It has been a long week for Jets wide receivers coach Sanjay Lal.
He watched his players drop six passes (by his count) against the Patriots last week in the 13-10 loss. He called the drops “unacceptable” and struggled to figure out what led to the bad night in Foxborough.
“It’s hard because there’s not one thing we don’t do in practice,” Lal said. “We do every drill from Jugs to honing in on the nose of the ball to eyes to the tuck to grip strength. So, it is hard when that happens.
“You don’t want to make the excuse that it was a downpour because we are at the highest level of football and the best athletes. If the ball is in the air, we’re paid to catch the ball and that’s what we should do. No excuses were made. We know it was unacceptable.”
Lal said they have not changed the drills they do, but he has emphasized concentrating on the ball.
“We talked this week and said when that ball is in the air there is no sunlight that can blind you, there’s no lights, there’s no rain drops, my knee doesn’t hurt, my kids didn’t do poorly in school today and my mind is there, not even one iota of your thinking should be on anything other than that ball when it’s in the air,” Lal said. “The world should go black and you focus on the nose of the ball, that’s it. That’s the thing I tried to drive home. Let’s see where that takes us.”
By Lal’s count, Clyde Gates had four drops, Stephen Hill had one and Ryan Spadola had one.
***
The Jets raised a lot of eyebrows last week when they did not send a punt returner back deep on three Patriots punts. Special teams coordinator Ben Kotwica got a chance to explain the thinking on Thursday.
“We thought it gave us the best opportunity to make a play,” Kotwica said. “We saw something on tape that we could take advantage of and we darn near got [the block] on the first time. We had a free runner there. Given the circumstances, and that time, we thought it was something that we saw that gave us an opportunity to make a play and we decided to go with it. We look at the risk, we look at the reward and at that time that’s the way we went with it.”
Kotwica said it is something the Jets have done before when Kotwica was Mike Westhoff’s assistant.
“We’ve done a variant of it where we put a lot of pressure on a punter a few years ago, a few years back,” Kotwica said. “We kind of took that variant and ran with it. It’s nothing we haven’t done before. We’ve done that before. Like I said, we just kind of changed it up a little bit and went with it.”