Justin Fields’ second appearance with the New York Jets is in the books. Just like his first, he logged six dropbacks as a passer.
Unlike his first game, though, this six-play outing did not draw rave reviews.
It was an ugly viewing for fans. Fields completed 1-of-5 passes for 4 yards and scrambled once for 5 yards.
After a poor opening drive from Fields, the Jets started to ignore the passing game. To open their second drive, the Jets called six consecutive run plays. They finished the drive with nine runs and two passes, with neither pass play yielding a first down.
Was Fields as bad as he looked upon first watch?
Let’s run back through his six plays against the Giants.
Justin Fields film breakdown
Play 1: 1st & 10 at NYJ 42
Jets offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand dials up a flood concept for Fields on a play action bootleg. It gives Fields an easy 1-2-3 read: deep, medium, shallow.
We can’t see without the All-22, but it seems likely that Garrett Wilson is covered on the deep option, as we see two defensive backs bracketing him. Jeremy Ruckert is blanketed on the crosser. Fields makes the right decision and dumps it to Mason Taylor for a 4-yard pickup on first down.
Pretty easy play for Fields, and he executes it properly.
Play 2: 1st & 10 at NYG 46
Fields goes for a hard count and gets a slight jump from Kayvon Thibodeaux on the Jets’ right side. It prompts him to make a change to the play.
We cannot know for sure without being in the Jets’ locker room, but my guess is that Fields changed the play for two reasons. Knowing that Thibodeaux was coming (not dropping into flat coverage) and also seeing that the Giants’ corners were backing off, I think Fields audibled into a quick-hitting concept that he believed would allow him to easily target Garrett Wilson (outside right) on a short pass.
Post-snap, Fields immediately looks Wilson’s way. However, the corner on Wilson does not continue bailing downfield as Fields seemed to expect. Instead, the corner squats in place, sitting directly on top of Wilson’s route.
With Wilson shut down, Fields hesitates for an extra hitch. He tries to progress to Breece Hall, who is open for a checkdown that would yield a decent gain on first-and-10.
Fields makes the right decision to target Hall. However, Armand Membou allows quick inside pressure to Thibodeaux, which rattles Fields. With Thibodeaux bearing down, Fields tries a jump pass and misses high on a wide open checkdown from five yards away. He is lucky that Hall tapped the ball down, or it would have been a pick-six.
While Fields gets some slack for the shoddy pass protection, it is still a negative rep. He made an audible that didn’t work, and while he eventually found the correct option regardless, he responded poorly to the pressure. That is still a throw you would like him to hit; at the very least, he cannot miss high in that part of the field.
Play 3: 2nd & 10 at NYG 46
Joe Tippmann throws off Fields’ rhythm with a high snap. Tippmann had multiple of these in his short appearance, which is discouraging after he dealt with snap issues throughout 2024.
Fields proceeds to do his best Zach Wilson impersonation by throwing a screen pass at Garrett Wilson’s feet.
Sure, Tippmann’s snap threw off Fields’ rhythm, but he still had more than enough time to reset himself and deliver this easy throw into an uncontested window. Whiffs like this are back-breaking for an offense.
Even if this particular screen probably would not have gotten far anyway, you do not want to see your quarterback missing screen passes. This particular miss was dangerously close to being a live ball, which makes it even more brutal.
Play 4: 3rd & 10 at NYG 46
Similar to the first down play, the corner does a great job of anticipating Wilson’s route and squatting on top of it, which puts him in perfect position to contest the pass. With the corner multiple steps ahead of Wilson, there really isn’t anywhere for Fields to place this ball that would result in an easy catch.
However, the great coverage does not excuse the throw. Fields could see the entire way that the corner was squatting with inside leverage and that Wilson had outside leverage toward the sideline. Fields should have placed this ball high and outside to give Wilson a chance at going up and catching it back-shoulder away from the defender.
Instead, Fields darts it low-and-inside in a spot where Wilson has no chance.
This is either poor ball placement or a display of poor accuracy in which Fields actually did try to go back-shoulder and flat-out missed. I lean toward the former, as Fields’ mechanics suggest he was trying to place the ball where he did.
Maybe Fields expected Wilson to come back toward the ball, but that would just be an incorrect read. It’s on Fields to read the defender’s leverage and place the ball accordingly. Wilson saw the inside leverage and correctly positioned himself for a back-shoulder pass. Fields failed to make that read.
Fields needs to place this ball in a better spot to give his playmaker a legitimate chance at making something happen.
Play 5: 1st & 10 at NYG 45 (Difficult to judge from broadcast view)
(Due to the limitations of the broadcast view, there will be quite a bit of guessing in this section. I will update this section when the All-22 film comes out.)
After the previous three-play stretch led to a punt, the Jets came out on their next drive with six straight handoffs. This scramble was the seventh play of the drive.
We shouldn’t criticize this play too harshly before seeing the All-22 to confirm. However, it seems like Fields likely had much better options than a 5-yard scramble.
Mason Taylor motions to the right side of the field. After giving a slight chip on Kayvon Thibodeaux, Taylor leaks into the flat. The corner on Wilson eventually turns to the flat and appears to track down Taylor, but we can see that there is initially no defender in Taylor’s area. If Fields hit Taylor quickly and led him outside, he could have turned upfield and at least matched Fields’ eventual 5-yard gain, if not significantly exceeded it with a great YAC play.
