Certain tests separate good defenses from the great ones.
Perhaps the most important is how they perform against elite quarterbacks and offenses.
The Jets have not shied away from their belief that they are not just a great defense, but one of the all-time best.
That claim is set for another big test in Justin Herbert and the Chargers when the two teams clash Monday night at MetLife Stadium.
“You know how they’d be if we were just going against average to below-average offenses,” star Jets cornerback Sauce Gardner told The Post after practice Thursday. “It’d just be, ‘They’re not going against anybody.’ Being able to go against an explosive guy like [Herbert], it’s the same thing.
“Just like cornerback, when you’re not going against those elite guys, and you’re just going against average receivers or who the public wanna call average, they’re not gonna give you the credit that you deserve. But when you’re lining up against elite [players], they can’t deny you.”
Jets coach Robert Saleh said, “We’ve played a gauntlet of quarterbacks, and I know we haven’t gotten all wins, but we’ve embarrassed all of them,” following the team’s Week 6 win over Jalen Hurts and the Eagles.
Though he later walked back the comments, Saleh’s remark certainly rings true this year.
The Jets intercepted Hurts three times, and he completed just 28 of 45 passes for 280 yards and a touchdown.
It tied the most Hurts has been intercepted in his career.
Two weeks prior, the Jets nearly beat the defending champion Chiefs.
They intercepted Patrick Mahomes twice, and he completed 18 of 30 passes for a season-low 203 yards and one touchdown.
In the Jets’ Week 1 overtime win over the Bills, they intercepted Josh Allen three times, and his 62.7 passer rating was by far his worst of the year.
“The message is that you want to make the great ones look average and you want to make the average ones look awful,” edge-rusher John Franklin-Myers told The Post. “That’s something we talk about and something that we try to live. … [Herbert’s] a great player. He does a lot of things well. What an opportunity we have.”
Beyond their elite stature and passing ability, defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich is preparing his defense to face the same type of athleticism in Herbert as he did Allen, Mahomes and Hurts.
“Similar ways in which you better monitor him,” Ulbrich said. “Especially in the drop-back game because if you do take away his options just like all the guys we have faced this year, have we faced a non-athletic quarterback this season? It has been an absolute pain in the butt. You definitely have to account for him because when he doesn’t have that initial read and the check down is taken away, he is gone, he is running.
“From that standpoint it is the same as Josh, he is the same as Jalen, he is the same as all these athletic quarterbacks we have faced. If you don’t have a second-level guy monitoring him to some capacity, where it is spy, where it is zone, principles, whatever it is, you better have a guy that has eyes on him.”
But the Jets will quickly have to adjust after facing the near complete opposite during their Week 8 win over the Giants.
The Giants started Tyrod Taylor in place of an injured Daniel Jones, but Taylor’s own injury in the second quarter subsequently forced third-stringer Tommy DeVito into action for his NFL debut.
The Jets held them to minus-9 net passing yards, the fewest in an NFL game since Dec. 3, 2000.
The Giants hardly even let DeVito pass the ball, and he completed just 2 of 7 passes in the game.
It was far from facing the NFL’s elite.
Now they face a quarterback who can throw it down the field as well as anyone.
“The way [the Giants] handled that was different,” Franklin-Myers said. “You don’t see an NFL quarterback just not attempting a pass. I’ve never seen that. But nonetheless it happened. … You see so many different things in the NFL that you gotta adapt. Adapting is more important than going into a game with a plan.”
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