Jets blocking schemes are incomprehensible right now

It isn’t a bold statement to say the Jets offensive line has struggled through the season’s first two weeks. Too many guys aren’t executing their blocks.

There are other problems present, however. One of the biggest is how incomprehensible some of the assignments are. In Monday night’s loss to the Browns there were a startling number of instances where the Jets didn’t even account for Cleveland’s edge rushers (who are pretty good players of the game of football).

On the first series of the game the Jets ran a play action pass. It’s a faking a zone run. The offensive linemen all flow in one direction off the snap.

Ryan Griffin flows to the other side to block the guy at the end of the line.

But there’s a big problem. Myles Garrett is totally unaccounted for.

And when you don’t account for a guy like Myles Garrett, he wrecks the play.

When I watched this over, I spent like 90 seconds just looking at the screen and shaking my head. You can’t design a play like this in the NFL. This might fly in high school when the defense ends you’re facing aren’t that good, but this play has no chance against Myles Garrett.

I want to be clear on something here. There’s a big difference between not blocking a guy and not accounting for him.

Sometimes you leave a guy unblocked by design. Maybe he’s the target of a fake or some sort of misdirection. Maybe he’s the guy you read on an option play, and his movements dictate where the ball goes.

This play would make much more sense if Trevor Siemian had some sort of boot action, and the design was to get Garrett running in the wrong direction. Then you’ve accounted for him by trying to get him to run himself out of the play.

If something like this just happened once it would be one thing. But as the game went on the protections the Jets were calling kept showing the safe defect.

This is the very next play. The Jets have a full slide protection called here. The entire line is sliding to take the gap on their left. But the problem with this is nobody is there to account for Olivier Vernon.

If you are scoring at home, yes, at one point three Jets were blocking the same Brown as Vernon went unaccounted for.

Later in the first quarter, same thing. Full slide protection. Garrett unaccounted for.

Later in the game, another full slide. Another free run for Garrett.

If this happens once, I’ll blame the players. Maybe somebody just missed their assignment. The quarterback and center have presnap responsibilities. Maybe they misread the defense, and got the team into the wrong blocking call.

When it happens this many times, I think the coaching staff has to be the primary problem. They’re either making these calls and not adjusting to the defense wrecking them, or they’re not correcting something the players are doing wrong.

These are premium edge rushers. They need to be accounted for. Even if this is the result of Ryan Kalil constantly making the wrong calls because he doesn’t think guys like Garrett and Vernon are going to attack, it’s on the coaches to bench him because these blocking assignments give these plays no chance of working.

When you watch the way these plays are drawn up in the trenches, there’s only one question you can ask.