Curious as to if the Jet's run D was for real or if offenses bypassed the run for the easier passing advantage I watched a handful of games and found that Kacy Rogers coaches and NY has a legit run defense.
The only team that gained substantial yardage on the ground vs them was Arizona with 171 in week 6 on MNF. The possible bad news for us in that respect is that the Cardinals found most of their success vs the Jets thru gap schemes, where as we run mainly zone.
If you want to get cute and manipulate some stats of that game you can remove the only long run, which was 58 yard TD run by Johnson in the 1st qtr, and the runs of the last meaningless drive of the game when it was out of reach where the Cards gained another 27 rushing yards (which also featured the next two longest runs of 12 and 13) and you have them sitting at 86 rushing yards. Out of those 86 yards, 23 were gained by WR JJ Nelson on two end around plays of 14 and 9 and that leaves the RB's with a total of 63 rushing yards on 23 carries for a mere 2.8 yards per attempt.
I fully understand that's not how things work and the Cardinals had a legitimate 171 rushing yards, but the purpose here was to give an idea of just how established the Jet's run defense is overall. They are a stout run defense which was also proven last week vs the Browns who are a top 5 team in rushing yards per attempt and had over 5 yards a carry entering the game vs the Jets and Johnson and Crowell were held to 58 yards (29 yards each) on 15 total carries.
It will be a very difficult challenge to continue our current trend of establishing our run identity Sunday afternoon.
