Thats right fellas, Thomas Jones led the NFL in rushing for week 13, on 16 Fucking carries. If we gave him the ball more in the first half, or maybe on 3-1and 4-1, or 3-3, or in the freaking red zone, he would have lit up the broncos on sunday. Unfortunately our staff decided to try and outsmart the broncos, and we got fucked up on Sunday. Congratulations to Thomas Jones for his performance on Sunday! BTW when voting goes up, we need to make him Ground player of the week on NFL.com. If you are curious TJ had 138 yards rushing, while his closest competitors, were Marshawn Lynch (134), Adrian Peterson (131) and Steve Slaton (130). So once again Congrats to TJ.
In all fairness, the Broncos stacked the box for most of that game. I still would have preferred more running attempts but we got stuffed on first down for 1 or 2 yards a decent number of times. It wasn't like TJ was consistently picking up 4-5 yards - most of his yards came from the two big runs.
take out his 2 TD runs, and he had 50 yards on 14 carries ... 3.57 yards per carry and was routinely stopped for no gain +/- a yard or two
Maybe my memory is poor but I remember early in the Titans game not gaining much on quite a few running plays in the first half. The Jets kept after it in the second and ended up doing well on the ground. I think that if they had kept trying to run a bit more they could have been successful with those later rushes.
while i concede it wasnt TJ's most complete performance, he still had the two td runs, as well as leading the league in rushing for a week. The fact he's not even up for voting for ground player of the week is a mockery, he had better numbers than Hillis as well as more TD's. Regardless Westbrook should win it.
The point is that he was not consistently getting chunks of yards so we could not run the ball as much as we wanted. They were putting 8 in the box for most of the game and we picked up 1 or 2 yards on a lot of first down runs. It's a tough call to run the ball with 8 in the box on 2nd and 8 or 9. Now if you wanna talk about 3&1, and 4&1 passes, that's another story.
I wasn't saying he wasn't effective, but its not like he was continuously ripping off runs for 6+ yards. The majority of his carries he was stopped at/around the line, which going back to the original post in the thread, "maybe on 3-1and 4-1, or 3-3" I'm saying he may not have effectively gotten the first downs, and passing may have been our best option. Especially when, as many other posters have pointed out, that the Broncos routinely had 8 in the box, particularly on running downs such as those. Why try and pick fights?
No you can't, TJ had a good day. Besides congratulating TJ on a good day it seemed the OP's intent was to complain about the CS not running the ball enough. We weren't consistently effective in the running game so we were unable to run the ball more especially considering how they were playing defense.
go out and take hillis 3 19 yard runs and he had a very poor day.. thanks for your wonderfull insight
With all the heat TJ's taken on this board, it's time to give him his props. Congrats TJ! Keep up the good work.
I still don't agree. At least with the ball in TJ's hands, we had the potential to rip off some big yardage. The way Favre looked throwing the long ball on Sunday I think it certainly would have been justified to continue running Jones much much more than they did. This guy has more than proven that he can be and should be the go-to guy, and yet they still neglect him in such a crucial situation. I think the CS outsmarted themselves on Sunday. In the second half as the Denver D became more worn down is exactly when we should have continued to pound TJ...not to mention the weather factor! Props to Jones - he did an amazing job with what they gave him, which wasn't enough.
I guess our definition of effective is pretty different. Out of 16 carries he broke 2 of them for long TDs. The 43 passes netted the Jets 3 points, and all the yards on that FG drive were on screens. Even with stacking the box Denver's run defense is so bad that plays are going to be there. The Jets abandoned the only thing that was working on offense early in the second quarter and it probably cost them the game.
