Usually, when fans and analysts implore NFL teams to change their usage of a player, they call for the team to use the player more, whether it’s more targets, more carries, or more snaps.
Sometimes, though, what a player needs is not more opportunities, but different opportunities.
Here are three player-usage tweaks the 2-4 New York Jets should consider making.
1. David Bailey in coverage
The Jets are struggling to get after the quarterback. Save for an eight-sack explosion against the Cleveland Browns, they have nine sacks in their other five games, which is less than two per game.
Even more problematic than the sack total is the lack of pressure in general. Outside of the Browns game, when they racked up 14 quarterback hits, the Jets have 19 QB hits in five games. That’s just 3.8 per game, which would rank 31st ahead of only the Giants (3.6) over the course of the first six weeks.
When a team is struggling this much to generate pressure, it is a questionable decision to have your best pass rusher spending so much time in coverage.
David Bailey has been the Jets’ most productive pass rusher by any cumulative measure this season; he has 10 more total pressures and three more sacks than the closest teammate in either category. Yet, he’s been asked to drop into coverage on a whopping 36 snaps, the fifth-most among NFL edge defenders.
Across six games, that equates to 6.0 coverage snaps per game for Bailey. That’s six opportunities for him to get after the quarterback each week that he instead spends standing around in coverage as an exploitable liability (no 6-foot-3, 250-pound defensive end will ever not be a liability in coverage).
That’s just actively making your team worse.
Of course, Bailey will drop into coverage occasionally. The Jets are a blitz-heavy team. So, they will utilize plenty of creative looks to confuse quarterbacks, which often entails dropping defensive linemen.
The idea is not to never drop Bailey into coverage, as that would reduce the creative potential of the Jets’ blitz packages. But six coverage snaps per game is too many.
This past week against the Patriots, Bailey dropped into coverage on a season-high nine snaps, representing over a quarter of his pass-game reps.
The Jets finished the game with zero sacks on Drake Maye. When the end result is that poor, it’s hard not to look at Bailey’s nine coverage snaps as an easy avenue to increased pass-rush potential.
Every Bailey coverage snap that is converted to a pass-rush snap will raise the Jets’ pass-rush ceiling and make them a better team overall. Simply put, the guy is more dangerous going after the quarterback than he is at playing the curl-to-flat.
2. Harrison Phillips on the edge
Harrison Phillips is on the Jets for his locker-room leadership and his gap-plugging against the run. As a pass rusher, the 30-year-old is one of the weakest defensive linemen in the NFL.
Across 23 starts and 461 pass-rush snaps with the Jets, Phillips has a half-sack and 17 total pressures, which is a microscopic 0.7 pressures per game. His pressure rate is 3.7%. For a starting defensive tackle, these numbers are about as invisible as it gets, even relative to other run-game-centric players.
Despite these numbers, the Jets occasionally deploy Phillips as an edge rusher. Yes, they are asking a 307-pound, run-stuffing nose tackle with a half-sack in 23 starts to be a pass-rush threat off the edge.
This idea seems beyond incomprehensible to consider deploying on a single play, let alone multiple times per game. Yet, the Jets keep going back to it, and they keep paying for it.
Phillips has lined up as a 5-technique (over the tackle’s outside shoulder) on 28 snaps this season, which represents 12.7% of his defensive snaps. That might not seem like much, but over six games, that’s nearly five snaps per game in which the Jets are basically conceding that they will not generate any pressure off the edge, and the price can be seen on film.
In their Week 6 loss to the Patriots, the Jets gave up a 42-yard touchdown bomb on a play where they sent three rushers, including Phillips in a one-on-one against the left tackle. Predictably, Phillips was completely shut down, and as a result, Drake Maye was given an enormous pocket and as much time as he wanted. He used that time and space to allow a long-developing deep concept to break open after an eternity.
This play, and others like it, actually show why Phillips’ 28 snaps at 5-tech don’t even do justice to how grossly the Jets are over-relying on him as an edge pass-rush threat, because he didn’t even line up at 5-tech on that play. He lined up inside, but was asked to loop outside and replace the dropping edge rusher; this is something the Jets often ask him to do, and it won’t get charted as a 5-tech rep.
