The Jets\u2019 offense started Thursday night\u2019s game with a brilliant 14-play, 72-yard drive that ended with a Justin Fields five-yard touchdown run. On that first drive, Fields ran the ball five times and threw the ball twice, and the Jets\u2019 offense was humming.<\/p>\n
So did the Jets keep having Fields run the rest of the game? No.<\/p>\n
The Jets\u2019 remaining three drives of the first half were all three-and-outs, and Fields didn\u2019t have a single rushing attempt for the rest of the half. All three of those three-and-out drives ended with Fields throwing the ball on third down and failing to get the first down. But Jets head coach Aaron Glenn defended the play calling after the game, saying Fields is not a running back and can\u2019t be treated like one.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want to make a habit of our quarterbacks continuing to run because we can put them in harm\u2019s way,\u201d Glenn said. \u201cI felt like if we get a fast start we\u2019ll be in a good position, and Justin ran the ball quite a bit. The thing is, we can\u2019t put Justin in a situation where he\u2019s a running back, and I think we all know that, because we\u2019re putting him in harm\u2019s way.\u201d<\/p>\n
After that great opening drive on which Fields ran the ball five times and threw the ball twice, he ran the ball six times and threw the ball 24 times the rest of the game. Glenn said he would have liked to see his receivers do a better job catching Fields\u2019 passes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to have some guys make some plays for him too,\u201d Glenn said.<\/p>\n
But the reality is that whether you blame Fields or the receivers for the struggles of the passing game, the Jets\u2019 offense was moving better when Fields was running: Fields ran 11 times for 67 yards, an average of 6.1 yards per run. Fields also passed the ball 26 times for 116 yards, and was sacked twice for 11 yards, a net of 105 yards on 28 dropbacks, or 3.8 yards per attempted pass.<\/p>\n
The Jets were better with Fields running more than passing, but Glenn made clear that Fields running more than passing is not part of the Jets\u2019 future plans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Jets\u2019 offense started Thursday night\u2019s game with a brilliant 14-play, 72-yard drive that ended with a Justin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-291243","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-nfl","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}