Rontez Miles + Everyone Else

The 4th pre-season game is never a great game to watch, but I always enjoy it because usually a bubble player steps up and makes a claim for a place on the 53 man roster. That simply did not happen last night as the Jets were dominated and then blown out of the water by the Philadelphia Eagles. Only one man can come out of that performance with any credit and that was Rontez Miles, the undrafted free agent out of California (PA) who was all over the field making tackles and statements.

Matt Simms and Tajh Boyd both look as bad as each other. Stephen Hill was terrible, the secondary were playing soft and as a result we saw some injuries to players like Johnny Patrick, LeQuan Lewis and Josh Bush.The defense as a whole had a shocking night, surrendering 568 yards to Chip Kelly's high powered offense. The scoreline said 37-7 but in reality it felt like a much bigger margin.

When asked about the performance Rex Ryan said:

"We were poor today," coach Rex Ryan said. "Today was more about trying to find out the back end of our roster . . . With that said, it's really hard to pinpoint who stepped up. It was a really poor performance by us, without question . . . It was just an awful performance."

This for me is a big problem. Through the course of the season, you need the full depth of your 53 man roster and you need to have strength in depth for the "next man up" philosophy. Unfortunately for the Jets they may have to scour the cuts of the other NFL franchises to strengthen their back end.

However the one bright spot was Rontez Miles. A very promising safety who hits like a ton of bricks, he picked up a couple of injuries last year that stunted his development, however he is definitely on my list for the 53 man roster. Now only does he play at 100% every single snap, but you see the quality in terms of read and react and ability to tackle, that's a positive, especially when you consider he can do some work on specials.