It isn’t fair to Phillips to ask him to play this role; it isn’t his strength. Not only does it make Phillips look bad, but it actively sabotages the team’s pass-rush ceiling, all just for the sake of deploying a fancy blitz that looks exotic on paper but ultimately amounts to nothing because 307-pound nose tackles are not going to get home off the edge.
The solution isn’t necessarily to reduce Phillips’ snaps; right now, they don’t have much of a choice but to count on him, due to David Onyemata’s injury. They just have to stop asking him to do something he should never be considered capable of doing.
The Jets’ misusage of Phillips shows in his on-off numbers. His presence sinks the entire defense.
According to RayCarp, the Jets allow 0.260 more EPA per play with Phillips on the field than when he is off, which ranks 227th out of 248 defensive linemen.
That’s not shocking; I’d also expect the Jets to be worse with Garrett Wilson on the field if they asked him to play tight end.
While it is understandable that Bailey will occasionally be deployed in coverage, there should never be a situation when Phillips is rushing off the edge in a one-on-one situation as part of a three-man rush. Perhaps he will occasionally end up there as part of a stunt or an all-out pressure, but the Jets keep asking him to essentially be an edge rusher, and that should not be on the table. Every time it happens, the Jets are all but conceding.
3. Geno Smith on play action
Few NFL quarterbacks have benefited from play action as much as Geno Smith this season. Smith is averaging an astronomical 10.6 yards per attempt with play action, trailing only Lamar Jackson (13.5).
According to Pro Football Focus, Smith is averaging 4.0 more yards per pass attempt with play action (10.6) than without (6.6), the second-largest jump in the league, trailing only Jackson (+4.8). Third-place Kyler Murray (+3.0) is the only other quarterback seeing a Y/A jump of at least 3.0 yards when using play action.
Subsequently, Jackson and Murray’s teams are using plenty of play action to emphasize their quarterbacks’ success in those situations. Jackson uses play action on 30.1% of his dropbacks, ranking eighth out of 33 qualifiers, while Murray’s play action rate is 30.9%, ranking sixth.
Smith? He’s down at 25th out of 33 qualifiers, using play action only 22% of the time.
As Jet X’s Connor Long detailed, this incongruency was on full display in the Jets’ latest loss to the Patriots. Using play action, Smith went 7 of 7 for 126 yards, one touchdown, and no interceptions, yet the Jets only called play action on 21.2% of Smith’s dropbacks. Without play action, Smith was 13 of 23 for 126 yards, no touchdowns, and one interception.
Winning coaches in the NFL know how to get the best out of their most important players, with the quarterback topping that list. It is hardly coincidental that Murray and Jackson have combined for just one loss this season, while Smith is 2-4. All three quarterbacks see similar jumps in efficiency when using play action, but the Ravens are building their offenses around their quarterbacks’ strengths, while the Jets are not.
Over the course of 60-minute games that are decided by one score more often than not, a couple of extra dropbacks in concepts that optimize the QB’s strengths could be the difference between him making two plays that give his team the decisive advantage and having two drives stall, leaving his team on the losing end of another close game.
Now 1-3 in one-score games, the Jets are trying to find ways to consistently make the one or two game-tilting offensive plays that flip their close losses to victories. Converting some of Smith’s non-play-action dropbacks into play-action dropbacks seems like an easy avenue to do that.
This is not to say that the Jets need to come out and spam play-action. Just a few extra chances per game could make a significant difference, especially if the Jets sprinkle those extra chances in at key moments of the game, such as the fourth-and-short situations that have consistently burned the team this year.
Smith is averaging 34.2 dropbacks per game this year. If they push his play-action rate up from 22% to 30%, he’d get 2.5 extra play-action dropbacks per game.
Now, picture that those two or three extra plays come in those fourth-and-1 spots where the Jets previously ran out of shotgun into brick walls against the Packers and Patriots, causing losses. Trusting Geno Smith off a play fake would be far more reliable in those situations than the Jets’ run game, or even Geno Smith without a play fake.
This simple tweak could be all the Jets need to get those last couple of yards that have often been the difference between winning and losing.
