After each game, we’ll be highlighting three defensive and three offensive players and looking in detail at their performance. We’ll start today with the defense:
Fully Tone’d
Tony Adams has slowly developed into one of the most reliable Jets defenders. He did another solid job on Sunday with six tackles and a pass defensed.
Three of his six tackles (and another one that didn’t count because the play was called back due to penalty) were 20 yards or more down the field. However, he still made some contributions in the box.
On this play, he diagnoses well and then makes a great play to scoot past the offensive lineman in space so he can make the stop.
Here’s another great play which may have people asking how many safeties there are in the league who could do this against one of the league’s greats in Justin Jefferson.
There were three other occasions when Jefferson was targeted with Adams being the closest defender in zone coverage and all three went for a first down, although on one of these it appeared clear that Adams had stopped Jefferson short of the marker on third down.
The other negative was his involvement in a couple of collisions between Jets’ defensive backs that freed up Sauce Gardner’s man for a couple of first down completions.
On the whole, though, you have to be impressed with Adams’ steady contributions, especially since he is still on a minimum salary.
King Solomon
The Jets made a tweak to their run defense this week and it seemed to be beneficial as the Vikings were held to just 2.7 yards per carry. The change was that Solomon Thomas played almost exclusively at defensive end.
Thomas is obviously still athletic enough to play on the edge because a Jets player last season told us that he was clocked at 21-22 mph. As a defensive tackle, he is obviously also strong enough to hold up on the edge. This gave a boost to the second unit, which typically gives up yardage routinely whenever Quinnen Williams sits. In this game, that unit didn’t give up any runs of more than five yards.
Here’s a play where Thomas creeps to the inside pre-snap, takes on the tight end and then leverages off the block to make the stop for a short gain.
What’s interesting about this change is that the Jets did not work on it in practice, which speaks volumes about Robert Saleh’s confidence in Thomas to play a position he knows he is capable of playing within his system but that he hasn’t for some time.
During the offseason, when Thomas re-signed (which was before the Haason Reddick and John Franklin-Myers trades but after Bryce Huff signed for the Eagles), we were told there was talk of him playing a dual DE/DT role this season, much like Michael Bennett would have played during the time when Robert Saleh was on the staff in Seattle.
However, they didn’t work on it at all in camp and preseason. It will be interesting to see if this is something they continue to do going forwards, especially with the coaching change and the imminent return of Leki Fotu inside. If they like their depth on the inside more than their depth on the edge, it might make sense…
Taylor-made replacement
…which brings us to Leonard Taylor II, who filled in at defensive tackle with Jalyn Holmes on the second unit.
Taylor had one huge play, this third quarter sack, which came as the Jets dropped Williams into coverage and had Taylor attack a double team.
On the play before this one, Taylor had also been impressive, as he blew past Ed Ingram, swatting his hands aside for quick interior pressure. Ingram basically tackled Taylor from behind but there was no call from the officials. However, the pressure caused Sam Darnold to rush his throw and it was a short gain, so the Jets might have declined it anyway.
In terms of his run defense, where Taylor wasn’t as impressive in preseason despite shooting gaps to make a play here and there, he graded out poorly in this game. However, if he did have negative plays where his man controlled him at the point of attack, these certainly didn’t have much of a negative effect because the Vikings had no runs of longer than five yards with him in.
Much like Adams, Taylor is looking like a really good undrafted find, who has probably earned his spot in the rotation even once Fotu is brought back.
Three-on-O will follow tomorrow.