(Neil Miller/Sportsday Wire)
A note to Jets Nation: Pick up The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy and look at the cover.
Read those large friendly letters.
“Don’t Panic!”
So what if the Jets starting defense got torched for two touchdowns.
And so what if the Ryan Fitzpatrick offense looked just OK.
It’s the preseason and the Jets still have time to learn the new system.
“I think for me it was more looking at our team trying to jell than looking at who we were playing against,” said head coach Todd Bowles. “I know it’s a preseason game and having them only play a series last week, they needed to play together to try to jell so we weren’t worried about who we were going up against. I know it’s preseason. We were doing it for our sake and not theirs.”
The Jets play four of these games and they looked better in Game 2 than they did last week in Detroit. It makes sense for them to just go about their business and improve.
Even with the win, it feels somewhat hallow. The Jets scored against a bunch of Falcons who will be bagging groceries or pumping gas in the next few weeks, so there’s no need to print playoff tickets yet.
What’s more important about a preseason game like this is if the Jets are starting to pick up a new system.
The defense needs to learn Bowles playbook, while the offense has Chan Gailey changing things up.
It’s simply going to take time.
“I think it was an up-and-down performance,” Fitzpatrick said. “It was nice to get the touchdown at the end. It’s certainly always a great experience, to have it be a preseason game, to go against an opponent that does some different things on defense that we don’t see every day and have to do try to go out there and execute our basic plays that we had in this game.”
Remember baby steps and there’s still three weeks and two games left before the season starts. As long as the Jets are starting to pick up the system, then it’s a good week. They got the win and more experience.
“We’re close.” said defensive end Sheldon Richardson on picking up the system. “A few plays kind of busted up open on the ones. The twos played pretty decent, stayed pretty stout. We’re not too far off. Of course he’s going to complain about the penalties we got, but that’s just guys competing and that happens. ”
Although the preseason click is running, the Jets need to use this time to get the kinks out of the system. They will learn from this and hopefully have a better first team effort against the Giants next week.
“That’s what preseason is for,” Bowles said. “Hopefully, we learn from this one. We learned something last week about tackling. Hopefully, we’ll learn from penalties this week. We have to get better every week. We have to progress next week. Hopefully the penalties go down next week. We’re going to work our butts off on it and go from there.”
Now back to work.
Don’t Panic Jets Nation.
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