At the start of camp, it appeared that the opening day corners would be Dee Milliner and offseason addition Dimitri Patterson. New York suffered two huge setbacks on Monday though, after rookie third round pick Dexter McDougle went down for the season with a torn ACL and Milliner injured his ankle. While Milliner’s injury isn’t too serious, likely putting him out 3 to 4 weeks, which means he's probably going to miss week one of the season. So now it puts the team in more dire straits. This is a Jets defense that finished last year 22nd in the NFL in passing defense in the league. That's bad enough. Now with these injuries, it makes things a lot tougher. So the questions is where does this leave the Jets?
Well, in the case of Millner, he will be back by week two, maybe week three the latest. It's not too big of a loss for the long term of the season, but it does hurt Millner in that he's missing valuable reps with the team. This is the same guy who went on record last week of saying he's the best cornerback in the league. He now has more pressure put on him for saying what he said. With the injury thrown into the mix, it's going to make things harder for Millner to back up those comments. They may have a possible solution for the injury issues at the moment.
Monday, at practice, Antonio Allen took a bunch of spins at corner and had arguably the best day of any member of the Jets’ secondary during the team’s first two weeks of training camp up in Cortland. He and Ellis Lankster got shots with the first team on Monday. So both guys looked good in practice, so this may be a temporary fix till Millner gets back into the lineup. It is a little too early to tell if this is going to work out the way the Jets hope, but its a step in the right direction to help hold the fort down till Millner gets back. But the injuries to the secondary showed two big problems that the Jets have had during the last number of seasons.
One has been the secondary as a whole and the addressing of the issue. It was already a well known fact that the Jets secondary had gaping holes. That's bad enough. Now we are seeing that the team appears to be ill equipped to handle serious injuries, which is something that wasn't really addressed in the offseason. General Manager John Idzik has taken criticism for not addressing the issue. He says he had no regrets about doing what he did in free agency, but, depending on how things play out this season, he may have a few of those regrets. While he did address the offensive issues, he should have at least tried to get one proven cornerback to put into the roster. It didn't have to be a big name but at least somebody who has a proven track record of being a solid cornerback.
The other thing that is shown by the weakness in this secondary is the offense. What I mean is the offense is going to really have to give more support to that defense. The NFL, as we know, has become a pass happy league. A good defense can only really do so much for a football team. A good defense can keep you in a game, but the offense really needs to score some points to support the efforts of that defense. The Jets have struggled doing that the last 15 years. Only twice in that time frame have the Jets finished in the top ten in points per game in the league: 1998 they finished 5th averaging 26.0 PPG and then they finished 9th in 2008 with 25.3 points per game. So never once under Ryan have the Jets finished in the top 10 in scoring. In fact they finished 28th and 29th respectively the last two seasons in scoring. So with a banged up, weak secondary, more pressure is on the front seven on defense and the offense has to score more.
The recent injuries to the secondary are starting to show more of the things that are going to need to be changed during the rest of camp and this season.
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