How they are winning is a mystery, however.
In the bottom third of the league in just about any stat you could come up with, the Jets seem to be winning using smoke and mirrors, slight of hand and the constant rubbing of rabbits feet, because there is no other explanation.
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| Using Gillislee Properly can only help Brady |
On defense, they give up 143 yards per game on the ground and a yield of 4.6 yards per carry and through the air they cough up two touchdowns per game to their opponent despite posting a relatively miserly 211 yards per game in that category - while on offense, they go for 111 on the ground and 189 through the air respectively.
Not exactly a juggernaut by any stretch of the imagination, yet they are somehow tied for the AFC East division lead with New England and Buffalo, each with a record of 3-2.
Of course, their three wins have come against the offensively challenged Miami Dolphins, Jacksonville Jaguars and Cleveland Browns while their two losses came at the hands of the aformentioned Bills and the Oakland Raiders - but each contest has been about game planning and optimizing the talent that they do have, and it's worked pretty well for them so far.
For instance, in their win over Miami, they concentrated on stopping Jay Ajayi and the Dolphins' running game and dared Jay Cutler to beat them - the result being 18 yards on 11 carries for Ajayi and a typically dismal day for Cutler. Against the Jaguars, they concentrated on getting to Blake Bortles and let rookie running back Leonard Fournette have his yardage, and Bortles' game was just as dismal as Cutler's while Fournette carried 24 times for 84 yards...
...and against the Browns, they concentrated on nailing rookie quarterback DeShone Kizer, beating him so badly that he was replaced under center by Kevin Hogan, who fared better, but it wasn't enough.
The final score in two of those games were relatively close, but the one thing that they all had in common is that their opponents each scored last-second touchdowns, or got scores from their defense to make the score seem closer than it really was - as evidenced by the thirteen points per game they've surrendered during their winning streak, which reduces down to seven points per game if one were to eliminate defensive and garbage-time scores.
On the other side of the ball is a Patriots offense that is really in no condition to challenge the Jets' Defense.
After all, despite success on the ground, the Patriots inexplicably don't try to optimize the talent they have in the backfield, instead putting quarterback Tom Brady in harm's way by making him drop back to pass on a full two-thirds of New England's offensive snaps - which feeds right into what New York does best on defense.
Brady's forty pass attempts per game put him on pace to set a career high, which currently stands at 637 in 2012, and to top last season's number by more than 200 attempts, which is also partially due to Brady serving a four-game suspension - but still five more attempts per game.
The need to reduce Brady's exposure to abuse should be paramount, given his age and the fact that he's already had to peel himself off the turf more in the first five games of 2017 than in all of last season. To be fair though, the total sacks for all of 2016 is actually 24, and when considering that nine of those came with fleet-of-foot Jimmy Garoppolo and Jacoby Brissett under center in a total of four games, the numbers from the present season don't seem particularly out of line thus far.
Curiously, the running game has been virtually ignored at times when it should be foremost in the mind of offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels.
After all, McDaniels used the running game to protect his young quarterbacks while they were filling in for Brady at the start of last season, protecting them while his young offensive line sought cohesiveness and chemistry - balancing out the offense to the point that the Patriots could have actually been considered run-heavy, even when Brady returned in week five...
...yet despite Garoppolo and Brissett being far more mobile than Brady, they still took ten sacks to start the season, and lost Jimmy Clipboard when he took a nasty hit from Miami linebacker Kiki Alonso and Brissett tore ligaments in the thumb of his throwing hand in the following game against Houston, rending him and the Patriots' offense inert the week after that in a shutout loss to Buffalo.
No matter which way you look at it, the song remains the same. Had the Patriots the same imbalance last season as they have this season, the number of sacks suffered by the quarterbacks would be virtually identical - one sack every 12.3 snaps in 2017 compared to once every 12.2 last season. But what's missing and what people are forgetting is that the line allowed fourteen more sacks the rest of 2016, and another nine sacks in three post-season games.
That means that in the 15 games Brady played in last season, he went down in the grasp of a defender twenty-five times and hit times-three.
So the line is just about where it was last season, considering the disparity between running plays and passing plays, which brings us to the eternal question of how to keep Brady upright so that he can survive the season and to give the offense a chance to realize it's full potential - not to mention matching up well with the New York Jets this Sunday - and the answer is as clear as a bell:
Run the damn ball.
Running the ball cures many ills, not the least of which is the fact that all Brady has to do is to turn and hand the ball off and become a spectator. Theoretically, mixing the run with the pass forced the defense to defend the entire field and paves the way for an effective play action sell that mitigates an aggressive pass rush to a certain degree...
...but having a 66/33 split between pass and run, respectively, causes the defense to focus on getting to Brady and dares the offense to beat them on the ground - but the Patriots are handicapped even more by the way McDaniels calls running plays when he decides to use the ground game.
Given the fact that power back Mike Gillislee has not been targeted in the passing game at all, it goes to figure that with him in the game, the opposition is going to stack the box against him - yet he still manages to break into the second level. Where things go south for him is when three or four running plays are called in succession as McDaniels seems to like to go with something until the defense stops it, then moves on.
New England has more success with James White or Dion Lewis in the backfield because they are used in both facets of the game, so teams have to account for them in both the running and passing games.
Gillislee hasn't been used a lot in the passing game, but he has great hands and once the play calling starts targeting him in the passing game, it will eventually force defenses to respect him as a receiving threat and open up wider running lanes - instead what is happening is that the play call will go to fullback James Develin out of a two back set, with Gillislee remaining in to block.
All of this said and true, what will it take for the Patriots' offense to get untracked against a decent Jets' defense?
Simply, they are going to have to mix up the run and the pass, distributing the play calls in a manner that doesn't scream the obvious, because running the ball twenty times in a game by lumping the runs into a condensed time span does the offense no good. Against the Jets, an offense must establish the run to keep the play action relavent, which keeps their pass rushers on their heels...
...though every team the Jets have faced thus far in 2017 have done exactly that, yet there isn't a 300 yard passer among them - in fact, New York has held two of their opponents under 200 passing yards per game.
But the Jets haven't faced a quarterback like Brady yet - Oakland's Derek Carr is the only thrower the Jets have faced in five games who is anywhere close to a true franchise passer, and the Raiders torched New York for 45 points in a lopsided win - so that streak of holding opposing passers under 300 yards may be in jeopardy.
But then again, if the Patriots find a true mix of run and pass, they won't need a big day out of Brady, as the Jets have allowed opposing offenses to rush for more than 140 yards in four of their first five games - if they can't find that mix, however, New York could win their fourth straight by forcing the Patriots to become one-dimensional, abusing Brady along the way.
It's all in the hands of Josh McDaniels.
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