The New York Jets are a very young and exciting team, aside from their 39-year-old quarterback and the newly acquired Al Woods. However, those old men in NFL years are still playing at a high-enough level to make the Jets not just a contender within their division but in the conference.
It Took Time for New York Jets To Address Their DT Losses
The Jets’ defense ranked fifth in DVOA a season ago and third in the weighted version of the metric. They also were one of just five teams that ranked inside the top 10 against the pass and run.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the offense, and more specifically, swinging and missing on Zach Wilson, led to the team’s downfall late in the season. They simply didn’t have the QB play to compete. But that won’t be an excuse any longer.
So if things go wrong in New York again in 2023, what will be the cause of it? Well, that would be their group of defensive tackles.
Sauce Gardner may already be the league’s best cornerback. D.J. Reed is an unbelievable complement.
“Definitely, man,” Gardner said when asked if the Jets have the best cornerback duo in the NFL. “The way that we go about the game, the way that we watch film, the way that we practice, I feel like there isn’t anybody doing it like we’re doing it.”
PFN’s Arif Hasan agrees with Gardner.
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Michael Carter II emerged as one of the league’s best slot defenders a season ago. The defensive backfield played some incredible football. Adding Chuck Clark for a seventh-round pick might have been the best value move of the entire offseason.
But the Jets had a potentially fatal flaw on the defensive side of the ball until they signed Woods.
Losing Sheldon Rankins to Houston and Nathan Shepherd to New Orleans dealt the Jets a blow to the defensive interior that they did not address immediately.
While New York did add Quinton Jefferson to the mix a while back, there’s a level of consistency lacking in his game that makes the 30-year-old a volatile player to be starting, even if he’s still able to provide pressure on a relatively consistent basis.
Big boys can’t play 80% of a team’s defensive snaps. The Jets were staring at a lineup consisting of All-Pro Quinnen Williams and a lot of underwhelming play beyond that.
Although Robert Saleh believes in Solomon Thomas like a parent does their child, Thomas has never rounded into the player San Francisco believed he could be when they drafted him. In fact, he hasn’t been anything close to that, but he is still only 27, so he continues to get opportunities to improve.
Tanzel Smart played only 49 defensive snaps a season ago for the Jets. Isaiah Mack only played 30 in Baltimore. It was going to be Williams and a lot of question marks. It only takes a quick peek over at the 2022 Cleveland Browns to know that a bad defensive interior can have a devastating effect on the defense as a whole.
How Al Woods Might Have Saved the Jets’ Season
Am I being a bit hyperbolic? Absolutely. But when one really digs into the Jets coaching staff and depth chart, it’s really hard to find glaring flaws. Until the Jets signed Woods, it was easy to imagine the team being bludgeoned at times up the middle.
Even though brothers Quinnen and Quincy, along with C.J. Mosley, are dynamic, things could have still been very ugly with the younger Williams off the field. Linebackers, no matter how talented, need to be kept clean as often as possible.
Woods, even at the ripe age of 36, is still one of the better interior defenders in the NFL, particularly from a gap-control and run-defending standpoint. And that is exactly what New York needed to add to their roster. But they also got someone who leads by example.
“What I would do is I would get somebody to get me a cut up of my mistakes only,” Woods told reports after re-signing with the Seahawks before 2022. “So I was always in a mind frame of, ‘I’ve got to get better. I have to get better because these plays cannot happen.’ I think that’s what it was. I was resetting my mind to get better literally every week.”
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The big defensive tackle played over 400 snaps a season ago, and he’ll likely be somewhere around that number again in 2023, given the Jets depth chart at the position.
If the Jets want to get cheeky, they could double up on 36-year-old run defenders by adding Tyson Alualu. Linval Joseph is only 34, but he could also be another option to play a limited role on the Jets’ interior.
We can all hope and expect Williams to be healthy and incredibly productive once again in 2023. However, if he were to have to miss an extended period due to injury, the Jets couldn’t rest on their laurels and run out the group they had on the interior prior to Woods. Even with Woods, the interior is the obvious weak link on their defense.
Additionally, adding another defensive tackle with run-stopping ability could allow the Jets to continue their trend of having an A-team and B-team rotation. Woods and Williams could be the starters, while a trio of Jefferson, Thomas, and (insert name here) could rotate in as the B team, with one of the three remaining on the sideline depending on the situation the defense finds themselves in.
