After each game, we’ll be highlighting three defensive and three offensive players and looking in detail at their performance. We’ll wrap up today with the offense:
John D’oh
It’s been a bit of a disappointing season for John Simpson, who will turn 29 next August and is out of contract at the end of the year.
While the Jets’ line has played pretty well as a unit and boasts the 7th best running game in the league (albeit skewed by Justin Fields’ scrambling contributions), his individual performance seems to have slipped.
Simpson has already given up one more sack than last year’s three and the same amount of total pressure. He’s also committed six penalties, just one short of his total from 17 starts in 2024. That included a holding penalty on Sunday.
Whether this is because Alijah Vera-Tucker’s absence has weakened the interior trio, because the center on his right shoulder has been downgraded or something physical or scheme-related is impossible to tell.
Despite this, there may be signs his consistency is improving. In the past three games, including on Sunday, he didn’t allow any pressures. This was something he didn’t manage to do at all in the first eight games.
In addition, he’s also been making some good contributions in the running game lately.
Here’s a terrific block to drive back and seal off the edge defender to create a big running lane.
On this one, he drives the interior lineman back and pancakes him to set up a run down to the goal line (which unfortunately ended with a fumble).
Also, while Joe Tippmann’s pancake block on the screen pass to set up the above play got most of the attention, Simpson made a good block 10 yards downfield on that one.
If Simpson does have an underwhelming first half with a strong finish, that will be pretty much the opposite of what happened last year. He allowed zero pressures in five of the first 11 games last year, but none of the last six. Also, all three of his sacks allowed were down the stretch.
Simpson needs that strong finish to ensure he gets the kind of big money deal which seemed possible at the start of the season but now is less certain. And that deal may or may not come from the Jets.
Inanimate Carbon Tyrod
Stepping in for Justin Fields, it was a reasonably solid performance by Tyrod Taylor, albeit that his first pass was almost intercepted and his last pass (a desperation heave) actually was.
In between times, he put together a line that looks spectacular compared with Fields’ recent pass game outputs, but really was a pedestrian 222 yards and one touchdown effort.
Despite the interception and near interception, Taylor’s worst mistake was probably right before halftime when he took a sack that meant New York couldn’t attempt a long field goal.
The majority of his passing game success was on dinking and dunking, although he extended the play to find John Metchie III for the only Jets touchdown and on this completion to Adonai Mitchell.
Including those plays, it was really with his legs that Taylor looked his best, as he also scrambled for two first downs.
As noted, most of the success he had was on short passes, as he was 0-4 on passes longer than 20 yards and 2-10 on passes longer than 10 yards.
This is a pattern that has permeated all of his performances this year, though. Everyone seems to say that Taylor throws a beautiful deep ball and can air it out to provide a different dimension to Fields because of that, but actually he is just 1-for-14 for 35 yards and three interceptions on passes beyond 20 yards.
In fact, taking these throws out of the equation, he has a 99.3 quarterback rating this year – good for 11th this season, or 5th all-time if he posted it over a full career.
Maybe the answer is that Taylor should forget about airing it out and instead dink and dunk all the time. Nobody wants to see that, but it seems to be where he’s at his most efficient right now.
Allen Wrench
Allen Lazard returned to the line-up for the first time since the Bengals game, when he played a season-high 56 snaps and was this time out there for 24 plays.
The book on Lazard is that his blocking is an asset and he certainly made some good contributions in that Cincinnati game (although he could arguably have negated one of the touchdowns with a block in the back which went uncalled). In this game, however, he was a little inconsistent in that area as he let his man get off his block on one play and didn’t get across to his assignment in time on another.
As for his passing game contributions, they’ve been almost non-existent as he had just 45 yards on 12 targets before Sunday. He did make this first down in the game, though.
Aside from this, Lazard had two unsuccessful targets. One, on third down, was batted at the line anyway and might actually have not been intended for him. The other was out of his reach on a diving attempt downfield on 4th-and-long and the Jets might have been called for holding anyway if it was complete. (The officials picked that one up).
At this stage of the season, it seems a little pointless to be giving reps to Lazard ahead of some younger players who could theoretically benefit from the playing time but they presumably want to get their money’s worth from a player who assuredly will not be back in 2026.
Previously: Three on D: Phillips, Oliver, Sherwood