“I don’t know what else to say about it,” Ryan said.
Ryan just stood there, his face ashen, but the words eventually flowed from the coach’s mouth like a lazy river. He spoke of resilience and teamwork and adversity, how he and his coaching staff accepted Revis’s injury as “a personal challenge” to revitalize a team that had lost its best and most indispensable player. But Ryan did not address, at least not directly, that murky area between popular perception and harsh reality — that Revis’s absence deals the 2-1
Jets a potentially devastating blow, weakening not only their defense but also their playoff hopes.
“I have all the respect in the world for Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers and Peyton Manning, but Darrelle’s the best player in the league,” said the former San Francisco cornerback Eric Davis, an analyst on NFL Network. “No other player goes out with those expectations on him every single week and produces like he does. No one has a tougher assignment week in, week out than Revis. Brady and Rodgers and Manning throw interceptions. Revis doesn’t make mistakes.”
He didn’t, at least, before his knee buckled while he made a cut in the third quarter of the Jets’ 23-20 overtime victory against Miami on Sunday. Their aggressive defense relies heavily on Revis, a neutralizing force in one-on-one coverage; according to the statistical Web site
ProFootballFocus.com, which last season rated him as the best cornerback in the N.F.L., receivers caught only a league-low 41.2 percent of passes thrown while Revis was covering them.
By erasing the opposition’s top receiving threat, effectively eliminating a huge swath of the field, Revis allows Ryan to deploy the other 10 defenders in exotic ways — in creative blitz packages, in bracket coverage and in space, prowling other areas of the field.
“All that changes dramatically moving forward,” said Brian Billick, the former Ravens coach who works as an analyst for Fox Sports and NFL Network.
In the coming weeks, some of the N.F.L.’s most dangerous receivers — including Larry Fitzgerald, Andre Johnson and Reggie Wayne — visit MetLife Stadium, where Revis would surely have shadowed them. Instead, that burden falls to Antonio Cromartie — or, more likely, to his fellow defensive backs and him because the Jets are unlikely to trust Cromartie the same way they did Revis. With Revis sidelined, opponents are almost certain to emphasize their No. 1 receivers, devising game plans that funnel passes toward them.
Tom Moore, the former Indianapolis offensive coordinator who worked as a consultant last season for the Jets, said he always took Revis into account when calling plays, telling his players to “play smart, not scared.” In the Jets’ 2011 playoff victory against the Colts, Revis held Wayne to one reception for a single yard. The details have faded for Moore, but he said of Revis, “You always knew he was there.”
To compensate, Billick said the Jets could start playing more zone coverage, which would alleviate the pressure on Cromartie and Kyle Wilson, elevated from nickel corner to starter in Revis’s absence. When injuries diluted the Ravens’ secondary heading into a 2007 game in Seattle, Ryan, reluctantly, kept the defensive backs in a two-deep zone for much of the game, Billick said, “even though it killed him.”
“To do anything else would have been a mistake,” said Billick, who was Ryan’s boss in Baltimore for nine seasons. “He’s not in that dire straits now, because he has good people behind Revis. Rex’s nature is always to bring pressure — that’s his answer to everything. But you might be a little bit more tentative about bringing five- or six- or seven-man pressure knowing that your back end’s going to be more vulnerable.”
Ryan disagreed. Instead of taking a more conservative approach, as many would probably expect, Ryan said he might be more aggressive, mentioning how his father, Buddy, coached teams in Chicago that harassed quarterbacks despite an anonymous secondary.
In theory, that strategy makes sense: if the Jets feel exposed at cornerback, increasing their pressure would be a way of preventing the quarterback from dissecting the diminished secondary. In practice, the counterargument is fierce; the Jets, supported by three weeks of evidence, have struggled at generating a consistent pass rush, recording 3 sacks and 10 quarterback hits — 5 across their last two games.
“We’ve got to get 1,000 times better,” said linebacker Calvin Pace, who lamented the Jets’ inability to stop the run (148.7 yards a game) and generosity in third-down situations, yielding a 55.8 percent conversion rate. “It’s hard to rush the passer when you get third-and-4. The offense can pretty much do what they want.”
Ryan said: “Maybe we play some opponents differently. There’s different ways to skin a cat. You can’t just take away their best receiver with one guy. Again, we’ll find a way.”
Wilmer Ramírez - September 19, 12:47 PM