McCown & dirty
QB’s play isn’t pretty, but won’t be ugliest part of Jets
THINK of it this way: Your spouse drags you to a restaurant you would otherwise never have heard about, let alone eaten in. In my house, for instance, that’s Indian food. I tell my wife I’m going on the road, she instantly dreams of how much chicken vindaloo she can hoard while I’m gone.
I have been a reluctant date a time or two, though. And this is what I said the moment we left the restaurant: “That wasn’t nearly as bad as expected.”
That was Josh McCown on Sunday in Buffalo.
He wasn’t nearly as bad as expected.
He did throw two picks, but both were heaved in understandable desperation while the fourth quarter was slipping away. He threw for 176 yards, was only sacked once. He engineered an 11-play, 75-yard drive late in the third quarter punctuated by his own fourthdown quarterback sneak, which briefly pulled the Jets within two points.
(And, don’t say this too loudly among your Giants-fan friends — or, what the hell, SCREAM it at them, because how many opportunities across the next few months will you have to do so — but that’s the only touchdown a New York football team has scored thus far in the 2017 football season.) The Jets lost the game, 21-12. But they didn’t lose it because of McCown. That hasn’t always been the case across a 16-year career in which he now has an 18-43 record in 61 starts (and 3-23 in his last 26). The defense was porous, riddled with uninspired performances. The running game was invisible. The only reason, in fact, the Jets hung around the game is that McCown wasn’t nearly as bad as expected.
The ultimate backhanded compliment, sure. But in 2017, any kind of compliment is preferable to the long list of available alternatives.
“I thought he did a good job,” Jets coach Todd Bowles said, and if he didn’t exactly say that emphatically it’s because in his third year Bowles sounds more and more like someone who laces his Diet Coke with Seconal every time he’s about to talk into a microphone or a telephone.
McCown himself was a little more measured, saying: “I look at the level of play required especially from the quar- terback, you’ve got to play at a high level. I demand that of myself.”
That’s a good thing, because he’s facing the varsity this week. As badly as the defense looked against the middling Bills, it portends badly what might be in store for that side of the ball when it has to figure out the two-man game of quarterback Derek Carr and resurgent unretired running back Marshawn Lynch.
Let’s be frank: The Raiders are going to fillet the Jets defense. So if there is going to be any reason to keep your set tuned in to the game past the f irst quarter, McCown and company are going to have to provide it. And it’s not like they’ve been given the kind of tools necessary to make that even a remotely likely possibility.
McCown played all of three series in the preseason, a choice by Bowles that felt remarkably foolish at the time and seemed downright unforgivable for long stretches of Sunday afternoon. Both coach and quarterback admitted there were chances for him to stretch the field, and McCown never took advantage, settling for dump-offs and check-downs and generally making the game look as fun as knee-replacement surgery.
“I look at the drive where we moved the ball down there and scored, and we know we can be that kind of offense,” McCown said.
“You’ve got to be careful how much you hold onto the ball,” McCown said, referring to the Bills, but that’s also a credo that applies to the Raiders. “They can create issues. At the same time we want to create bigger plays for ourselves. Some things we left out there, and the ball didn’t get thrown because of miscommunication or whatever. But I believe we can get that done.”
He’d better. Unless the Jets are going to fulfill the worst prophesies of the coming season, they need McCown to be more than he was Sunday. Clearing a low bar will keep you from getting crushed the way Ryan Fitzpatrick did last year. But it won’t bring anything tangible along with it. He has to be better than that, which may mean being better than anyone will ever expect him to be.