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Westhoff On Bowles: Doesn't Adjust Well Mid Game


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Westhoff on Bowles: Doesn't adjust well mid game 

Submitted  by Vaedur

When i talked to Westhoff a few months ago, he was one of the few critics of the Bowles hire. His viewpoint was that in all the game tape he watched of the Cardinals, Bowles defenses didn't adjust to what the other team was doing. Any opinions on this? I noticed in both the Eagle games and the Oakland games, when they found stuff that worked, the Jets did not have an answer.

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Now this is the second time the Jets owner has had to have the league office hold his hand with a head coach hiring. The first time they gave us Herman Edwards and now the second time they went and did the same thing again. Picked a head coach who had never been hired as a head coach before and lucky for us, we have an owner so clueless as to need to have this stuff done FOR him, for 'us'. I will say this much though, I think the league actually screwed up and gave us a good one as GM, which may just save us another 5 years of meh.

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I think he lacks a basic understanding of how the game is played in the AFC East with the never say die or never say we scored enough because the Patriots will try to score TD's up by 35 points with :41 seconds left and the ball on their own 22 yard line. Todd Bowles seems to think that there is some gentleman's game being played out on the turnpikes and it's going to cost this team games if he doesn't wise up. You can NOT sit on a lead just like Herman Edwards had to learn the hard way that playing not to lose is only good for 1 thing: losing.  

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I think the jury's still out on this guy.  I like what he's done and we really needed the anti-Rex here after the "circus"  However, we can't lose sight in the fact that he was given a completely new and much more talented roster than Rex probably ever had while here.  We have to remember he's a rookie coach who's going to make mistakes and he's learning on the job.  I like what I've seen but not ready to anoint him like we did with 'Mangenius" and Rex.  In game adjustments I agree are hit or miss, what's more concerning to me is the team tends to come out of the gate flat every week.  On the flip side, this is a much more disciplined team.

 

 

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Now this is the second time the Jets owner has had to have the league office hold his hand with a head coach hiring. The first time they gave us Herman Edwards and now the second time they went and did the same thing again. Picked a head coach who had never been hired as a head coach before and lucky for us, we have an owner so clueless as to need to have this stuff done FOR him, for 'us'. I will say this much though, I think the league actually screwed up and gave us a good one as GM, which may just save us another 5 years of meh.

League office?

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I see some of this on D.  For sure.  Even though we've had success in the 2nd half of games, I dont think it was necessarily adjustments more so than the team just settling in and not missing assignments.  Bowles said it himself "we're not going to let a team dictate what we do"...which is stupid but if he was telling the truth would lend to what Westy is saying.

We definitely dont adjust on offense, at all.

 

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I think the jury's still out on this guy.  I like what he's done and we really needed the anti-Rex here after the "circus"  However, we can't lose sight in the fact that he was given a completely new and much more talented roster than Rex probably ever had while here.  We have to remember he's a rookie coach who's going to make mistakes and he's learning on the job.  I like what I've seen but not ready to anoint him like we did with 'Mangenius" and Rex.  In game adjustments I agree are hit or miss, what's more concerning to me is the team tends to come out of the gate flat every week.  On the flip side, this is a much more disciplined team.

 

 

That happened with Rex too, so I don't know why that is.

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I see some of this on D.  For sure.  Even though we've had success in the 2nd half of games, I dont think it was necessarily adjustments more so than the team just settling in and not missing assignments.  Bowles said it himself "we're not going to let a team dictate what we do"...which is stupid but if he was telling the truth would lend to what Westy is saying.

We definitely dont adjust on offense, at all.

 

Well to this point, we are 11th in the NFL in scoring points. I would like to know who his candidate was.

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Well to this point, we are 11th in the NFL in scoring points. I would like to know who his candidate was.

Whose, Westhoff's candidate? It wasn't his job to choose a head coach for the Jets. in fact he may have even been considered at on point. I would have liked to know who was Woody Johnson's first choice.

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Seriously? Bowles gets 8 games and you're giving up on him already?

Unreal. 

That's the problem with this fanbase and this team right now. What are the expectations coming off of a 4 win season? If he wins 8 games, he will have doubled the win total from last year. But fans will be upset because they missed the playoffs. What should the expectation be with this team

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Fuk Westy.  Wasn't he on the CS under RR whose team never ever made half time adjustments?  After the fact, talk is cheap.  I suppose he'd have us believe that RR never ever listened to anyone on the CS, ever, including him.  Or maybe Westy never spoke up, who knows but to be coming off a team that never adjust, and to start mouthing off is really calling the kettle black IMHO.

