The Jets lost their opener yesterday to the Carolina Panthers.
When the Jets lose a game in the regular season, I give out an anti-game ball to the player I believe did the most to distinguish himself in a negative way. Whenever possible I do my best to avoid giving it to the quarterback or to the same player more than once in a season. Generally the quarterback plays a prominent role most losses (although that wasn’t really the case for the Jets this week), and there’s no point in bashing the worst player on the team week after week. Sometimes a performance is so putrid that we have to break those rules, but I do my best to adhere to them.
This week it is easy to abide by the rules. Zach Wilson wasn’t a contender for the anti-game ball, and there can be no repeat winner since it is the first week of the season.
The performance of the offensive line in this game was ugly. The Jets were dominated in the trenches in the both the run game and the passing game. The backs didn’t have much room to operate, and Zach Wilson was under constant duress.
I could easily give out a group anti-game ball to the entire offensive line. I’m not going to do that this week, however. Last year it felt like I was giving out a special group anti-game ball every other week. I am hoping to get away from that this year (although the team’s performance will have something to say about that).
Any individual offensive lineman would be worthy of this distinction. I don’t have any specific numbers to single out out over the others. I am purely going off the eyeball test, but it looked to me like George Fant was the worst of the worst. Almost every time I looked at him yesterday he was getting dominated at right tackle. It seemed like he was losing consistently in all phases of the game. I thought he was the worst player on the unit most culpable for the loss.
For that reason Fant gets my anti-game ball. Who gets yours?
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