Jeff Ulbrich didn't mince words when he spoke with reporters following the Jets' fall-from-ahead 37-15 loss to the Steelers in Pittsburgh on Sunday night.

"That game, especially that second half, is not who this team is," Ulbrich, the Jets' interim head coach, said. "And it starts with me and the coaching staff and goes down to every single player on this team. We have what we need. That's not who we are. I'm extremely disappointed."

The disappointment didn't really start to be felt until about 90 seconds remained in the first-half clock. At that point the Jets were still leading 15-6 and even threatening to enlarge that lead at Acrisure Stadium, in front of Steelers Nation and a host of luminaries from the franchise's first Super Bowl-winning team.

At that time, Aaron Rodgers threw the first of his two interceptions, one that he described with a word that sounds like but does not mean "gritty." Rodgers thought he had Wilson open over the middle but Bishop flypapered the pass with one hand to turn a possible Jets power-boosting drive into an energy-killing end-of-half turnaround.

"Going into this game, momentum we knew was going to be a big part of it, especially the environment we were playing in," Ulbrich said. "And in these games, you can't give up those plays because it's just a huge shift in momentum. And if you do make them, you've got to fight your butt off to fix it. And we just didn't do that well enough."

Injuries were a part of the problem. The Jets lost RG Alijah Vera-Tucker (ankle) and then his replacement, Xavier Newman, took a violent hit on the return of Rodgers' second INT, also picked off by Bishop when Wilson let it bounce off his pads and into the air. The game was stopped as Newman was examined and carefully transported to a local hospital, but as Ulbrich said, "Thank the Lord the tests came back negative. He's traveling back with the team."

The secondary, meanwhile, was playing without three injured starters out of its five-player front line (CB D.J. Reed, nickel Michael Carter and S Chuck Clark). But during the game the Jets lost S Ashtyn Davis to the NFL concussion protocol, S Tony Adams to a hamstring and CB Sauce Gardner, but only for two second-quarter plays before he returned in the third.

Yet Ulbrich would not use the team's health as a crutch to explain the unfolding defeat.

"We just didn't play at our standard," he said when asked about the defense possibly wearing down. "And we'll take a deep dive into the tape and we'll identify exactly what happened."

Offensively, the Jets still moved the ball, especially with one of Breece Hall's hundred-yard impact games (141 yards from scrimmage and the game's first TD on a 13-yard first-quarter left-side dash). But did the offense and defense give up the fight at times? That was another no from the IHC.

"I felt like the guys were fighting," he said. "I felt like execution was not good enough. I felt like we went into the mode of trying too hard, and sometimes that's just as dangerous as not trying hard enough.

Rodgers offered two more possibilities for why the second half turned out as it did. "We've got to run the ball better," he said of the ground game's 54 yards at 3.6 yards/carry, "and I've got to play better."

Ulbrich wasn't hard on his QB, saying, "I felt he gave us enough to win that game." But he didn't see the "explosives" continue from Buffalo all the way to Pittsburgh.

There is good news, not from the final 30-plus minutes on SNF but in the week ahead. Rodgers and new trade acquisition WR Davante Adams had six targets that resulted in incompletions but also three connections for 30 of A-Rod's 276 yards. And word circulated Sunday morning that pass rusher Haason Reddick, whom the Jets traded for in March, will end his stayaway from the Atlantic Health Training Center and report as soon as Monday.

"Of course that helps, for sure," Ulbrich said of adding Ulbrich to the pass rush that produced one sack, by Will McDonald, and five hits on QB Russell Wilson. "But we've got a lot of things we've got to fix right now."

And Ulbrich was firm in not accepting that things can't be fixed or that maybe the Jets at 2-5 aren't the team he thinks they are.

"If we accept that, then the season is lost. So we're not going there at all. We have a high-character room, we have the pieces capable of getting it done. Every man in there, coaches and players, will point a finger at themselves. That's what we have to do. If you do that, you've got a chance."