Marshall Deserves Credit, Defense Deserves Blame

The Jets were awful against the Browns in the first half. Let’s take a look at what went wrong.

The first touchdown is a play where Marcus Williams gets all sorts of turned around after the initial play failed to work. Then the backyard football aspect gave the Browns the advantage.

The Browns run two in routes out of three wide. The only person not running an in route is the slot man who does a drive route. Basically he runs a corner, then tries to get the corner to bite while pushing inside.

The Jets are in man coverage. What little pressure they get up front is negated by the quarterback slipping out of the pocket.

The route doesn’t work at first as Williams has decent coverage to the outside. However the WR makes a slight fake inside then double outside. Williams is slow to react giving a clean lane for a relatively easy pass for score.

The pressure up front was not good, Williams did OK off the bat but his shortcomings in man coverage appeared late in this play. I hold steadfast that Williams and Darryl Roberts are nothing special and if it wasn’t for Darrelle Revis, we’d be talking about how bad the other corner spot is.

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Let’s check out what good we did. I never heard really about Brandon Marshall and blocking, but this is something else. On film, it really becomes apparent how good Marshall set the Bilal Powell TD up.

It’s a simple draw/power play up the middle. There’s not much to it. The line basically blocks what they see in front of them.

Every single battle between offensive and defensive line was won by the Jets in the middle. Just really great stuff.

Here’s where Marshall comes in after the line dominates. Check out the gif above and how he sets himself up here. He backpedals to a spot turns and engages the corner in the exact spot where the safety will be lead to by Powell.

Powell leads the man perfectly into the Marshall block taking him out the play. At that point it was a foot race, and Powell won it into the end zone.

The subtlety of how Marshall set that up wasn’t given any kind of justice on television. That is truly a pro level and beyond play by Marshall to set up not only his man, but the next one for Powell.

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Back to defense and another fail.

It comes down to two things here, number one the right NT gets blown off the ball into the center of the field and by the first picture is out of the play completely. Number two the LG gets a clean pull and is able to get to the linebacker without any issues.

David Harris did his job clogging the middle but the hole was too big to cover for him. The Jets have continued to crash that DT into the middle, but every time they do it opens up holes like the one you see below.

I’m not sure if it’s design or what’s going on, but I’ve seen this play before from the Jets and it didn’t work the last time either.