Nathaniel Hackett, Jets' offense can't stick to same playbook going forward
New York Jets offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett looks on before a game against the Philadelphia Eagles at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, Oct. 15, 2023 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Credit: Jim McIsaac
FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — If Nathaniel Hackett is going to stick around — and, given that Aaron Rodgers made it clear in his weekly ESPN appearance he’d like that to happen despite the coach overseeing the league’s worst offenses in terms of scoring last year and yardage this year, it is almost certain to be the case — then this season has to have some sense of meaning.
It has to be building toward something better.
There needs to be a lesson hidden deep beneath all the buffoonery.
But other than trying to not have your quarterback suffer a season-ending injury four snaps into the opener, it’s been really hard to find anything.
Even Hackett himself struggled to come up with any actual progress or positives to take away from a forgettable 2023 campaign.
“There’s a lot of things,” he said vaguely, but when pressed to name one or two he said he could not because he is getting ready for Sunday’s game against the Commanders.
That must be one heck of a game plan he’s got bouncing around inside his head.
If it’s anything like most of the previous 14, though, it won’t matter much. The Jets offense without Rodgers has been plain awful and Hackett hasn’t been able to squeeze much production from even the elements that were supposed to be sure things, that have played the season mostly without injury, such as Garrett Wilson and Breece Hall.
Hackett, though, stands by his overarching schemes, citing the success he had with them in Jacksonville, Buffalo and Green Bay.
“We just got here this year,” he said. “We’ve had an unbelievable amount of changes, so there’s reasons why everything happened, and so long as we’re able to identify those and get those pieces in the right places, it will be very good.”
Let’s be clear: Rodgers is the piece that needs to be in place for anything Hackett draws up to work. The Jets’ offense is not quarterback-friendly in that anyone can step in and run it. It is friendly to one specific quarterback, one Hall of Famer who had a hand in designing it and may be the only player in the league who can execute it at a high level.
This is the Aaron Rodgers offense, and without Rodgers it was nothing.
That part of it has to change. The Jets cannot go into 2024 with a 40-year-old quarterback coming back from a torn Achilles and count on him to be healthy for all 17 games plus the ones they envision themselves playing in the postseason. They will undoubtedly spend this offseason in search of a capable backup quarterback. What they also need to come up with is a capable backup playbook.
Even Rodgers himself admitted as much when he endorsed Hackett for another season on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Tuesday.
“I believe in Nate Hackett,” he said. “I think the offense that he runs is quarterback friendly. Obviously, it was geared around me and my abilities and what I do well and my ability to get to the line of scrimmage and get us in some good plays and to survive bad plays.”
“You always want that play to be called that [the quarterback] feels he can execute at a high level, so we want enough to be able to adapt to anybody that might be on the field, same thing with the skill players,” Hackett said. “Aaron’s going to be a lot different than anybody, but we want to have enough for everyone.”
No one in the Jets organization had more personally and professionally riding on Rodgers’ success this season than Hackett. He was the coordinator brought in to help woo Rodgers to New York, the one who is supposed to be in sync with him, the one who amuses and entertains Rodgers. He is the one who was coming off a terrible season — well, almost a full season anyway — as a first-time head coach in Denver that ended with him fired and with his replacement mocking him on the way out. He is the one about whom many had their nagging doubts; they were just assuaged by Rodgers’ certainty in him.
“In the end, my job is to win,” he said. “My job is to put a good product out there on the offense, and that’s what I focus on … It doesn’t matter who’s playing for us, that’s what we want.”
Mission clearly not accomplished. Under nearly any other circumstance, in any other season, Hackett would be a goner.
Hackett has been coaching in the NFL since 2006. He’s been around the game a lot longer than that, for most of his life really, as his father Paul was a long-time coach in the league as well, including a stint as offensive coordinator of the Jets from 2001-04. This season has reinforced something he has always understood, even if never to this degree.
“It’s always a humbling league,” he said. “There are so many things you have to prepare for, and every time you think that you’ve seen it all, you have to realize you have not seen it all. From the different things that we’ve faced throughout this year, I think that those are the things that make you stronger, and as long as you take it that way and are able to grow from it, it’ll make you better.”
Let’s hope so.
This season has been a disappointment in so many, many ways and, without Rodgers, essentially one big mulligan. If Hackett and the Jets can’t find at least one thing to learn from it and carry forward, though, it will go down as something worse than a failure.
It will have been a complete waste.
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.
