Short yardage situations should be the bread-and-butter of this offense right?  Apparently not Saturday night.  Out of all the mess that the Jets are going to have to work on in the final few weeks of the preseason, one of the most troubling was the Jets inability to get the tough yards they needed at key times in the game.

Ryan clearly wasn’t happy with his team’s inability to get the tough yards on the ground.

Fullback John Conner was stopped on two different drives on 3rd and 1 and 4th and 1, a troubling early sign for a team with a ground-and-pound mantra. Conner was stuffed for no gain on 3rd and 1 on the opening drive. In the second quarter, Shonn Greene was stopped at the line of scrimmage on 3rd and 1 before Conner got the ball on 4th down. He was again blasted for no gain.

“Yeah, it was brutal. Absolutely bad,” Ryan said. “I might’ve been more disappointed in those things than I was anything else.”

Brian Bassett, theJetsBlog.com

I think it’s fair to say that as a baseline, fans expected Sparano’s offense to be able to more easily execute in those short yardage situations and to see it not even resembling that brings up some real cause for concern. Part can blame on the vanilla offense the Jets have run, but it’s not been the biggest issue.  Normally the Right Tackle is the road-grading player that’s supposed to be one of the team’s best run blocker.  While there’s little solace in it, that was probably Hunter’s best area even if he had some blocking breakdowns on the 3rd and 4th and 1 plays.

The Jets will help out Hunter more, but the problem with that is then teams will have the book on the Jets and use that “tell” to their own advantage all season.  Hunter can be mitigated, but if the team doesn’t think long and hard about what they’re doing at the right tackle spot, then he’s going to be their weak link all season.