FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — The Jets will find out quickly Sunday if the focus of their bye week has paid off.
Head coach Robert Saleh and his staff have been trying to solve why the team has started so slowly this season. The Jets have failed to score a point in the first quarter through five games, and they’ve been outscored 75-13 in the first half. They spent the past two weeks trying to fix that and now travel to Gillette Stadium to see if they can get up on the Patriots early.
“You know, we feel good about it. Obviously, we’ll see Sunday,” Saleh said of what the Jets have done to address the slow starts. “We got to put up or shut up, right? We’ll get an opportunity to continue building through it. We’ve got these three games before the Thursday mini-bye to see if we can tweak something else. But we feel good about the soundness of everything. I think the guys have responded well to everything, and now it’s just a matter of going out and executing.”
Saleh altered the practice schedule this week to move a competitive period between the starters on offense and defense to a spot earlier in practice. He has made a few other “subtle” changes to try to speed the Jets’ clocks up.
The Jets see a Patriots team that is in unfamiliar territory at 2-4 after losing an overtime heartbreaker to the Cowboys last week and falling to 0-4 at home. New England beat the Jets last month, 25-6, on a day when rookie quarterback Zach Wilson was intercepted four times. The Patriots surely are happy to see a 1-4 team coming their way. The Patriots have won 11 consecutive games against the Jets and 14 of their past 15.
Wilson gets another crack at Bill Belichick and the Patriots, and he knows a quick start could help ease some of the pressure the Jets are feeling about their first quarters. One stat that has been driven home with the Jets is they are averaging seven plays in the first quarter, something that has to improve.
“The goal is to start the game feeling relaxed, and not feeling that tension from the start,” Wilson said. “I don’t even think it has to be a touchdown. I think, [against the Titans], we really felt it just hitting that 10-yard out for a first down on third-and-long, it was just like, ‘Holy crap, we just converted on a third down. We’re finally moving the sticks.’ And so just moving the chains and having positive plays to start the game is what we need. Really, I think is killing us, is the seven plays a quarter. It’s hard to do much when that’s all you’re having. And so, we’ve got to do a better job of taking advantage of our opportunities and being able to put something together.”