Pressure on Jets’ defense to make Week 1 disaster an anomaly
NY Post
In case you hadn’t heard over the past couple of years, the Jets have a tendency to tout their place in the NFL defensive rankings because they’ve been good on that side of the ball.
They haven’t made the playoffs or produced a winning season in that span, but their defense was ranked No. 3 in the league in yards allowed and 12th in points yielded last season. In 2022, they ranked fourth in both of those categories.
So, what took place in Sunday’s season opener at the 49ers was difficult to swallow — particularly the 180 rushing yards and 6.9 yards per carry San Francisco gashed them with in an utter show of dominance.
A backup running back named Jordan Mason, who played in place of injured MVP candidate Christian McCaffrey, rushed for 147 of those yards on 28 carries. This after Mason had rushed for a total of 464 yards in his previous 33 NFL games.
Which leads us to Sunday’s Jets game at the Titans, who are offensively vulnerable — particularly at quarterback with second-year Will Levis coming off a miserable opener in which he turned the ball over three times on two interceptions and a lost fumble.
If the Jets defensive players, who were undoubtedly embarrassed by the way they were pushed around by the 49ers, don’t come out against Levis and the Titans like “a bunch of crazed dogs’’ — to borrow from the great Lawrence Taylor — then we have a problem here.
With the Yankees on an impressive run of mostly correct decisions, there’s some reason to leave them alone and just let the best team in the American League continue to roll. But they did raise serious doubt and leave room for suggestions (and even ridicule) following maybe the most inexplicable decision of this season, or any season.
The Giants have never been 0-2 under Brian Daboll, until now. They were 2-0 and flying high in 2022 and 1-1 after a rousing comeback in Arizona in 2023. So, this represents a low point as far as early-season difficulties for Daboll and the Giants. They had no business beating the Vikings in the opener and no business losing to the Commanders in Week 2. But here they are.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Harrison Butker kept making a lonely walk to midfield after each quarter Sunday to check on the direction of the wind, which tends to swirl inside Arrowhead Stadium. He did it one last time during the 2-minute warning, when his Chiefs were trailing the Bengals by two and trying to give him a winning field-goal attempt.