Sorry Sam 'picks' apart Week 3 dud
On a rare fall weekend off, Sam Darnold was able to spend some time in the city with friends as he tried to get away from football, if only briefly.
But his Sunday didn’t pass by without a hard look in the mirror provided by the film from a rough 21-17 loss to the Browns on Thursday night in Cleveland.
“That was the biggest thing I got to do this weekend was self-evaluate,” Darnold said on a conference call Monday after the Jets returned to the practice field. “[The last few days] have been pretty hard, I’m not going to lie.” The two interceptions Darnold threw in the last two minutes of the game, as the Jets were trying to mount a comeback, surely ate at him. But there was more to correct from a night when Darnold completed 15-of-31 passes for 169 yards.
Immediately after the loss, Darnold said he didn’t think he was decisive enough. The film confirmed that, and led the rookie to a bigger revelation.
“Trusting what I see and letting it rip, that’s really the biggest thing,” Darnold said. “Just going one to two to three and going through it like that. Going through my reads quick and decisively, but at the same time, just trusting what I’m seeing out there.
“Because every time I look back at it, my first read, sometimes I would think the defense is maybe not going to give me something and I would skip over a progression. And it was like, ‘Man, if I really just look at that first progression, it was there.’ A couple plays popped up like that. From that perspective, I really just wish that sometimes I could trust my gut and trust the progression. If I continue to do that throughout the season, I feel like I’ll have a lot of success.”
Jets coach Todd Bowles chalked it up to Darnold being a rookie quarterback seeing more defenses for the first time.
“If it’s drawn as it is on the blackboard, that’s easy, but when they do different things and you hesitate a little bit, those things come in time, and that’s part of his maturation process,” Bowles said.
This week presents another challenge for Darnold. Aside from preparing to face one of the best defenses in the league — “We don’t have any patsies playing defense over there,” Bowles said of the Jaguars’ lockdown unit, which is allowing just 14.7 points per game — Darnold also will get a test on how he’s able to lead a team trying to bounce back from consecutive losses.
The Jets were on a high after their season-opening thrashing of the Lions, but have come back down to earth quickly.
“I think [Darnold] will come out of it fine,” Bowles said. “I think Sam has the right mentality and he has the right work ethic to learn what he has done wrong, as well as the rest of the team. They come back out of it, and he’s not in it by himself. We are in it as a team. Everything he learns from is an experience.”
Through three games, Darnold has completed 56-of-93 passes for 701 yards, three touchdowns and five interceptions. He has thrown a pair of interceptions in consecutive weeks.
Bowles praised Darnold for the toughness he showed against the Browns, but the quarterback knows that’s not enough.
“That’s awesome that Coach said that and he even noticed that, but I expect more out of myself,” Darnold said. “I gotta be better.”