NFL 2024
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The Jets sacked their coach, got Davante Adams, and got worse. lol.
The Ravens are so up and down.
The Lions are running rough shod all over the league at the moment. Scary team. And yet they are only a win in front of the Packers in what is probably the best division in football this year.
Still a very inconsistent season. The Chiefs look like they will remain undefeated without hitting any heights. But nearly every game every weekend is a lottery.
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@barbarian said in NFL 2024:
I am really enjoying the demise of the Jets. Aaron Rodgers is just so easy to cheer against and seeing him fail has brought me a surprising and perhaps slightly unhealthy amount of joy.
yeah, weirdly i am right with you
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@mariner4life said in NFL 2024:
i just watched another angle of this. The player that ends up tipping the ball in to the Commanders player's hands was taking the piss out of the Washington fans as the play started. Hilarious and instantaneous karma
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@KiwiMurph I can't believe so many people are sticking up for him.
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@barbarian said in NFL 2024:
I am really enjoying the demise of the Jets. Aaron Rodgers is just so easy to cheer against and seeing him fail has brought me a surprising and perhaps slightly unhealthy amount of joy.
As a Jets fan it obviously sucks to lose, but as I was saying earlier, Rodgers off field stuff has always been his biggest weakness. He's a total clown, ond given he has no historical loyalty from the Jets fans I can see him get booed off the field by the end of the season.
Jets fans are basically all hoping that this is embarrassing enough that Woody Johnson gives up and sells the jets. He's one of the worst owners in the league and over the past few weeks he's basically taken over as GM, firing the HC, trading for Davante, agreeing to terms with Reddick (have I had a rant about how awful that trade is? How do you have a guy hold out through 6 weeks of the season that you traded for in the off season? GM 101: before you trade for a guy, either ensure he's happy with his contract or work out a new deal), and at some point in the next day or two, probably cutting the kicker. None of this has any good team building principles behind it, just the NFL owner equivalent of 'one more bet and my fortune will turn around'.
It's . extra frustrating because for about two years around 2022/23 they actually looked like they were doing sensible team building things, and conceivably had a strong roster held back by poor QB play from Zach Wilson. A gun-for-hire Rodgers could conceivably have pushed them over the top. But neither Saleh, Douglas or Johnson were willing or able to stand up to Rodgers and keep him in check and instead they effectively made him the GM. All elite QBs have a massive say, but this was beyond even that.
Tl;Dr: Jets gonna jet. I'm increasingly convinced Namath made a deal with the devil for the win in SBIII.
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Cyclops, from watching them a bit I'm still not sure why they are doing so poorly.
The defence is easily a top 10 unit. Rodgers isn't what he used to be but he's fine, and that's more than enough in what is a weak division.
Breece Hall is a good RB, and Allen is a decent backup. And the passcatching unit is great - Wilson and Adams are both WR1s, and Lazard and Conklin are capable third options. The O-line seems to hold up pretty well.
So what the hell is happening? The kicker is the obvious answer, he sucks, but that doesn't explain everything...
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Because American sports are great for incredible and impossible-sounding stats, here's one to warm the cockles of @Cyclops heart
Since 1940 when a team scores at least 20pts, dont turn the ball over, and defense allows under 250yds the record is 756-0. Well the Jets are the first team to lose in that situation
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never liked rodgers
but unbelievably i think i might be starting to feel sorry for him!
so arrogant, he went to the jets thinking he could turn them around . . . nah
he's due up on the mcafee show today . . . maybe he'll "tap out"i think johnson stepped in because he got sick of his buddies asking him why the jets are so shit
at least they won't ask that anymore . . . because they know . . . it's him!the bills are the first to clinch a playoff berth
hard to see the pats jets or dolphins winning that division -
There's a bunch of stuff going wrong, so this might turn into a bit of a ramble.
There are a coupe of issues on defence, partly caused by roster construction and partly caused by key guys having down years.
The past couple of years Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams have both been top 3 at their position. That's pretty much the dream for every team - reliable pressure on the interior and a lockdown corner. They've both regressed this year. I'm not sure why; in the case of Williams I'm confident it's just a down year caused by other issues on the line, and in the last couple of weeks he's shown some signs of improvement (more on that in a moment), and for Gardner I suspect the same is true but there's a school of thought that his first two seasons were a mirage and he's really not that good a corner. I don't buy that - you don't have the college career he had, then be first team all pro your first two years in the league without being an elite talent. Maybe he's not going to be a top 3 CB long term, but if he's not a consistent top 10 CB for his entire career I'll be stunnned. Two studs having bad years, along with general underperformance makes me suspect locker room issues, but probably won't know that until after the season if at all.
So that leaves roster construction. Until this year the Douglas/Saleh regime was basically the perfect case study of how to build a defence. They used premium draft picks on premium positions, they brought in role players with skill sets the complimented how their defence operates, they had a clear and coherent philosophy and they developed guys well. And then this year their recruitment is almost a total bust.