Meanwhile, Breece Hall also leaks into the flat on Taylor’s side, and it is quite clear that nobody is in his area. On the initial angle, we can see all three linebackers bailing into deep coverage, and later in the clip, all three of them can be seen pursuing Fields from beyond the first down marker. With the Giants’ left corner seemingly on Taylor, that leaves nobody for Hall on the checkdown.
I am also curious to see if Josh Reynolds was open on his corner route at the bottom of the screen, as he gained an initial step on his man. Additionally, if Reynolds’ man stuck with him, it probably means Jeremy Ruckert was wide open in the flat with nobody close to him. If Reynolds’ man dropped off to cover Ruckert, then Reynolds was probably open.
There is a lot of guessing going on here without the full view, but we have to wait until later in the week for the All-22 film to come out, and I wanted to break this game down while it was still fresh in fans’ minds. Because of the broadcast view’s limitations, I will clear Fields of harsh judgment for now.
Still, the play is suspect from what we can currently see. You don’t want to see your quarterback declining open passes in favor of short scrambles, especially when he is as well-protected as he was on this play. But if the All-22 absolves him, I will let it be known.
One thing is for sure: We can see a great rep by Membou here against Thibodeaux. It’s a nice response after Thibodeaux cooked him earlier.
ALL-22 UPDATE:
As it turns out, Fields missed a plethora of opportunities to net a better result on this play.
Fields checks the deep middle as he gets into his drop. Not liking the potential throw to Wilson due to the linebackers gaining depth, Fields progresses to the right, where he has two great options.
The best option is to check it down to an uncovered Hall for an excellent YAC opportunity. He could also target Taylor a bit further downfield on an out route to the boundary side, which would have some YAC potential if Fields hit it quickly enough and placed the ball in the right spot.
The Jets’ offensive line does a stellar job against the four-man rush. There isn’t a good reason for Fields to move off his spot and not take one of the two throws to the right side. For some reason, he declines both options.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe Fields didn’t expect Hall to leak into the throwing lane to Taylor, and that threw him off. I don’t think that is a good excuse here, but if that is the case, it’s fine, as Fields has another deep route (Josh Reynolds) to check on the left side. But instead of continuing through his progressions in a clean pocket, Fields puts his head down and runs.
With a fantastic pocket and plenty of time to go through his reads, you would love for Fields to progress to Reynolds and see him sitting wide open in a hole between the linebackers and the extremely deep safeties. Reynolds’ man passes him off and nobody is there to pick him up, as Brian Burns, who is an edge rusher, looks unaware in coverage and spot-drops to a designated zone instead of scanning for nearby threats. That’s a sieve in the coverage that Fields should have recognized and targeted.
Better yet, even after bailing the progression too early, Fields still could have hit Reynolds after stepping up. Once Fields starts climbing the pocket, he draws all three linebackers in his direction, vacating even more space to deliver a throw to Reynolds. But Fields decided he was a runner the instant he moved off his set point, shutting down all throwing options.
Even if Fields didn’t like the window to Reynolds, he could have led Zack Kuntz downfield on the wide-open checkdown for what would have likely been more than five yards.
This is a bad play by Fields, and an example of a habit that places a cap on his ceiling if left unaddressed. The moment he saw wide-open space in the middle of the field, he flipped the switch from quarterback to runner. It netted a decent five-yard gain on first down, which looks fine on the surface, but he left yards on the field, and those yards add up over the long haul when he misses those chances time and time again.
Play 6: 3rd & 2 at NYG 20
The Jets ran three more times after Fields’ scramble and came back to him on third-and-2.
Fields makes a good call to target Wilson here. His best receiver is running a slant against off coverage with only two yards to go.
This incompletion falls more on Wilson than Fields.
Wilson needs to cut this route flatter. By drifting upfield, he allows the defender to undercut him for the deflection. Needing just two yards, Wilson did not need to go vertical here. Once he clears the linebacker, you’d like to see him straighten out along the 15-yard line, keeping the defender on his back so Fields could dart the ball into his chest.
While it looks like Fields’ pass is behind Wilson, it would have been risky for Fields to put it further out in front, as he does not want to lead Wilson into the safety who is waiting to crash down on anything inside.
If Wilson had just cut this route flatter, the ball probably would have been on point. When Fields begins winding up, he is still expecting Wilson to run horizontally around the 15-16-yard line. It is not until Fields is on the cusp of releasing the ball that Wilson starts drifting, resulting in the defender beating him to the spot.
Pin this one on Wilson.
Takeaways
In the same way that we should not overreact to six good plays, we should not overreact to six bad plays.
Six plays are six plays. That can be less than one drive’s worth in a full game. Every quarterback has had one bad drive in an otherwise great game – and one great drive in an otherwise bad game. Drawing conclusions about such a tiny sample size, good or bad, is a reckless thing to do.
That doesn’t mean we cannot criticize six plays for what they are, though.
Fields was poor in this brief outing. Four of his six plays were negative. He nearly threw a pick-six on a panicked under-pressure throw, dirted a screen pass, misfired to Wilson on third down, and opted for a short scramble while multiple receivers were open for larger gains.
The Jets’ passing woes were not all his fault, though. Membou’s allowed pressure affected the pass to Hall, while Tippmann’s high snap contributed to the screen. The final incompletion seemed like it was Wilson’s fault.
Still, Fields left a lot to be desired in this outing. It was a brief glimpse into some of the familiar issues that have held him back throughout his NFL career.
The sky is not falling, but it is not bright blue, either. To muster legitimate faith that Fields could have a breakout season, you would like to see Fields showcase strong evidence that he is stomping out the issues that have held him back. This was not a step in the right direction.