Don't excuse Adam Gase, but head coach isn't sole reason for Jets' offensive woes

When Adam Gase looks back on his tenure with the Jets, which will almost certainly end on Sunday afternoon, he will surely have a lot of regrets. But the thing that will bother him most is this:

He was hired in large part because he was considered one of the brightest offensive minds in football. Yet in both his seasons in New York, the Jets’ offense ranked 32nd – dead last – in the league.

“It pisses me off,” Gase said at his Zoom press conference on Wednesday. “Because if there’s one side of the ball that I want to make sure is right, that one has not happened.

“And that’s on me.”

Maybe it is on Gase that his Jets’ teams have failed so miserably on offense the last two seasons. It’s impossible to excuse him, even a little, considering how bad it’s been. The Jets have averaged just 16.3 points and 274 total yards per game while running his scheme. That’s a full touchdown and 79 yards below the NFL average in that same stretch (23.7 points, 353 yards).

And that’s a devastating blow to a man Jets CEO Christopher Johnson, back in September, called “a brilliant offensive mind.”

“There’s no point in looking at (the offensive stats),” Gase said. “I know where we’re at. It’s not good. We had way too many games where we were just so unproductive. I feel like we’ve done some things better in the last month or so. We still had that Seattle game (a 40-3 loss on Dec. 13) where we just couldn’t do anything.

“It’s those games where you just have just absolutely nothing -- no yards, no points, (the) third-down, red-zone percentage is crap. You have more than like two or three of those, it’s just going to be bad.”

And so it was, far more often than not, and that’s how Gase will be remembered, especially by Jets fans. But there’s also a part of that legacy that’s a bit unfair. It’s not like Gase had much of a chance to thrive with a Jets team that was at rock bottom when he arrived and then was devastated by injuries at key positions during his two seasons.

Start with Sam Darnold, the franchise quarterback, who was suffering from mononucleosis in Gase’s debut last season, then missed three games and then admittedly struggled with his conditioning for several weeks after that. Right out of the gate, Gase’s quarterback wasn’t himself. Then they lost their second offseason together due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And then Darnold suffered a painful shoulder injury in Week 4 that cost him four more games after that.

That’s not an excuse. If Gase was really an offensive genius he should’ve figured out a way to generate points, whether his quarterback was veteran Joe Flacco or the very green Luke Falk. There are examples all around the league of offenses thriving with unexpected quarterbacks, whether it was C.J. Beathard for the 49ers last Sunday or Brandon Allen in Cincinnati or Taysom Hill in New Orleans earlier in the year.

It’s still a factor, though, in figuring out what went so wrong in Gase’s tenure. So is the inability of GM Joe Douglas to fix the offensive line on the fly. Jets quarterbacks have been sacked 92 times in Gase’s 31 games as head coach – 19 more than the NFL average over that time. And injuries and turnover have caused him to use 16 different offensive lineman – a major problem at a position where chemistry is key.

And yes, the lack of weapons was a huge problem too. The Jets have had their “three dudes” – Jamison Crowder, Breshad Perriman, rookie Denzel Mims – on the field together for just six games this season, including both wins. Of course, that was less of an issue a year ago when Crowder, Robby Anderson and running back Le’Veon Bell were all healthy and combined to catch 196 passes, though for only 2,073 yards.

The point is, it’s not like Gase was handed Chiefs-like, or even Browns-like weapons on offense.

But again, it was his job to figure out a way to make it work. Obviously, he never did.

“I feel like I have a pretty good understanding (of what went wrong),” Gase said. “You can go through the games and you think back like ‘OK, this is why this one went the way it did.’ I mean, it’s kind of irrelevant at this point when you get to this late in the season. Yeah there’s going to be a lot of things you wish you can change, but you can’t.”

That may be the perfect epithet for the Gase Era. There’s a lot that everyone wishes they could’ve changed from the last two years. But they can’t, so the Jets will soon surely change coaches – even if Gase isn’t the sole reason why the Jets’ offense has been such a mess.