A note on the scheme the jets run (this is mostly based on Saleh's scheme, Ulbrich is maybe changing it a bit, but too early to tell). The basic philosophy is to play as fast as possible; they have relatively simple schemes, with the idea that if players are execute the same thing over and over, they won't need to think and can just execute. The place this is most obvious is defensive end and linebacker. At DE they favour smaller, twitchier guys who can bend around tackles, and at linebacker they favour smaller, faster guys with coverage skills (basically, big safties). This creates issues in the run game, because you end up with a bunch of guys who struggle to shed blocks. In the past couple of years they've had two solutions to this: Quinnen Williams being a monster in the interior and John Franklin-Meyers, who is really a pretty middle of the road player, but was a bit of a hybrid Edge-Tackle, so could set the edge strongly to stop runs, but then collapse the pocket and create pressure if it was a passing play.
So this year, they traded away John Franklin-Meyers and hoped that Michael Clemons (a 4th round draft pick from a couple of years ago) and Jermaine Johnson (1st rounder from the Sauce/Wilson draft) would step into that JFM role. But Clemons has been useless and Johnson is out for the season, so the line is really struggling to stop the run. This team has probably the worst run defence in the league. Some games they've been able to stop the run, but if you watch the games, what's happening is their linebackers have played out of their skin. People say 'it's a passing league', but what they really mean is 'it's harder to stop the pass'. Running the ball is less efficient in general. But in the case of this team, often running the ball is a reliable way to gain yardage - the 49ers and Bills games especially the Jets were just helpless to stop them.
On the offensive side of the ball it's not as rosy as you suggest. Wilson at his best is a WR1 but most of the season him and Rodgers haven't really got on the same page, so he hasn't produced a lot (although that's improving), and even as a WR1, I'd put him in the lower tier of WR1 guys, not the kind of game destroying WR1 like Justin Jefferson etc. Adams was that kind of guy, but he's now 32 which is an age very few WRs have maintained a high level at (basically just Larry Fitzgerald). He's a useful complimentary piece, but I'd say he's really a high end WR2 at this point.
But Wilson, Adams, Lazard, Mike Williams, Conklin, Hall and Allen are a pretty good set of playmakers, and although there are better units in the NFL, you should be able to thrive with them.
The o-line has been a mixed bag. They're solid without being elite in pass protection, but their run protection has been awful. I suspect that Keith Carter, the oline coach is a big part of the issue (he had an awful rep at his last gig, the titans), because often the issues look like they're scheme/communication based rather than a lineman totally missing a block. But I think age is a factor - Tyron Smith and Morgan Moses were both allowed to leave their previous teams for pretty reasonable deals (a late round pick for Moses and only 6m in guarantees for Smith who is a future HOFer). Sometimes you get a bargain because the other team has cap issues or a logjam of players, but sometimes when a team lets a stalwart go cheap it's a sign that the player is declining. I think Breece Hall also has to take some of the blame for the run protection though, he wants to be a patient back looking for the gap to open, but that's just not happening, so he probably needs to get more decisive and be more of a downhill runner, although even if he did that, he'd probably struggle, because his biggest strengths are really making guys miss in the open - he's the kind of guy that if you get him at the line he probably won't break the tackle, but if you get him into a gap, he'll turn a 5 yard gain into a 50 yard gain.
So that leaves Rodgers. He's not good. He either doesn't trust his protection or doesn't trust himself, because he is really focused on getting the ball out ASAP, and bailing on the pocket way too early. He's also missing passes that he wouldn't have a couple of years ago. I don't think this team needed MVP calibre Rodgers, but they needed him to be at least in the top 12-15 QBs in the league. What they've got is a guy who is probably around the 20 mark. Every now and then he produces a sequence of plays that look like vintage Rodgers, but it's not consistent enough to turn drives into TDs.
Early season the play calling was awful. Completely unimaginative, and consistently putting the team in third and long by running the ball to often. Since Hackett has lost the play calling responsibilities that's got slightly better.
Finally, they've been unlucky. That doesn't excuse this record at least 4 of these games should have been blow out wins, where bad luck would have reduced the margin a bit, but because of the issues above, it's been more decisive. Some of that is the kicker (Zuerlein is a decent kicker, who has either got old or having a down year; kicking in the NFL might be the most ruthless job in the world, it's really only a couple of kicks a year is the difference between keeping a job and getting cut), but also there have been a few freak plays that have got against them (for example in the steelers game, there were two slightly freakish interceptions, while two long steelers plays that on another day would have either falling incomplete or been picked off). I don't want to make too much of that though, because they have also had luck help them (Will Levis incomprehensible-for-anyone-else implosion is basically the only reason they beat the Titans, the hail mary vs the Bills made it look closer than it really was).
The situation isn't as bad as the record looks - there is a good core of genuine talent here, but they probably need to accept that next year is a cap-reset year so they can resign all that talent, and keep restocking, but I don't think Woody Johnson will accept that. If Rodgers comes back next year I think it's the kind of move that will destroy the roster for another 5 years.
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Thursday night football is just so consistently low quality football. I guess Amazon won't care as long as people keep paying and the NFL won't care as long as Amazon keeps paying them.
One of the crazier drives I've seen though is the Texans field goal miss. They made it from 44 yards but a penalty gave them a first down, so they wiped off the field goal, sent the offence back out and ended up having to settle for a chip shot field goal. Which they missed.
Check out the second Wilson TD if you can, on all time great catch from him, showing off the body control that got him drafted in the top 10.
Rodgers lit it up in the second half. Too early to read too much into though, he's had other periods of elite play earlier this year then gone cold again.
