I think it can be tempting to excuse the offensive coordinator when the quarterback looks lost. In truth, it can’t be easy to call plays for a quarterback like Justin Fields when the fifth year quarterback looks as hopeless
has he has lately.
But I don’t think evaluating coaching is purely about end results. It can question of whether a coach is maximizing his team’s odds of success.
Six years ago Sam Darnold’s bout with mono and Trevor Siemian’s broken ankle forced the Jets to start waiver wire claim Luke Falk at quarterback. Falk wasn’t a quarterback who could execute on an NFL level. You couldn’t blame Adam Gase for the Jets losing or struggling on offense with him as the signal caller.
Still, as I wrote at the time, it was clear that the coaching staff wasn’t doing everything in its power to help Falk succeed. Had the Jets coaches given Falk a bunch of concepts that help a quarterback against man to man coverage in that game against the man-to-man heavy Patriots, the blame would have fallen completely on the quarterback. They didn’t.
Gase might not have been at fault for Falk’s lack of ability, but he deserved criticism. He clearly wasn’t designing an offense that could maximize whatever scraps of talent Falk had.
Things brings me to Jets offensive coordinator Tanner Engstrand.
I’ll be honest with you. Up until this week, I had the mindset that Engstrand was in an impossible situation. How can you blame him for a quarterback who looks as lost as Justin Fields? Engstrand received rave reviews for the Jets’ season opener against the Steelers when the offense put up 32 points. Reviewing the game, I honestly didn’t see anything all that special about the game planning or play calling. I just thought the players executed well. After that opener, the players executed less well. It is a players’ league after all. Overnight it seems like coaches can suddenly look much better or much worse if the talent level on their roster changes.
The last few days, however, I’ve zoomed out a bit and looked at some tendencies in the Jets offense. What I found just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
Even Justin Fields’ biggest fan would probably admit that he is not a natural pocket passer at this point in his career. He is a quarterback for whom you’d like to limit traditional dropbacks.
One would think that this would call for a heavy diet of play action and run-pass options. These concepts both lead to simpler reads in the passing game. Play action manipulates defenders to bite on run fakes, opening large passing windows. There also tend to be less receivers out on routes, which simplifies the quarterback’s decision-making. Run-pass options generally ask the quarterback to read one defender to make a decision rather than scanning the entire (or half) the field.
With that in mind, I took a look some numbers. Pro Football Reference’s advanced stats list the number of play action and run-pass option attempts each quarterback has. So I decided to compare Fields with other quarterbacks. I simply crunched the numbers on what percentage of each quarterback’s passing attempts came on either play action or RPOs. (For the purposes of this venture, I also included runs on RPOs as a passing attempt since the option to run is cooked into those plays.)
It’s a bit tough to believe the numbers for Fields are so low. One of the few quarterbacks with a lower rate is his teammate, Tyrod Taylor, so it would appear that this is a possible Engstrand thing. That wouldn’t be a terribly positive development because RPOs are a staple of modern offenses, and numbers prove that play action is a very effective method of throwing the ball in general.
Especially notably to me are the two players with the highest rate, Jaxson Dart and Daniel Jones. These are perhaps the two players most compared with Fields this season. Dart because he was drafted by the crosstown Giants, and Jones because he was the other major reclamation project with a first round pedigree who signed for cheap this offseason.
I think anybody who scouted Dart coming out of Ole Miss or has watched his early games with the Giants knows that he isn’t yet ready to shoulder the burden of a conventional NFL offense. So the Giants have given him a lot of these simpler concepts. Jones has used these plays as a springboard to garner early MVP discussion.
You might say, “It wouldn’t matter. Fields can’t execute anything right now.”
And it’s possible that you would be right. That is beside the point I am making, though. I refer you to the Gase/Falk discussion. We can evaluate coaching quality independent of how well the quarterback is player. If Engstrand was calling a steady diet of RPOs and play action passes, and Fields was still failing it would be tough to get on the offensive coordinator. What else can a coach do with a quarterback who is struggling other than simplify the concepts? That clearly isn’t happening, though.
This brings me to another point. Fields didn’t fall out of the sky. The Jets made him their number one free agent target this offseason. One might presume the man running their offense had influence in that decision.
Fields’ shortcomings as a quarterback weren’t a secret in March when the Jets pursued him in free agency. The weren’t a secret before the start of the season. In fact, I wrote before Week 1 about how run-pass options needed to be a staple of the offense because of Fields’ limitations as a pocket quarterback.
You might get on Engstrand for his role in bringing Fields to the Jets to begin with. I won’t. As I said earlier this week, somebody had to play quarterback for the Jets this season, and none of the options were particularly good.
What I will ask is why the Jets would target Justin Fields and then run an offense like this. The only way it was ever going to work with him was to lean into making the passing game as easy as possible for him. If the Jets were going to run an offense like this, they would have been much better off rolling with a journeyman veteran who might not have much ability but would at least understand passing concepts at a high level.
I hope you take this all in the spirit in which it was written. Sometimes people blame the coaching for the quarterback’s failures. That is not my attempt here. Fields’ play has been unacceptable, and that’s on him.
With that said, I have questions about the way the offense has been constructed that are independent of Fields. We aren’t seeing much from the play calling that attempts to minimize his biggest weaknesses.
