Jets-Colts ending displays just how broken this team is
Indianapolis Colts quarterback Anthony Richardson reacts after scoring a touchdown against the Jets during the fourth quarter of an NFL game Sunday at MetLife Stadium. Credit: AP/Adam Hunger
The Jets defense was on the sideline watching intently as Aaron Rodgers walked up to the line of scrimmage on fourth-and-2 from the Colts’ 17 late in Sunday’s game at MetLife Stadium. They assumed the offense would try to convert and seal the win with a first down.
“We all stood up because we thought he was going for it,” cornerback D.J. Reed said of the sideline.
He did not. After Rodgers’ barks were unable to draw the defense offside, the Jets called a timeout and sent the field goal unit onto the field.
The Jets defense was pretty excited to see that, too.
Anders Carlson knocked a 35-yarder through the uprights to give the Jets a five-point advantage with 2:41 remaining, putting everything that the team had to risk — the potential win, the comeback from a dismal first half, heck even the prospects for the rest of this season — on the shoulders of the unit that believed it was the identity of the organization.
“We were all happy,” Reed said. “We were like, ‘Alright, this is what we do.’ I mean, the last three years, this is what we do.”
Not this time.
Not this year.
Not these Jets.
Second-year quarterback Anthony Richardson had played so poorly this season that he’d been benched twice, was so erratic with the ball in this game that he sprinted off the field with his head in his hands after missing a wide-open receiver on a two-point conversion that could have tied the score earlier in the fourth quarter, and had never in his career led a game-winning drive. He shredded the supposedly vaunted Jets defense for a six-play, 70-yard touchdown trek that included passes of 39 and 17 yards and a 4-yard scoring run with 46 seconds remaining to earn Indianapolis a 28-27 victory.
Teams strive to play complementary football where the different elements work in synch to help them win. The Jets continue to play their own brand of disparate, deleterious football wherein each unit drags the other further into the grim fissure of failure until eventually they are all sucked underwater by the weight of their own inabilities.
It left interim coach Jeff Ulbrich second-guessing his decision to kick that field goal.
“In hindsight I probably should have gone for it,” he said.
Don’t be too hard on yourself, Jeff. When seasons are playing out the way this one is, there can be no right buttons to push, no winning decisions to make. He trusted his defense, the group he has coached for the past few years.
It wasn’t a bad call. It’s just a bad defense.
And bad offense.
“If we were a great team we would have scored seven there,” Rodgers said of the drive that resulted in that 27-22 lead.
While he would have liked to go for the fourth-down play, he said, he was being more critical of the play on that possession than the decision from Ulbrich.
Of course, the Jets have proven many times over that they are anything but a great team. Rely on the offense that couldn’t register a first down for most of the first half? The one that couldn’t convert a fourth-and-inches even when relying on a gimmicky tight end sneak with Tyler Conklin taking a snap under center? No, thank you. The analytics may have said to go for it, but those computers haven’t had to actually watch the incapabilities of this Jets team over the last few months.
At 3-8, their odds of making the postseason now stand in the single digit percentages, depending on the calculator to which you subscribe.
“It’s very hard to fathom,” Reed said. “I am still processing it right now. I’m still processing that last drive.”
To be fair, there was a lot to digest.
On the second play of that fateful journey, Richardson found Alec Pierce for the 39-yard gain between the zone coverage of Sauce Gardner and Jalen Mills. Then he hit Josh Downs for 17 to get to the 10. Again, Ulbrich was ruing his calls, but as Reed pointed out, they were pretty standard for that situation. The Jets were trying to keep the ball in front of them and not let the Colts get any momentum.
“If they throw an out, whatever, we all rally to it and make the tackle,” Reed said. “[Thirty-nine yards]? We can’t give that up. Can’t give that up. Point blank, period. There is no one to blame other than everybody having to know we can’t give that up . . . They pretty much put the pressure on us when the pressure should have been on them.”
On the first two plays of goal-to-go from the 10, the Colts picked up 4 and 2 and then Richardson, as he’d done earlier in the game, ran a keeper and lowered his shoulder to force himself into the end zone. It was Reed he blasted his way through to get there.
Oddly enough, the Jets keep talking about showing character, not splintering and sticking together through these arduous times, as if it will pay some dividend for them in the future. They keep making references to next year, whether it be Rodgers saying he wants to play for Ulbrich in 2025 or Ulbrich returning the favor and wanting Rodgers back too.
The reality is this team deserves nothing more than to be demolished from top to bottom in the offseason.
Seeing this stacked roster disintegrate from the potential it showed in training camp to the wreckage that now mercifully heads into its bye week must be how astronomers feel witnessing a star collapse on itself, gasping in awe at such massive forces of gravity and energy working against themselves toward self-destruction. Eventually the light flickers out and that cosmic spectacle leads to a black hole. A nothingness.
This Jets season is doomed to the same fate whether the coach decided to go for it on fourth down or not.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.