What do we make of Zach Wilson outdueling the Texans’ defense on Sunday, playing perhaps his best game as a professional just a few days after the Jets were unsure they’d give him the ball and signed Brett Rypien as insurance?
Actually, the answer is pretty easy. It’s the same thing we should have made of Wilson the last few times he’s done this, most memorably during his rookie season in a win over the Titans, an eventual No. 1 seed in the conference. Or, most recently in a near loss to the Chiefs back in Week 4. In both of those games, his stats were nearly identical to Sunday’s performance, during which he produced 300 passing yards and two touchdowns.
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Wilson’s timetable for becoming a truly great NFL quarterback, as it turns out, was always going to take longer than the Jets had to give (and realistically, more than any team that put its future on the line to draft a quarterback at No. 2 has). His game against the Texans was not necessarily a window into some great promise, but a snippet of his maddening inconsistencies.
To be clear: If I were in the market of betting long-term NFL futures, and I was going to be assured that Wilson would spend a few years on the bench with a true technician of a quarterbacks coach who kept him in guardrails and constantly forced him to play in structure so that he could master the game from inside out (a luxury afforded to very few quarterbacks in the NFL), I would say he could reemerge like a phoenix from this mess of expectations. Wilson possesses many of the tools to become a top-10 quarterback in the current landscape.
But I would caution the Jets fans who wondered why the team hasn’t tried whatever it is the New York offense did on Sunday, or the fans who were quick to hold this up as some sort of long-term indictment. The reality is that Wilson’s game against the Texans contained the perfect ingredients for the quarterback to have a good game on his own terms.
For example, a throw we would look back on as his “best” from Sunday was on a third-and-12 conversion, with the score still a 0–0 tie at the 11:55 mark of the third quarter. Wilson evaded Jonathan Greenard after the Houston edge rusher burned left tackle Mekhi Becton. The quarterback then got to roll out, build up some steam Happy Gilmore style, and chuck one of his footless passes to Garrett Wilson, who was working his way back to the ball. Under normal circumstances, the prospect of doing this would be horrifying; a pass to the middle of the field, especially in the midst of three converging Texans defenders, would cause a sea of papers to upturn like startled hornets in the coordinator box. But, this is a throw Wilson likes to make, despite the high degree of difficulty and lower degree of success. It was a throw similar to the one he made at his Pro Day that caused scouts to drool. (Though some quarterback coaches argued it was a kind of showpiece throw designed more to garner attention than to reflect a viable skill set … I also wrote about the origins of that throw here.)
Completing that throw seemed to log on the parts of Wilson that we know are in there, but that we can’t get on a regular basis. Again, an example: A few minutes after the throw to Garrett Wilson, on the following drive, Wilson let it rip on a third-and-9 to Tyler Conklin for a first down. The throw was perfectly on time, and featured Wilson’s deft touch that he can put on the ball.
Or we can look at his first touchdown, a throw to Randall Cobb on a pretty basic route over the middle where all the other defenders were cleared out of the box. This is a throw that, when rattled, Wilson may end up throwing behind the receiver. But, when he is feeling confident, and can access his rhythm, the throw looks unconsciously easy. It makes you wonder how many points have been left off the board this year and how many game plans were short-circuited before they had a chance to get rolling.
If that first deep throw to Garrett Wilson gets picked, are either of these fathomable? Or, are the Jets playing from behind, with pressure ratcheted up on the quarterback and the difficulty of each throw rising?
Wilson reminds me a bit of a skateboarder who insists on throwing a 900 into every routine. Sometimes it’s going to land, and render us all speechless. Other times? There is a spattered mess that needs to be cleaned off the halfpipe.
We all enjoy watching Wilson when he plays like he did against Houston. The Jets, especially. And while the timing is never bad for a win, we have to be careful not to get swept up in a storm of finger-pointing over why it can’t look this good most of the time. A lot of that is up to the quarterback.
Wilson’s true potential probably will not materialize in Florham Park. It may not materialize at all until the most basic tenets of his game match the potency of his most extreme.
