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They need to make it tougher . . .
Too often last year, savvy quarterbacks, didn’t seem to have much of a problem diagnosing what they were seeing from the Jets’ defense.
And this led to a lot of lopsided losses.
The Jets need to up the confusion they present to opposing quarterbacks in 2022-23 season. Last year, too often it looked like signal-callers were conducting a 7-on-7 practice drill against the Jets’ defense.
“I think when your a great defensive coordinator you do three things really well,” said former NFL GM Mike Lombardi on VSIN. “You disguise your coverages. The quarterback has a hard time figuring out what is going on. The QB is confused when the ball hits his hand.”
It certainly didn’t seem that many of the opposing quarterbacks struggled with disguised coverages last year, so the Jets need to up the challenges they present this year.
“Second, you need to call timely pressures and attack the protections,” Lombardi said. “As a defensive coordinator you spending time most of your time understanding how pass protections originate and how to attack them and how to get home free. To blitz and not get a guy home free is bad. You gotta get a guy free. You gotta get a free rusher or your trying to get a (good) matchup – your little guy is trying to block my big guy.”
And in order to this, you’ve gotta do a great job during the week finding weaknesses in the other team’s protection packages.
“You don’t sit in your office as a defensive play-caller and draw blitzes,” Lombardi said. “You sit in your office and study the protections of the team you’re playing, and then you figure out what is the hole in this protection. What causes them the most problem? And that is when you start to build your blitz package.”
And the third thing:
“You also have to eliminate big plays,” Lombardi said. “You can’t try to cause turnovers yet allow big plays.”
So these are three areas the Jets need to improve on defense this season – disguise coverages better, come up with more exotic pressures and not give up as many big plays.
It’s going to be interesting to see, once the games start, how Robert Saleh and Jeff Ulbrich tweaked their scheme this off-season in the lab.
Now granted, one of the reasons for the simplicity last year, that made it somewhat easy for cerebral opposing quarterbacks to pick apart their scheme at times, was because the Jets’ defensive brass needed to keep things simple with so many young players on the field.
But along with that, how much of this was related to the Pete Carroll scheme, which, whether the defense is young or old, isn’t known for being that complex? Saleh and Ulbrich play a variation of the Carroll scheme.
And it’s well documented at this point that Carroll is making changes to his scheme with the hiring of former Chicago Bears defensive coordinator Sean Desai this off-season to add some of the Vic Fangio scheme. Desai is a Fangio disciple.
Better talent should help Ulbrich and Saleh take their defense to another level.
But they also need to play better chess at times against sophisticated opposing quarterbacks.
July 6, 2022
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