Davis expected the ball to be:
The replay helps really understand what’s going on here. Wilson looks to his left and sees that his first read isn’t open, so he moves to his next read-- that’s great! He then sees the late pressure screaming towards him, and instead of maneuvering in the pocket he delivers a ball towards Davis that isn’t particularly sharp or quick-- that’s bad. I would guess that Wilson was thinking the safety would make a play on the ball if he put the ball in front of Davis, so he tried to play it safe and put it well behind his receiver so that, at worst, it’s just uncatchable by anyone. Problem is, he placed it far too close to J.C. Jackson, who was able to make a play on the ball and come down with the pick.
Another worrying thing is that Wilson doesn’t seem to properly step into the throw, instead trying to generate the power from his hips in Mahomes-esque fashion, which I cannot recommend is a good decision for any rookie who isn’t used to NFL-caliber competition. I don’t know if Wilson is underestimating defenses or overestimating his own abilities, but this overeagerness to make a play that was makeable in college is a recurring theme for Wilson in this game.
On the second interception, a lot of the blame can be placed on Corey Davis rather than the quarterback. Wilson rolls out to his right and throws it on the run to Davis, who can’t quite corral the pass and tips it to a Patriot defender:
The pass is high, but Davis should do better there. Still, there’s some questions that come to mind about Wilson on this play. Why not take the time to set your feet on such a tight throw, with that much space to work with after the rollout? Why force-feed Davis on such a difficult on-the-run throw at all, given there were three defenders in the area? It’s not completely an excusable throw like some people have said, but if this was his only mistake of the day it’d be a non-issue. Unfortunately, this is already the second occasion where Wilson either rushing his mechanics or trying to play “hero ball” led to a major negative play for his team.
To complete the hat trick, Wilson just throws a plain old duck. Not a duck while under heavy pressure. Not a duck in inclement weather. Not even a duck while throwing off his back foot. He just throws a bafflingly awful pass:
There’s simply no redeeming that one. NFL quarterbacks throw bad passes all the time, but that one is bad. I can’t think of anything that makes it make sense. A quarterback with a draft profile like his can’t have routine throws to the outside be a flaw in his game on top of everything else. He just can’t.
And speaking of things that I can’t make sense of, I present to you Wilson’s fourth and final interception of the afternoon. Strap in, this one is a doozy:
What. The. Hell.
He’s got a pocket as clean as you get in the NFL-- so why in the world is he throwing it off his back foot like that? I don’t care if you had success with it in college, no one should be doing that willingly. Maybe he felt Chase Winovich starting to beat his man (and perhaps a hold?) near the end of the play, but he shouldn’t. There’s no need to be jumpy in a pocket that’s still that clean. I understand that being three interceptions deep into a game and being under pressure as often as he is can make a quarterback anxious, but you can’t just abandon the fundamentals of playing the position like that.
Worse, I can’t tell who he’s trying to throw it to. Is he trying to hit his man down the left sideline? Because even I can tell that safety is probably running with him all the way, and there’s no way you can launch it deep enough off your back foot for that not to be a worry. Is he trying to get it to the other receiver underneath, but overcooks it as badly as humanly possible? I’d guess it’s the first one, but this is yet another instance of Wilson being lazy with his mechanics, struggling to read the field, and delivering a ball without power or placement.
Out of the (albeit) limited footage I’ve seen from the five first-round rookie quarterbacks, Wilson seems to have the most difficulty reading the field. The game doesn’t seem “slow” to him like it needs to for a rookie diving into the deep end. He doesn’t always seem ready for the major leap in competition and difficulty from his college career to the professional league. He simply doesn’t have the accuracy or pure arm strength to mask these limitations, and on top of everything he tries too often to play hero ball and assume he can make a highlight throw that was easy in college.
In truth, no rookie quarterback truly “gets” the NFL. Most quarterbacks don’t fully understand how to read a defense until at least year three. Wilson is having the same problem, and this is only natural. But if you don’t have pinpoint accuracy or superhuman zip on your passes, you need to have a good pocket presence and decision-making skills. Wilson, at present, has shown none of the above.
If all of that wasn’t exhausting enough, Wilson very nearly threw a fifth interception later in the game on a 4th down, which would have firmly taken him from “man, that’s a rough game for a rookie” to near-Nathan-Peterman status. This one is a common enough mistake for a rookie, so I won’t talk about it in depth; it’s a throw outside he thinks he has, but he’s actually getting baited by the cornerback sitting on it, and there’s not nearly enough zip on the throw to make it work:
Whew. I think we can all agree that these clips were rough to watch. So where do we go from here?
There are rookie quarterbacks who have floundered to this degree and still found success. Justin Herbert had easily the worst game of his rookie season against this same Patriots defense and ended up having a historic Rookie of the Year campaign. Alex Smith is on that list of recent QBs with 0 TDs and 4 INTs in a single game, and ended up having a pretty solid career. It’s way too early to tell about Sam Darnold, but his processing and ability to push the ball up the field looks miles better under Joe Brady’s offense in Carolina. There is some real precedent of quarterbacks playing this poor and recovering.
Wilson seems to have a great deal of confidence and a cool attitude about him, so this performance won’t necessarily crush him. But I’ve seen far too many quarterbacks have a rough game and almost completely abandon throws on the second-and-third levels, regardless of their mental fortitude, and without Brady-level processing power you just can’t make an offense work like that.
We do have to consider the possibility that Zach Wilson wasn’t the right guy for the New York Jets. Its not that he’s incapable of being “the guy” for someone in this league-- he just might be really ill-suited for this Jets team. They don’t have enough offensive structure or know-how around him to cover up his flaws while he learns to correct them. There’s no veteran quarterback for him to sit behind and learn from, or even one in the room at all to help him work through his struggles, which I think is the most egregious oversight from the organization. Wilson doesn’t have the experience against this level of competition, and he doesn’t quite have Mahomes-level arm strength or Mayfield-level accuracy. So why have the Jets bet the farm on him being able to produce from Day 1, given the circumstances?
Image From: Steve Luciano, AP
There is, of course, so much more that goes into a rookie quarterback’s struggles than them just playing badly. It’s an incredibly complex equation that the best minds in football consistently struggle with. But from what I’ve seen so far, the marriage between Wilson and the Jets just doesn’t seem like it was well thought-out. A large portion of blame always needs to be put on the front office for not putting their rookie signal-caller in the absolute best possible place to succeed, but if Wilson doesn’t work hard to iron out the kinks in his game, his rookie season could get even worse before it gets better. Otherwise, we’ll be having this same exact same conversation about a new rookie Jets quarterback in three years, and the cycle will perpetuate yet again. Maybe the curse of the Butt Fumble is real after all.
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