It was there. There’s no denying it. Robert Saleh invited you to take a closer look at the play, and when you do that there is no mistaking it: if Zach Wilson had handed the ball to Braxton Berrios — fourth-and-2 at the Tampa Bay 7, 2 minutes and 17 seconds left in the game, Jets up 4 — Berrios could have moonwalked to the first down.
Maybe hand-walked into the end zone.
But Wilson didn’t hand off to Berrios. He kept the ball, barreled into the teeth of the Buccaneers’ line while Jets fans everywhere exclaimed the same thing in unison — “A BLEEPIN’ SNEAK?!?!” — and what happened then was more inevitable than Monday morning’s sunrise: Tom Brady with the ball, 131 seconds to score the winning touchdown, scoring that TD needing only 116 of them.
“They deserved better,” Saleh said of his team, and in the next breath he offered up a scapegoat for the masses to shred: himself. Well, himself, and the other coaches.
“Poor communication by the coaching staff,” Saleh said, insisting that he and offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur should have made it abundantly clear to Wilson that his first, second and only options on the play should have been to hand the ball to Berrios, that all signs pointed to that choice was the best choice even before the game film provided back-up testimony.
His players were less harsh, Wilson saying that if he’d made the 2 yards — or if he’d handed it off and Berrios had gotten stuffed — the conversation would be different. Berrios put it even more simply: “I fully trust 2, he sees game through a different lens than I do. He makes that call and I’m riding with that call.”
Good on the players, taking the smartest option of all and not burying the boss under the bus. But Saleh was right. That’s the time for the coaches to treat the rookie QB like a rookie QB, especially coming off a timeout. It was an unconventional enough call as it was, choosing not to kick a field goal, forcing Brady to try for the tie without any timeouts.
It was also the right decision. You get the first down, you’re going to beat the defending Super Bowl champions. Right decision, wrong call. They cancel each other out, and so the Jets are 4-12 instead of 5-11, with one more game left in Buffalo next week.
“We’ve got to be better as a coaching staff,” Saleh said.
He’s right. This has been a difficult season for Saleh, and he is not exactly stoic so we tend to see everything — every Wilson growing pain, every blown fourth-down coverage, every costly penalty, every turnover — on his face, in his shoulders, every syllable of body language. That’s one part of his game that needs to improve.
But if we are judging him fairly, it is right to mention that the Jets have improved across the first 16 games and 17 weeks under his watch. It’s important to remember how hapless and helpless the team looked in September to fully appreciate the fact they outplayed the champs for 59 ½ minutes in January.
The Jets themselves weren’t accepting moral victories — safety Elijah Riley probably put it best, saying, “It sounds cool but you’ve got to win those games; so what we played them close? You have to finish and get the win.” But that is a significant step forward out of the decade-long morass that has suffocated this franchise.
Still, harsh as it sounds, that’s the easy part. Improving the level of bad from inexcusable to unacceptable is a first step. By this time next year, we need to see less Saleh expressionism on the sideline. We need to see Wilson continue to move forward — so far, his late-season improvement is the silver lining of the season. We definitely need to see the Jets’ defense turn in more efforts like Sunday’s and fewer like the stretch where they allowed 30-plus points in seven out of nine weeks.
(It also wouldn’t hurt if Saleh could make it known that from this day forward asking an opponent for an autograph — as cornerback Brandin Echols did of Brady moments after Brady broke his teammates’ heart — is something that will only be tolerated along with a one-way ticket to the taxi squad. If not for Antonio Brown’s striptease farewell, that would’ve been the most disgusting sight on the field all day.)
For now, we are learning that Saleh isn’t afraid to absorb accountability which, considering the soul-sucking filibuster that spilled out of Joe Judge in Chicago on Sunday, is not always an automatic part of the coaching toolbox. Results must follow, of course. But this is a start.
