Jeff Ulbrich knew his audience.
The New York Jets interim head coach knew that darkness is more than just a metaphor for the quarterback on whose shoulders the franchise rests.
So on the heels of the Jets’ fifth straight loss, Ulbrich leaned into the imagery.
His message to a team that blew an eminently winnable division game vs. the New England Patriots?
“This is a moment of darkness,” Ulbrich told his locker room after the rebuilding Patriots beat them, 25-22. “And we understand the outside world is going to get really loud right now. But the only thing I know in life is that when it gets dark and it gets hard, you work. And you point the finger at yourself and you look inward and you figure out what can I do better.”
Rodgers is intimately familiar with darkness in a way that perhaps nobody else across the league is.
The four-time MVP famously spent four nights in total darkness in 2023 as he contemplated retirement. Instead of hanging it up, Rodgers instead emerged from his meditative retreat to help facilitate his trade from the Green Bay Packers to the Jets.
Rodgers’ last emergence from literal darkness gave the Jets a powerful injection of hope. But after the Jets fell Sunday to the last place in AFC East, can he find that strength again?
But as New York’s offense struggles to even line up without penalty and delay of game, and the Jets’ defense struggling to stop the run while special teams misses kicks each week, can Rodgers find the strength to light the Jets again?
With the shadow of his hat fittingly cloaking his eyes in darkness during his postgame news conference, Rodgers believed so.
“I’ve been in the darkness,” he said. “You got to go in there. Make peace with it.”
What would peace in the darkness look like for Rodgers?
The quarterback seized on Ulbrich’s imperative to point the finger at himself more than others.
“Offensively, our goal has to be: Just go score 30,” Rodgers said after a 17-of-28, 233-yard day including two touchdowns. “Doesn’t matter what the other sides are doing. We have trust in our defense and [special] teams but if we’re not scoring 30, we’re underachieving.
“This offense can do that every single week.”
Rodgers’ words echoed the assertion of team owner Woody Johnson when he fired head coach Robert Saleh on Oct. 8, insisting that this was the best Jets roster he had assembled and thus it should be better than 2-3.
Since then, the Jets have further bolstered both sides of the ball, trading for receiver Davante Adams and reaching a contract agreement with holdout edge rusher Hassan Reddick.
No matter — they have now lost five straight, including three after Saleh’s firing, two with Adams and one with Reddick.
And the Jets have not reached Rodgers’ 30-point threshold once in eight tries.
Their 22 points Sunday was their most since they put up 24 against the Patriots five weeks earlier, a mark that still undercuts the Patriots’ 25 points allowed per game.
And while a missed 44-yard field goal and missed extra-point attempt hurt the Jets in this loss, so did continued operational disorder. The Jets used up their first-half timeouts before the second quarter began, also committing five of their eight penalties in the first half.
“One of them we were late getting out of the huddle, one of them I was trying to get the protection right, one I felt like we could have gotten off, but it was fine to take [a timeout] there,” Rodgers said. “Our operation was a little slow at times.”
Operational lethargy would bite the Jets again in the fourth quarter, when they took another delay of game on a 2-point conversion attempt after scoring the go-ahead touchdown with 2:57 to play. The 5-yard penalty more than tripled what would have been 2 yards needed on the play. The failed play meant the Patriots needed a touchdown, but not an extra-point attempt, to win.
The Patriots ended up getting both, as the Jets’ defense followed its offense’s lead in faltering.
Rodgers defended the decision while accepting its consequences.
“They start the clock at 20 and we had a shift and a motion,” Rodgers said. “By the time it came down to it, the defense they were playing wasn’t good for the play that was called. So I figured let’s just move it back to the 7, not that much of a difference. I like the play that we called, but they brought zero pressure.
“And I guessed wrong, they guessed right.”
The Jets will have a chance to palate-cleanse as early as Thursday. But they’ll need to do so against a 6-2 Houston Texans team whose quarterback is 18 years greener to the NFL but currently more productive.
The Texans’ offense has been shakier than last season, when C.J. Stroud earned Offensive Rookie of the Year honors. But Houston’s defense ranked second in yards allowed entering this week and 11th in points allowed.
Against the same Patriots team that just beat the Jets, the Texans won 41-21 two weeks ago. That Patriots team had starting quarterback Drake Maye for four quarters; the Jets faced him for just 16 minutes before he was evaluated for and then ruled out with a concussion.
Ulbrich, who described himself and the team as “pissed” and “hurt,” emphasized the importance of cleaning up game operations and executing more consistently.
“We are not executing in critical moments, especially down the stretch,” Ulbrich said. “We say that’s not who we are. But it’s who we are until we demonstrate otherwise.”
Ulbrich expressed confidence in the Jets’ ability to turn a corner, and confidence in the team’s ability to emerge from the darkness as they and Rodgers had before.
The team will lean on bright spots like Rodgers and Garrett Wilson’s best game of the season with defenders focused on Adams. The Jets’ defense allowed fewer yards than they had in six weeks, but New York also let a shorthanded group convert on 7 of 15 third-down attempts and three of four trips to the red zone.
Ulbrich said he will “take a hard look at everything,” including the best plan forward at kicker after Greg Zuerlein’s sixth missed field goal of the season.
Hard work and accountability are the Jets’ tickets out of the darkness, Ulbrich said.
“If we do that collectively, which I believe we will, that’s your only opportunity to dig yourself out of this,” Ulbrich said. “That’s your only opportunity to improve and fix some of these wrongs. That’s where we’re fortunate.
“The character of this locker room [is] going to demonstrate who we are.”
