Three on D: Maye, Jenkins, Robinson
After each game, we're going to highlight three defensive and three offensive players and look in detail at their performance. We'll start today with the defense:
Marcus Nay
Marcus Maye had a couple of bad plays in Sunday's game, the worst of which was on this long touchdown on the first play of the Chiefs' second drive:
At first, it seemed possible Maye was thinking he had safety help beyond him there. However, you can see from the replay that he's trying to read the quarterback, perhaps hoping to jump an out route and making him extremely susceptible to the out-and-up.
Kelce had already scored an earlier touchdown on which Rontez Miles appeared to be late to react to Kelce breaking towards the pylon, but this may have been a communication issue as Miles perhaps expected Maye to drop deep to cover that area.
Then, on the second of Tyreek Hill's two long touchdowns, Morris Claiborne seemed to be playing with outside leverage as if he was expecting to have inside safety support. However, Maye had vacated that area at the snap, chasing a receiver out to the flat that may have been Julian Stanford's responsibility.
Whatever the reason for these touchdowns - and they were uncharacteristic because the Jets had done a good job of mitigating big plays until yesterday - they likely weren't helped by Darron Lee's absence, which probably caused the Jets to change their gameplan around at short notice.
Maye had two other rough plays, one on a deep ball to Hill where he was in a pretty good position but seemed to react late to the pass being underthrown. He was also blocked out of the play downfield on Alex Smith's incredible 70-yard run.
Maye fared better on one other deep ball to Hill as he was in good position to prevent him from coming down with the ball inbounds. He also made a good play to come up and stuff a run for a short gain and a good open field hit to stop another runner in his tracks.
So, it wasn't all bad from Maye, but this wasn't one of his better games so far. Hopefully this is just a blip and not a sign he's hitting the dreaded rookie wall.
Fell on 'shard times
Yesterday afforded us our first real look at Rashard Robinson, who the Jets traded a 2018 draft pick for in October. He actually got the start, working with the nickel package on the outside, although he was benched after this play on the Chiefs' first second half snap:
Robinson's first half performance may have factored into that touchdown as he gave up two early first downs because he was too far off at the snap. Then, a little later on, he was a bit closer to the line at the snap and this enabled him to make the tackle on another catch for a gain of eight. That turned out to be his only tackle.
Unfortunately, Hill is so fast that you need a bigger head start than Robinson gave himself here so he was never going to be able to stay with him and probably should have realized that immediately and just tackled him before they even got to midfield.
Robinson only played 18 snaps in the end, including just that one on which he gave up the touchdown in the second half. Ultimately, we didn't learn much about him other than the fact that he can struggle in off-coverage.
Jenk Food
Jordan Jenkins didn't have a statistically productive game, but he did contribute this sack, albeit cleaning up as Smith tried to escape the pocket:
However, he did a pretty good job of creating pressure, including on the play before that one, where he forced Smith to step up into another sack.
Jenkins also had a pressure coming off the edge where he hit Smith's arm, which led to a wobbly throw that looped into the air and almost could have been picked off. He was close to a strip sack on another play too and showed some good relentlessness to chase after Smith after he was flushed from the pocket, forcing him to throw the ball away.
There weren't many opportunities to make plays against the run because the Chiefs only handed it off to their backs 11 times - and only three after half time. Jenkins was sealed on the edge on one play, though.
In the end, the sack was Jenkins' only tackle on defense. However, he also had a nice open field tackle on kick coverage.
Jenkins continues to be one of the Jets' most consistent and reliable players, but the occasional sack is welcome too and if he could force a few more fumbles, that would be even better.
PREVIOUSLY: Special teams analysis