Adam Gase‘s weaknesses as a leader are well-documented, but the production of his Jets team was arguably even worse.
1-15: record through first eight games of a season
Over his two seasons at the helm in Florham Park, Adam Gase led the Jets to only one victory through their first eight games of a season, which was a 24-22 nailbiter over the Dallas Cowboys in Week 6 of 2019. That’s it. His Jets went 1-7 in the first half of the 2019 season and 0-8 in the first half of the 2020 season for a combined first-half record of 1-15. Every other team in the NFL won at least two first-half games from 2019-20.
-297: Total point differential
Putting wins and losses aside, Gase’s Jets were arguably the worst team in football over his tenure. The Jets were outscored by 297 points across Gase’s 32 games (-9.3 average), the worst point differential in the NFL from 2019-20.
The Jets ranked 32nd in scoring over Gase’s tenure with 519 points (16.2 per game), a total that sits 71 points behind the 31st-ranked Bengals’ 590 points (18.4 per game). They ranked 25th in scoring defense with 816 points allowed (25.5 per game).
In 2020, the Jets were outscored by 214 points, tying the 1976 squad for the worst scoring margin in franchise history. The Jets played only 14 games that year, so the 2020 team’s average margin of -13.4 is the second-worst in franchise history ahead of the 1976 team’s -15.3.
-15: Blowout margin
Gase’s Jets claimed only two victories by multiple scores (9+ points), the second-fewest in the league from 2019-20 ahead of only the Lions’ one blowout win. In addition, Gase’s Jets lost by multiple scores a total of 17 times, the most in the NFL over Gase’s tenure and representing 53.1% of the Jets’ games. Over the past two years, the average NFL team lost by 9+ points only 23.6% of the time. Gase more than doubled that rate.
The Gase-led Jets absorbed 15 more blowout losses than they handed out, the worst margin in football from 2019-20.
1: Offensive outputs above the league average in 2020
The 2020 NFL average for total yards of offense per game was 359.0. Gase’s Jets surpassed that mark only once all year, barely doing so with a 376-yard performance against the Raiders’ atrocious defense (31st in points allowed per drive) in Week 13.
The 2020 league average for passing yards per game was 240.2. The Jets eclipsed that mark just one time, which was a 257-yard performance against the Patriots in Week 9, led by Joe Flacco. They did not post more than 240 passing yards in any of Sam Darnold‘s 12 starts.
EPA (estimated points added) is a stat that values the impact of each play based on down, distance, and field position. The league average for offensive EPA per game this season was +5.7. The Jets beat that only three times – Week 9 vs. New England (+18.7), Week 11 at the Chargers (+7.5), and Week 13 vs. Las Vegas (+7.6). They managed to beat the league’s offensive EPA average in two of Flacco’s four starts but only one of Darnold’s 12 starts.
Overall, the Jets ranked dead last in offensive EPA (-63.0) in 2020. They fell exactly 28.0 points behind the 31st-ranked Broncos, a margin that is close to the difference between the seventh-ranked Raiders (+143.2) and the 15th-ranked Cardinals (+117.1).
Offensive Simple Rating System
Pro Football Reference concocts a statistic called “Simple Rating System” that combines scoring productivity with strength-of-schedule and the league averages to provide an accurate look at the quality of each team’s overall point differential, scoring offense, and scoring defense that can be used to compare across eras.
In 2019, the Jets posted an OSRS (Offensive Simple Rating System) of -5.7 that ranked 31st in the NFL ahead of only Washington. That mark currently ranks fifth-worst in franchise history, and at the season’s conclusion, it was the franchise’s worst mark since 1995.
The Jets’ -7.9 OSRS under Rich Kotite in 1995 was the team’s all-time low until the record was shattered in 2020. Gase led the Jets to an NFL-worst OSRS of -8.7 this season, making the 2020 Jets offense the worst-scoring unit relative to league average and adjusted for strength-of-schedule in the 61-year history of Jets football.
