With the New York Jets in must-win mode on a weekly basis from here on out, all eyes are on the team’s grabbiest storylines. Nuance has been tossed to the wayside; this is a full-on reality show at this point.
“Can Aaron Rodgers save his legacy?”
“Is Sauce Gardner cooked?”
“Is Joe Douglas gone?”
“Can we make a kick?”
These are a few of the common headlines that dominate the conversation around this team. Those storylines are justified to discuss, and they are undoubtedly important despite their surface-level nature.
I, however, have my eyes fixated on a much subtler storyline going into the Jets’ Week 10 road trip to Arizona. This, in my opinion, is the single most important on-field matchup for the Jets in a must-win football game, even if it is incredibly far down the list of talking points that the First Take crew will touch on in their weekly meaningless Jets segment that I will not be listening to but have shoved in my face on the Twitter timeline.
Let’s talk some actual football, shall we?
The Jets entered 2024 hoping to strike a solid balance between their passing and running games. That dream has gone up in flames thus far. Through nine games, the Jets rank fourth in pass attempts per game (36.0) and 31st in rush attempts per game (22.0).
Luckily, the stars are aligning for New York to finally begin discovering balance on offense. Both of their starting guards, John Simpson and Alijah Vera-Tucker, are set to play against Arizona after dealing with injuries; Simpson (groin) exited early in the team’s previous game, while Vera-Tucker (ankle) missed the last two games. Additionally, the Jets’ Week 10 opponent is vulnerable to allowing consistent success on the ground.
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The Arizona Cardinals are allowing a rushing success rate of 46.1%, per NFL Next Gen Stats, which is the fourth-highest in the NFL. If you isolate carries by running backs, the Cardinals fare even worse. They are allowing a league-worst success rate of 45.0% on RB carries.
Interestingly, the Cardinals’ ranking in yards per rush attempt allowed is a more respectable 16th (4.5). The disparity between those two rankings implies that Arizona does a decent job of preventing home-run plays. They have only allowed four rushes for 20+ yards, tied for the seventh-fewest. However, the poor success rate shows that opposing offenses have been very consistent at racking up productive gains to stay ahead of the chains.
That is a vital development for this Jets team. Consistency is what the Jets have been lacking on the ground, as they rank 24th in rushing success rate (37.4%). Even more troubling is their 23% stuff rate (percentage of runs for no gain or a loss) on RB carries, which ranks 31st. This is the reason why they have been forced to go pass-heavy for much of the year. They frequently force themselves into obvious passing situations on second or third-and-long.
The Jets don’t necessarily need a boatload of 50+ yard runs for the run game to be a weapon; they just need 4-to-6-yard gains on the regular. There are so many advantages that come with being able to run the football this way. It would wear defenses out, milk the clock, draw defenders in to open up space for the passing game, create short-distance third downs, and reduce the number of dropbacks that Aaron Rodgers has to take.
In Arizona, the Jets will have a golden opportunity to finally prove they are capable of forging a consistent rushing attack from down to down. To make that happen, it all comes down to one sneaky position group that does its work in relative obscurity: the interior offensive line.
Looking at the Cardinals’ run defense grades (via Pro Football Focus) by position, they align with the takeaways that can be gleaned from their team-wide metrics. Here are the cumulative PFF run defense grades of each unit on Arizona’s defense, and where they rank across the NFL:
- S: 75.9 (2nd)
- EDGE: 71.8 (2nd)
- LB: 71.5 (11th)
- CB: 59.7 (23rd)
- DT: 48.6 (25th)
The Cardinals do an outstanding job of setting the edge, and they have excellent second-level support from the linebackers and safeties. With these advantages, it’s no surprise that they have only allowed four rushes for 20+ yards. Those positions are crucial in preventing breakway runs.
However, the Cardinals’ brutal success rate can be attributed to their pillow-soft interior, which has a run defense grade below 50. The defensive tackles allow opposing runners to get through the first level with ease, leading to consistent successful runs even if the second-level defenders are preventing massive gains that would spike the YPC number.
This weakness can be seen on these two runs by the Commanders’ Brian Robinson. On both plays, Washington calls a power run up the middle (featuring a pulling guard), and they easily wipe out the defensive tackles for Robinson to find success straight up the gut.
New York must build its rushing attack accordingly. The crux of the plan should be to target the defensive tackles with power runs on the inside. Therefore, the Jets’ interior offensive line holds the keys to the team’s rushing success on Sunday.
As mentioned earlier, Simpson and Vera-Tucker will be back on the field, which is tremendous news. The Jets were down to Olu Fashanu and Max Mitchell at guard last week, a combination that provides an alarming lack of physicality in the run-blocking department. Arizona’s weakness up the middle likely would have been rendered obsolete. With the starting guard duo in the fold, the Jets have no excuses not to be able to run the football against a defense allowing the highest rushing success rate to RBs.
And it all starts inside, where Arizona has been particularly poor. On RB carries between the tackles, Arizona has allowed a shockingly high success rate of 53.4%, the worst in the NFL. When RBs go outside of the tackles, the Cardinals allow a much more respectable success rate of 37.6%, which ranks 19th.
While you can say that a team’s run game will be an important factor going into any NFL game, the Jets’ run game figures to be particularly imperative this week because their defense is facing a very difficult matchup.
Arizona is built to exploit the holes in the Jets’ defense, and they are playing at home against a team traveling across the country. The Cardinals have a strong chance of racking up points at a torrid pace. For that reason, it’s crucial for the Jets’ offense to sustain long drives and keep Kyler Murray on the sidelines. To do that, they must run the ball with consistency, and to run the ball with consistency against this Cardinals defense, they have to beat them up the middle.
That is why the Jets’ interior offensive line is quietly the Jets’ biggest key to victory in Arizona.
This would not be as big of a storyline from my perspective if the Jets’ run blocking (especially from the interior) was consistently effective this season. If that were the case, I would portray this as a major mismatch, not as a storyline. The reason I see it as a storyline is because this goes beyond solely the Cardinals game; it’s about cashing in on the hype this unit generated in the offseason.
Players like Aaron Rodgers, Sauce Gardner, and Breece Hall have received the most negative attention for their underwhelming performances at times this year, but the run-blocking of the offensive line is arguably the Jets’ largest disappointment of all. Those three aforementioned players have had their share of great moments. Heck, even the Jets’ pass protection has been decent. But the run blocking is the lone touted facet of the team that has remained consistently brutal.
Nine weeks in, the Jets are still 30th in rushing yards per game, 28th in yards per rush attempt, and 29th in yards before contact per RB attempt. Those marks are eight spots, 14 spots, and seven spots lower than the rankings of the 2023 Jets team, respectively. That is unfathomable when considering how talent-deprived and injury-riddled the 2023 offensive line was.
The Jets built an offensive line full of talented run blockers who are especially good at pulling and gap-blocking, and the spotlight is on them in a game where they must be successful in those exact areas against a vulnerable group of defensive tackles. It’s time for the results to start matching the hype. They won’t get a better matchup than this to prove they can be the unit that Jets fans thought they could be.
John Simpson, Joe Tippmann, and Alijah Vera-Tucker, this game is in your hands, even if nobody is talking about it.
