Bob Wischusen has been the radio play-by-play voice of the New York Jets for 19 years. Beginning this week and lasting all season, Wischusen will share thoughts pertaining to the Green & White in a weekly column: "Wischusen's Point of View"
1. Uniqueness of Season's Conditions
In this incredibly unusual year, it seems like the NFL, and the teams as a whole, have done about as good a job as anyone could expect in terms of this virus and creating bubbles for players' health and safety. The Jets by all accounts did a very good job during training camp of finding a way to get their work done. One thing I'll be very interested in though, is to see how teams react to no fans. Some stadiums will have fans, with smaller crowds, and some stadiums won't have fans at all. How is this going to impact the road team? Will the home team come out with the normal juice and enthusiasm? Often times players will say that they even feed off the energy and animosity of a road crowd. So, how these games look and the spirit of the players early on with no fans in the building, especially for football, will be very interesting to watch.
2. Bills' QB Josh Allen vs. Jets' Defensive Coordinator Gregg Williams
Last season in the team's opener against Josh Allen, the only time DC Gregg Williams ran a Jets defense against Josh Allen, the Jets had tremendous success. Forced turnovers had frustrated the Bills throughout the majority of the game until they came back late and ended up squeaking out a win. Of course, Williams had LB C.J. Mosley for part of the game and S Jamal Adams for all of it. The team will have neither when the Jets face Allen this week. However, he was very creative last year utilizing his personnel, even in the absence of both Mosley and Adams, and a Jets' no-name defense rose to the occasion most of last season. I would expect that he will have that same fire with this Jets team motivated to try and prove the doubters wrong to open up the season as well. The real key with Allen is keeping him in the pocket and forcing him to beat you there. He is most dangerous when he's on the move. He is a gifted, athletic runner and if he gets out of the pocket and makes big plays with his legs, those are the chunk plays that can hurt a defense the most. I'm sure Gregg Williams' emphasis this week is going to be confuse and rush, but rush with discipline and make sure Allen doesn't get out into the open field to beat the Jets with his legs.
3. QB Sam Darnold in Year 3
For Sam Darnold in Week 1, and really the early part of this schedule, he's going to have to play with discipline, good decision-making and patience. Being honest, he had very little to no time to develop chemistry with the group of skill position players he is going to be asked to play with early on in the season. More specifically, at wide receiver. The Jets had so many training camp injuries at wide receiver that Darnold and this entire offense is probably going to have growing pains early on in the season and will need to lean on their defense to win lower-scoring games. That can be frustrating for a quarterback, especially a young one when everyone is putting pressure on him in Year 3 to take this big step forward. Darnold needs to exercise patience, practice good decision-making, remain disciplined and make sure he's not trying to force the issue with an offense that is still going to be developing chemistry early on.
