Jeff Ulbrich knew his audience.
The interim head coach of the New York Jets knew that darkness is more than just a metaphor for the quarterback on whose shoulders the franchise rests.
So, after the Jets’ fifth straight loss, Ulbrich leaned into the visuals.
His message to a team that wasted an eminently winnable divisional game against the New England Patriots?
“This is a moment of darkness,” Ulbrich said in his locker room after the rebuilding Patriots beat them 25-22. “And we understand that the outside world is going to get very loud right now. But the one thing I know in life is that when it gets dark and tough, you work. And you point to yourself and you look inward and you figure out what I can do better.”
Rodgers is intimately familiar with the darkness in a way that perhaps no one else in the league is.
The four-time MVP spent four nights in total darkness in 2023 as he contemplated retirement. Instead of hanging it up, Rodgers came out of his meditative retirement to help facilitate his trade from the Green Bay Packers to the Jets.
Rodgers’ latest emergence from literal obscurity gave the Jets a powerful injection of hope. But after the Jets fell to last place in the AFC East on Sunday, can he find that strength again?
But as New York’s offense struggles to line up without a penalty or delay of game, and the Jets’ defense struggles to stop the run while special teams miss kicks every week, can Rodgers find the strength to light up the Jets again?
With the shadow of his hat appropriately covering his eyes in the dark during his postgame press conference, Rodgers believed so.
“I’ve been in the dark,” he said. “You have to get in there. Make peace with that.”
Jets’ loss to struggling Patriots meant trouble beyond a week
What would peace in darkness look like for Rodgers?
The quarterback took advantage of Ulbrich’s imperative to single out himself more than others.
“Offensively, our goal has to be: just score 30,” Rodgers said after a 17-of-28, 233-yard day, including two touchdowns. “It doesn’t matter what the other parties are doing. We trust our defense and the (special) teams, but if we don’t score 30, we are not performing.
“This offense can do that every week.”
Rodgers’ words echoed team owner Woody Johnson’s statement when he fired head coach Robert Saleh on Oct. 8, insisting that this was the best Jets roster he had assembled and therefore , it should be better than 2-3.
Since then, the Jets have further strengthened both sides of the ball, trading wide receiver Davante Adams and reaching a contract agreement with running back Hassan Reddick.
No matter: They’ve now lost five games in a row, including three after Saleh’s firing, two under Adams and one under Reddick.
And the Jets haven’t reached Rodgers’ 30-point threshold once in eight tries.
Their 22 points on Sunday were the most since they scored 24 against the Patriots five weeks earlier, a mark that still undercuts the Patriots’ 25 points per game allowed.
And while a missed 44-yard field goal and a botched extra-point attempt hurt the Jets in this loss, so did the continued operational disarray. The Jets exhausted their first-half timeouts before the second quarter began, and also committed five of their eight penalties in the first half.
“One of them we were late getting out of the huddle, one of them I was trying to get the right protection, one I felt like we could have gotten it done, but it was good to take (a timeout) there,” Rodgers said. . “Our operation was a little slow at times.”
Operational lethargy would hit the Jets again in the fourth quarter, when they suffered another delay of game on a two-point conversion attempt after scoring the go-ahead touchdown with 2:57 left. The five-yard penalty more than tripled the two yards needed on the play. The botched play meant the Patriots needed a touchdown, but not an extra point attempt, to win.
The Patriots ended up getting both, as the Jets’ defense followed their offense’s lead and faltered.
Rodgers defended the decision, accepting its consequences.
“They start the clock at 8 p.m. and we had a turn and a motion,” he said. “When the time came, the defense they were playing was not good for the play that was called. So I thought let’s go back to 7, there’s not much difference. I like the play we called, but they didn’t put any pressure on it.
“And I guessed wrong, they guessed right.”
Jets have quick response before Texans arrive
The Jets will have a chance to cleanse their palate on Thursday.
But they’ll have to do it against a 6-2 Houston Texans team, whose quarterback is 18 years younger in the NFL but is currently more productive.
The Texans’ offense has been shakier than last season, when CJ Stroud earned Offensive Rookie of the Year honors. But their defense ranked second in yards allowed this week and 11th in points allowed.
Against the same Patriots team that just beat the Jets, the Texans won 41-21 two weeks ago. That Patriots team had starting quarterback Drake Maye for four quarters; the Jets faced him for just 16 minutes before he was evaluated and then ruled out with a concussion.
Ulbrich, who described himself and the team as “angry” and “hurt,” emphasized the importance of cleaning up game operations and executing them more consistently.
“We’re not executing in critical moments, especially down the stretch,” Ulbrich said. “We say that’s not who we are. But that’s how we are until we prove otherwise.”
Ulbrich expressed confidence in the Jets’ ability to turn the corner and confidence in the team’s ability to emerge from obscurity as they and Rodgers had done before.
The team will lean on bright spots like Rodgers and Garrett Wilson’s best game of the season with defenders focused on Adams. The Jets defense allowed fewer yards than they had in six weeks, but they also allowed a shorthanded group to convert on 7 of 15 third-down attempts and three of four trips to the red zone.
Ulbrich said he will “take a hard look at everything,” including the forward’s best plan as a kicker after Greg Zuerlein’s sixth missed field goal of the season.
Hard work and responsibility are the Jets’ tickets out of obscurity, Ulbrich said.
“If we do it collectively, which I think we will, it will be their only chance to get out of this,” Ulbrich said. “That’s your only chance to improve and correct some of these mistakes. That’s where we are lucky.
“The character of this locker room is going to show who we are.”