Adam Gase Blames Himself For Jets' Awful Offense: 'It Pisses Me Off'
Barring some sort of historic performance in Sunday's regular season finale against the Patriots, the Jets will finish this year with the NFL's worst offense.
Sound familiar?
New York finished the 2019 season in the league's cellar as well, averaging 273 yards per game. Through 15 games this year, they're 20-plus yards away from the next-worst team with an average of 275.3.
Jets head coach Adam Gase, who was hired before last season in an effort to revitalize this organization's offense, said Wednesday that he doesn't even look at the numbers. There's no point in looking when you already know how bad they are.
"We had way too many games where we were just so unproductive," Gase said in a Zoom call with reporters. "I feel like we’ve done some things better in the last month or so, still had that Seattle game, we just couldn’t do anything. It’s those games where you just have those just absolutely nothing, no yards, no points; third-down, red-zone percentage is crap. You have more than like two or three of those, it’s just going to be bad."
Even a two-game winning streak against postseason contenders doesn't wipe away a franchise-worst 13-game losing streak to start the season, a stretch that included nine games with less than 300 total yards of offense.
New York is also last in the NFL in passing yards per game (170.5) and points per game (15.3) entering Week 17. The most this team has scored in a single game this year is 28 points (three times).
As he's done in the past—owning up to Sam Darnold's lack of development and admitting he let Jets owner Christopher Johnson down—Gase took the blame for New York's ineptitude on offense.
"It pisses me off, because if there’s one side of the ball that I want to make sure is right, it's that one," he said. "It has not happened and that’s on me."
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Gase added in his overall assessment of the season that it's irrelevant this late in the year to go back and nitpick what exactly went wrong. It may also be too late to win his job back as the 42-year-old is expected to be fired at some point following New York's final game of the season.
"There’s going to be a lot of things you wish you could change, but you can’t, so you’ve got to learn from them as it’s going on and try to adjust throughout the season," Gase said. "I think somewhat we did. There are certain games that were kind of [did] in that last month and a half ... you wish you just could have had a better performance, maybe that would have swung the tide of the game."
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The Jets have only finished a season with fewer than three wins once in franchise history. That's when they won one game back in 1996. With the No. 2 pick locked in and a chance to take down a division rival on the table, New York will look to win its third game in a row on Sunday and finish an otherwise brutal campaign on an extended high note.
They'll be playing without two running backs, however, as both Frank Gore (season-ending lung contusion) and La'Mical Perine (positive COVID-19 test) will be out. Youngsters Ty Johnson and Josh Adams will get another chance, as they did in Week 13 against the Raiders, to shine.
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