October 4, 2008, 4:37 am Football Scientist: Bright Spots for Jets? Defense By KC Joyner Tags: Jets The Football Scientist, KC Joyner contributes weekly to The Fifth Down. His latest book is ?Blindsided: Why the Left Tackle is Overrated and Other Contrarian Football Thoughts.? It is perfectly understandable that most of the coverage about the Jets does not revolve around the defense. They are 24th in the league in yards allowed per game, 28th in points per game and 30th in passing yards per game. Giving up 64 points in the past two games also doesn?t help their cause. After doing the tape/metric reviews of their first four contests, I can tell you that the overall stats don?t tell the entire story. This defense has more than a few high spots. The first is Kris Jenkins. Jenkins has allowed only 47 yards on eighteen runs at his point of attack (POA). The 2.6 YPA that equates to is impressive, but so are the five blocks that Jenkins defeated at the point of attack. That means Jenkins is beating blocks at a 27.8% clip. To put this percentage into perspective, consider that it compares quite favorably to the 2007 defeated block percentages of Pro Bowlers Kevin Williams (29.2%) and Albert Haynesworth (28.8%). Calvin Pace is another player performing at a top level against the run. Pace has given up 56 yards on 19 POA runs (2.9 YPA) and has a 21.1% POA win percentage. Darrelle Revis could also be added to this list. He?s had 18 passes thrown at him this season and 11 of those have fallen incomplete, which equates to a 61.1% incompletion rate. A fifty percent showing in this metric is quite good, and Revis has topped that mark by more than ten percentage points. Revis has given up only 86 yards on completions/penalties, so he is giving up 4.8 YPA. Anything under six yards per attempt at the end of a season will put a cornerback at or near the top in the league, and Revis is more than a yard lower than that. Last but certainly not least, the Jets? defense as a whole deserves credit for the number of bad decisions it is forcing other offenses to make. The bad-decision metric measures how often a quarterback does something ill-advised with the ball, leading to either a turnover or a near turnover. Opposing quarterbacks are making these mistakes on 4.7% of the passes thrown against the Jets, which is the third-highest percentage in the league. Some of that is probably due to quarterbacks they have faced (Chad Pennington and Philip Rivers both have high bad decision percentage histories), but it still bodes well that this defense was able to force them to make mistakes.
So the end story is that the yardage is garbage time yardage, but that doesn't tell the whole story either. Its great to see that the Jets NT, OLB and CB are some of the elite at their positions, 2 of which being FAs signed this year. Its good to see the bad decision being caused, but the 3rd down % is still a little high. Lets make Palmer make some bad decisions next week.
I agree, we have GOT to get off the field on 3rd - it's been our (one of our) achilles heel for years.
Well we are getting close to where everyone was saying give them time to jell, Well have they had enough time. We will see when the play next week.
Completely agree. Having not had a dominant NT for a LONG time it's painfully obvious how important that position is. J Ferguson was the last good one we had. Jenkins is better though, IMO...
exactly what I said. I said this team has until the bye week and then coming out of it they had better be in full swing chemistry wise. If they aren't the team is out of excuses it will be week 6 of the season, the defense should be better post bye as it always is. The offense has no reason to miss a beat seeing as how they came out swinging better than all but 1 Jets offense in their history just last week. We should come out in full swing mode. but it's the jets, and it's the definition of trap game, so it wouldnt surprise me if we come out flat, it also wouldnt surprise me if we came out without missing a beat from the arizona game. What would surprise me is if the game is so-so on both sides of the ball for the jets. If they aren't good, but not bad either, that would be the surprise for me. I fully expect us to be great or horrendous next sunday.
Agree 100%. Jenkins has been key for our run-d and our pass rush. When he isn't in there we just couldn't get to the QB or force the o-line into the backfield (see San Diego for both situations).
Hmm... I wonder how good they'll be after the bye. Let's look back at Mangini's history after the bye with defenses.
