Fitting yet another slow start would ultimately cost us a trip to the dance. It's been our achilles heel all season. Bowles has to figure a way to get his team to consistently start fast from here on out or else find employment else where.
The thing that is disconcerting is that Bowles has acknowledged this issue, but doesn't seem able to do anything about it. I don't know if he and his coordinators just aren't good at scouting and game planning, or if this team isn't working hard enough during the week. At any rate, I had a feeling this season-long trend was going to bite us hard at some point.
Jets are 12th in first quarter points. I dont know if they are nearly as bad as everyone is insinuating.
Isnt this a little misleading though? You can have 3 games where you put up 20+ points in the first quarter and 13 where you score less than 7. And that total could put you at 12th. Anyone who watches every game knows that when the team starts slow it gives every fan an uneasy feeling. The only games we won this year after a slow start were the Giants and Cowboys games. Both Bills games were a slow start, Oakland, Houston and Philly too. All losses.
Definitely can be a bit misleading. Every stat can be a bit misleading. Obviously starting slow does not usually result in wins. My point is that, the narrative this year has been that the Jets are this ridiculously slow starting team. They are actually slightly better than league average in that regard. My guess is that most people dont watch other teams with the intensity as they watch the Jets. The Jets are about par for the course with slow starts.
We could start by getting some luck every once in awhile on the damn coin toss. Seemed like we lost the toss at least 14 out of the 16 games not only giving us the ball first (typically inside our own 15 thanks to the horrific KOR team, fire Bobby April) and against the wind in the 2nd and 4th quarters (yesterday). But back to what we can control... the offense needs to start faster and when they don't it would be nice not to have a punter that can punt further than 21 yards. We dug ourselves in a deep hole in the 1st quarter yesterday and we never got out.
Thats fair. But from what I've seen, most better than average teams seem to put those slow starts behind them fairly easily. Whereas the Jets turn a slow start into an entire game slump.
