Ground game a blueprint for Jets' success
Thrilling as the Jets’ victory over the Bills was on Sunday — trumpeting their arrival as a team to be reckoned with not just in the division but the entire league, and doing so in dramatic fashion — the word that kept coming to mind during those pulse-pounding final minutes when they drove almost the length of the field for the go-ahead points and then held on with a gulp-inducing defensive stop was the antithesis of the ruckus that engulfed MetLife Stadium and the wave of euphoria sure to carry them through their upcoming bye week.
It was boring.
Beautifully, bountifully boring.
The kind of simple, effective, routine play Robert Saleh has been pleading with Zach Wilson and the rest of his brash young team to embrace as the recipe for success.
Take the external elements of the crowd and the standings out of the equation and yawn at the play-by-play on that game-winning 86-yard drive. Run, run run, run, penalty against the Bills. Run, run, run, run, huge third-down pass from Wilson to Denzel Mims. A two-minute warning to fluff the pillow. Then run, run, sack (in which Wilson neither fumbled the ball nor tried to avoid the takedown with a reckless throw), field goal to go ahead by three with 1:43 remaining.
“Hell yeah,” Saleh howled when asked if that’s the drab but effective style he knows will carry the Jets to heights greater even than Sunday’s stirring victory. “I love running the ball.”
Of course, that plodding, methodical offense works only if the defense can make it stand up. They certainly did that on the final four plays. While almost everyone watching the game had to be figuring the field goal with almost two minutes remaining left the Bills and Josh Allen too much time to comfortably etch this one as a Jets victory, Buffalo wound up losing a net of 4 yards on its drive.
A second-down sack by Bryce Huff, essentially the last player activated for the day as a rare 10th defensive lineman, nearly ended it with the ball on the ground, but the Bills recovered. A deep desperation pass batted away from Gabe Davis by Sauce Gardner on fourth-and-the-game sealed the 20-17 win.
Most people will look at the final score of Sunday’s game, jerk their knees, and consider this Jets team they wrote off a week ago as surprisingly dangerous hunters in the upcoming second half of this season.
The rest of the league, however, will look at those final eight minutes of play on tape and tremble because the Jets have found their blueprint. It’s the same one that worked against the Packers and Broncos and, to some extent, the Dolphins and Steelers. Seeing it work against a team that has legitimate Super Bowl aspirations if not expectations only crystallized its efficacy.
Now all they have to do is stick to it. It seems as if they will.
Wilson, who was rightly skewered for his three sloppy, game-wrecking interceptions against the Patriots last week, gladly took the ball out of his own hands on that final drive. There were a number of snaps in which he had the option to either change to a passing play or keep the ball himself on an option, and almost every time he decided to hand it off to Michael Carter or James Robinson (he kept the last one for his own run).
“You play with what’s going,” Wilson said. “When I see how well the run game is going, I’m just going to feed it until something changes.”
It never did.
“There is no better feeling than that when the body blows finally pay off and you can feel those 1-, 2-, 3-yard runs we had earlier in the game turn into bigger and bigger runs,” center Connor McGovern said. “It’s the way this offense is built and it feels good when we can execute it.”
While the Jets were rejoicing in their victory, over on the other side of the stadium, the Bills were lamenting their loss.
“It’s tough to win when your quarterback plays like [expletive],” Allen said of his two-interception, zero-touchdown pass game (he did run for a pair of scores).
The Jets learned that lesson last week.
This week they purposely limited Wilson’s ability to make costly mistakes. He threw only 25 passes for a modest 154 yards and got the ball out of his hands quickly before he could scramble and do something irresponsibly rash. Even his one turnover, a fumble on a third-quarter sack, was backed up by the defense when Gardner picked off Allen two plays later. The Jets scored a touchdown off that interception to go ahead 17-14.
“It’s just the execution of not messing it up,” Wilson said. “Through the entire game, it was playing the field position game, putting ourselves in good positions and relying on our defense to get some stops. I think that helped us. I think we’re learning from all this stuff.”
Embrace the bland, Jets. It will make the rest of this season very exciting.
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.
