A tendency after suffering a pair of agonizing home defeats is to want to tear everything down and start building up again while searching for answers that lead to victories.
NFL coaches battle that desire all the time, after wins _and_ losses. As HC Aaron Glenn said following the Jets' 38-33 loss to Las Vegas at MetLife Stadium about his offense: "There are plays out there, I thought, that we left on the field." Or as G Joe Tippmann put it in more hungrily, "We definitely left some meat on the bone."
But Glenn also offered praise for his offense after the game and he repeated those sentiments at his news conference Monday morning.
"I thought our offense did an outstanding job of moving the ball and creating explosive plays. We scored touchdowns, which was good," Glenn said, before noting that only 2 TDs came on 6 red zone drives, a shortfall that will be stressed again in the meeting rooms and on the practice fields this week before traveling to Kansas City.
One measure of how the Jets have been moving offensively is their yards per offensive play in these last two home games. Against Miami, they averaged 7.11 yards/splay. Against Vegas, that number was 7.20.
Combined, the Jets averaged 7.16 yards/play the past two games. And that is a good number. In fact, it's the seventh-best average in back-to-back games in franchise history, and the best since Games 9-10, at Oakland and at Indianapolis, 23 seasons ago in 2003.
The best averages, no surprise, center around Game 2 in 1972, when Joe Namath, at 10.61 yards/play. outdueled Johnny Unitas in the Jets' 44-34 win at Baltimore. Since that game, here is a more compact list of the Jets' top four back-to-back yards/play averages of the past 50 seasons: