For Jets, Development of Sam Darnold and Quinnen Williams Matters At Season's End

For the New York Jets, it is now about growth and development as their season winds down. While the Jets say that winning matters in these moments, the long-term outlook for this team is clearly in play. 

The Jets (5-9) and will face a tough Pittsburgh Steelers (8-6) side looking to win their way into the postseason. While the Steelers have everything to play for, the playoffs have been an impossibility for the Jets for several weeks now. 

These last two games of the year provide the Jets and first-year head coach Adam Gase a chance to evaluate talent and began building the core of this team ahead of 2020. 

“Yeah, for me it’s always going to be about just focusing on just this game and every game is important in the NFL, no matter what time of the year it is,” Gase told reporters at the team’s facility on Friday. “It just gets hyped up differently, by different people. For me it’s about getting better, making sure we’re executing the right way, the guys that we have available to us, just trying to get them to play at the highest level we can.” 

The two biggest pieces likely to benefit from these games are the last two first round picks by the Jets. Defensive tackle Quinnen Williams, taken third overall in this past spring’s NFL Draft, is improving as the season goes along. The same can be said of quarterback Sam Darnold, whom the Jets took in the first round in 2018. 

The growth of players such as Darnold and Williams over these last few weeks of the season matter to Gase. 

Darnold’s upswing in recent weeks is well-documented. Williams, however, has been under scrutiny. As a defensive tackle taken third overall, the expectation was that he would be dominant from the get-go.

In a position where traditional stats don’t matter much, Williams has been solid in a role that requires him to quietly go about and do the dirty work for his teammates. 

“Well I always look at it like this, especially up front, it’s always that first and second down transitioning from the run game to the pass game quickly. The veteran players if you ever notice, those are the guys that are really successful, they know how to do that,” Gase said.  

“They almost know how to do both at the same time, and sometimes when you’re a rookie you’re trying to feel your way out, ‘Ohh, it’s a pass, now I have to go,’ sometimes they’re a click slower. I think that’s just experience. The guys that are really successful they do a great job being able to transition when it’s a play-action pass, they know how to get to their pass-rush stuff and know how to penetrate quickly.”