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Fuk Westy.  Wasn't he on the CS under RR whose team never ever made half time adjustments?  After the fact, talk is cheap.  I suppose he'd have us believe that RR never ever listened to anyone on the CS, ever, including him.  Or maybe Westy never spoke up, who knows but to be coming off a team that never adjust, and to start mouthing off is really calling the kettle black IMHO.

To be fair, when Westy was here, his unit was typically the most reliable. Probably one of--if not the--best coach/coordinator on the team.

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To be fair, when Westy was here, his unit was typically the most reliable. Probably one of--if not the--best coach/coordinator on the team.

No argument here but he was the old grizzled vet on the CS under a rookie HC so he should have had the bosses ear, no?

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No argument here but he was the old grizzled vet on the CS under a rookie HC so he should have had the bosses ear, no?

Westy kinda strikes me as the guy who just deals with his sh*t on the job. A "do your job well, and trust everyone else does theirs" kinda thing. Besides, this is Rex we're talking about. When has Rex every listened to anyone?

 

EDIT: Nvm, you already mention that.

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Someone can check the math, but it appears as though the Jets have out scored their opponents 116-63 in the second half. As ever, Westhoff is a doddering old fool who will be forever embittered by never getting a sniff of anything beyond ST coach, which is a trainee job populated by 36 year-olds.

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I thought he has been hit or miss with adjustments. Did well adjusting to CLE,IND and JAG. didn't do well with the games we lost obviously enough.

In the wins - or all but one of them - I don't know how much he made adjustments. Seemed more that the original game plan was good enough to win. The lone exception that stands out to me was against Washington.

I remember after the Colts game he got up on the podium and bragged about how he wasn't going to let the other team dictate our gameplan of mostly running the ball (even in the face of it not working, and Fitz facing a depleted Indy secondary). That's the opposite of adjusting. The short & intermediate passing game was working really well - Fitz seemed to be completing those passes at will - and yet we kept running or ineffectively passing deep because that was their pregame plan.

And against NE it was more of that mentality.  He wanted to run, and no matter how ineffective the ground game was, we kept force-feeding it, much to the delight of the NE defense who couldn't keep up with or cover our giant WRs. We had 25 first downs against NE. We ran on 14 of them. Here were the gains on the ground: -4, 4, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 3, 3, 4, 2, 3. That's 34 yards on 14 first-down carries. Only once in 14 attempts did it leave the offense with as good a situation as 2nd & 5.  11 of 14 of them left us with 2nd & 7 or worse. And it's not like it got better as the game went along, that we ran less frequently as the game went on (after seeing that it wasn't working), or that Fitzpatrick - when his passes weren't getting batted down - wasn't throwing well, because he was throwing well. Given all that, how can you continue to run the ball 24 times for 60 yards? Well you can, but it doesn't suggest you are adjusting your gameplan to what's working best.

The ground game (such as it was) was working better against Philadelphia than against NE, and he gave up on that without trying. Worse still, almost all those runs were coming on 1st & 10. 1st & 10 for 3 yards, 1st & 10 for 1 yard, 1st & 10 for 1 yard, then one for 7, then back to 1st & 10 for 1 no gain, 1st & 10 for a 2 yard loss, 1st & 10 for a 1 yard loss, 1st & 10 for no gain.

It's not just whether or not we run so much as when we run. I know a lot of it's perception (what sticks out when it isn't working), but it seems like no matter how ineffective the ground game is, we will still try to ram it up the gut (certainly between the tackles) for repeated minimal gains, no gains, or losses on an awful lot of our first downs. 

Ironically, I would say Oakland - one of the losses - they did make adjustments (on offense, at least). Ivory was ineffective, but the truth is about half of his carries came in that first series. Granted, a big part of that reason was because we didn't totally stop running until we were down 21-3, but for that little while where Smith was completing almost every pass he let him continue until it stopped working instead of continuing to stubbornly run it up the gut on 1st down. But that's just on offense. On defense, whatever it was he was trying to start the game didn't work early on and nothing was done to appreciably fix it (21 points in the first half, 13 points in the 2nd half after they took their foot off the gas).

It's a fair criticism.  I would agree with you it doesn't apply every single game, but it isn't limited to only the Jets' losses.

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