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Let me start this by saying that I loved the aggressive call of Todd Bowles during the 1st drive of the game against the Miami Dolphins. The Jets had moved the ball close to midfield and were facing a 4th and 1. Wanting to set the tone early and continue the drive, Bowles called for a Chris Ivory run between right guard and right tackle, the Jets were pushed back, neither Winters or Giacomini were able to get a push and ivory was dropped for a one yard loss.
Despite the failure of the play, I loved the call. The Jets forced a 3-and-out by the Dolphins, and went on to dominate the game, no harm done. Had that happened against a better team, we may be looking at it slightly differently. However the coach put his faith in his running game, and I can't fault him for that.
However that got me thinking about running on short down situations. On several occasions this year, I've felt we've been unable to grind out those tough yards, convert in those situations. So I turned to Football Outsiders, for my money the best football analytical website on the net..
What I found was that the Jets are one of the worst teams in the league in converting those short yardage situations. The Jets are ranked 25th in the league on power success. Power success is determined by looking at the Percentage of runs on third or fourth down, two yards or less to go, that achieved a first down or touchdown. So we know that in those situations, we don't find much success.
I then had a look at how we compared with being tackled at or behind the line of scrimmage, and it didn't get any better. We rank 30th in being stuffed, which means that only 2 other teams in the league get stuffed on a more frequent basis than we do (49'ers, Browns).
We're not running the ball horribly this year, not by any stretch. We rush for over 114 yards on average per game (11th), run for a 3.9 yard average (20th), rushed for 10 touchdowns (11th) and had 9 runs of 20 yards or more (6th)...but is this a power unit? It certainly doesn't look like it.