Rookie QB looked lost vs. Jags ‘D’
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Well, this was always going to be the deal with Sam Darnold, right? You cast your lot with a kid quarterback who’s barely drinking age, you’re signing up for any number of highs, lows, and in-betweens.
And you put that quarterback behind an offensive line that is, um, well, a little talent — and depth-challenged …
Well, the formula will be there for games like this one, the Jets swallowed whole by the Jaguars, 31-12, and Darnold looking overwhelmed mostly, overmatched occasionally, along with the spasms of hope that emerge even out of the darkness. “No excuses,” he said. “We have to execute better and I have to do a better job making the plays that are there for me.” As rookie performances go this wasn’t exactly that five-pick game Mark Sanchez turned in against Buffalo, or any of the hard-to-watch games turned in by Geno Smith his first year on the job.
Darnold wound up 17-for-34 for 167 yards and a touchdown with a rating of 74.0. He didn’t get intercepted but he easily could have, with the Jags dropping balls on at least three separate occasions. He was sacked just three times for a total of 23 yards, but he was on the run constantly and was flushed from the pocket seemingly every other time he dropped back or took a snap in the shotgun.
“First of all, credit to [Jacksonville], they are a great defense,” Darnold said. “We’ve just got to continue to fight and continue to get third-and-manageables, which means winning on first and second downs, and then just going from there and converting on third downs.”
Coach Todd Bowles was a little more terse when asked his assessment of Darnold’s play: “Everyone had a bad game,” he said.
Darnold did have a couple of misfires that could have changed the way his portion of the game was evaluated, if not the final score. He had one throw, on a deep pattern to Robby Anderson, that was thrown maybe 6 inches too long and another to Bilal Powell that was maybe 3 inches too strong.
“Yeah. The one to BP, there’s no excuse for that one,” Darnold said. “You’ve got to put the ball on them. You’ve just got to execute those plays that are there in general. They beat the guy pretty good and we’ve just got to execute. Throw and catch.”
Three weeks ago he was the toast of footall and there were some across the league who wondered if the Jets may not be this year’s sleeper team; three weeks and three losses later Darnold seems to understand already what an outlier that first night in Michigan was.
“The Detroit game is behind us,” he said. “That’s long gone. Those games aren’t going to happen too often in the NFL nd we know that, we’ve just got to come out every single game and continue to play hard.”