Jets' defense pulls through despite 'heartbreaking' injury to Jermaine Johnson

NASHVILLE, Tenn.

Once he got back to the visiting locker room and composed himself after that tearful towel-over-the-head cart ride to oblivion, there were a few things Jermaine Johnson knew he had to do. The first was to call his mother and tell her what had happened. All she had seen was that he’d collapsed while rushing the Titans’ quarterback and been taken off the field late in the third quarter.

“I knew she was probably over there doing back flips,” he said of her concern.

Then he called his girlfriend with a similar update.

He also started to deal with the medical staff and come to grips with his own immediate future, what the next year or so likely will be for him as he recovers from what MRIs on Monday are almost sure to show is an Achilles tendon tear.

But as the trainers urged him to take off his uniform and shower, Johnson told them they’d simply have to wait. The game was still being played.

“They were mad at me,” he said. “I was like, ‘Look, I ain’t getting out of these pads. I’m about to watch how we finish this game.’  ”

“They’’ was the Jets’ defense, the one that Johnson had just left on the field, the one that gave up a 40-yard touchdown pass that Johnson heard the home field roar at while he still was in the tunnels of Nissan Stadium. The one that already was down two key starters in D.J. Reed (inactive with a knee injury) and C.J. Mosley (who suffered a toe injury in the first quarter) when Johnson left, the one that had been pummeled the week before when it lost the opener in San Francisco.

Somehow, through all of that, when this game came down to making a series of stops in the final minute, they did it.

Their numbers may have been weakened, their prospects may have been pessimistic and their hearts may have been as heavy as granite, but they did not allow another point after that long TD pass, holding on to seal a 24-17 victory by stopping four plays from their own 10 or closer in the final 44 seconds.

Aaron Rodgers may have engineered the winning drive, but it was the defense that overcame a tough start to this season that had everyone questioning its ability and made it all stick.

“Overall, the guys stood up,” coach Robert Saleh said. “We’ve got a good group.”

It wasn’t just a physical resilience but an emotional one that made this all so impressive. Tears were shed on the field when Johnson left their ranks, including some by defensive lineman Solomon Thomas, who embraced the young edge rusher before his cart took him off. Thomas had taken a similar ride himself earlier in his career.

“It was heartbreaking,” Thomas said. “Losing [No.] 11, it’s like losing a heartbeat from this team. I just told him I love him and he’s going to be OK. That’s all you can tell him in that moment.”

There was, however, more that they could do. And they did it.

“We’re all just out there playing for [Johnson] at that point,” Will McDonald, whose sack on third-and-goal from the 8 with 23 seconds left — his third of the game — was the next-to-last stop. It came just moments before safety Tony Adams broke up a fourth-down pass from Will Levis to Tyler Boyd at the goal line to officially notch the win.

This was the type of performance that can turn the narrative for a season, harden resolve, restore faith and allow a team to find its true identity through adversity.

Quincy Williams, who stepped in for Mosley as the quarterback of the defense, said he definitely felt that. He couldn’t recall the details — “I don’t even remember the last couple of plays,” he said — but he was latched on to the feelings that came as that last pass first popped into the air and then hit the ground incomplete.

The night before each game, Williams said, the entire team goes around the room and talks about their “why,” the reason they are playing. It’s not just so that the player remembers it, it’s so his teammates do, too.

“So when your brother goes down, you take on his why,” Williams said. “He can’t finish the game, so you are still playing for him, still playing for his family, feel me? Having that mindset, that fuels everything.”

These, by the way, are the important things Haason Reddick is missing during his holdout. Reddick’s negotiating stance may have been strengthened by Johnson’s injury, a cold, hard fact of the business of football, but not being with the team for the game in Nashville will leave him as less of a Jet if and when he does return.

And Johnson? He saw all of it on the TV in the locker room. On a day with so much pain for him, it made him smile.

“They handled business, man,” he said. “They finished it.”

Maybe, too, they are just getting started.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

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.